Rachel Cusk

 

I've written several times on the blog about my admiration for Rachel Cusk and for my sense that she has -- especially with the Faye trilogy -- charted new literary ground. Her novels occupy a curious perch: part philosophy, part auto-fiction, they highlight wonder in the banal, sorrow in places unseen. 

Cusk's most recent novel -- Parade -- advances many of these themes. The effect, however, was more muted this time around. Part of my response to Parade focuses on its saturation: unlike Cusk's earlier novels, this one makes direct and specific references to philosophy -- so that, instead of allowing the characters to explore some intellectual space, they seem instead to function as vehicles in support of a larger concept. 

At times, that philosophy overwhelms, rendering the characters little more than vessels meant to deliver dialogue. In the Faye novels, characters encounter one another in sometimes unexpected fashion, but the result of their interaction is a quiet suggestion about living, about ways of being. In Parade, the order seems to have been inverted, with the philosophical suggestion made first, and the characters supporting it through dramatic scenarios intended to sharpen the original concept (for instance, scenarios involving suicide or random acts of violence). 

There were chapters within Parade that function as the Faye trilogy does -- and these are excellent. I'm thinking here of the first chapter about ways of approaching art and gender. But other parts of the novel do not, in my reading at least, work as well, and it was here that the book felt too crammed, too full: there was too much happening for me to feel that I'd arrived in that very memorable place where Faye had left me. I'll not abandon Cusk, of course, but I did feel that the subtlety of Transit, for instance, had been exchanged for something far more dense and insistent.