The Artist Is Present (and Pretentious) in Rachel Cusk’s Latest

PARADE, by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk, the author of the autobiographical Outline trilogy of novels, has written so well for so long that it’s almost a relief to discover that her new novel, “Parade,” is skippable for all but her most devoted tier of readers.

It arrives on these shores trailing puzzled and negative reviews from England. The contrarian in me wishes I could unhorse those faraway critics and demonstrate why they are witless hacks. The contrarian in me is going to keep silent.

Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, “Parade” is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently (“each page, each paragraph”) interesting.

“Parade” is set in the art world. Most of its characters are painters or sculptors. They are identified by the same initial — G. One G is a domineering male painter who begins painting images upside down on his canvases. A second G is a female sculptor whose hallmark images, in the manner of the artist Louise Bourgeois, are of “giant forms of black spiders, balanced on stiletto-like feet.”

A third is a 19th-century female painter who, before she died young, made self-portraits while heavily pregnant. A fourth G is a Black artist who made a small painting of a big cathedral that was “a comment about marginality.” A fifth is a filmmaker. A sixth G is a painter, coping with the burden of success, who wonders if the attention she pays her child is attention withdrawn from her art.

Other characters include the domineering artist’s wife, who meditates on her unrealized life, and, most promisingly, a woman in Paris who is attacked by a female stranger on the street. The stranger “stopped on the street corner and turned around, like an artist stepping back to admire her creation.” The stranger is a terrorist of a sort, a maker of shocking images, a pint-size bin Laden.