Portraits of the Artist

Rachel Cusk’s newest book, Parade, her nineteenth, is a startling, unconventional work of imagined biography. Divided into four distinct yet loosely associated chapters—part artist portraits, part fictions—the book traces the life of an artist named G, who lives many lives and is variously male and female throughout. One G is an old-guard German painter who, mid-career, begins to paint upside down. Another G paints ordinary scenes of women at home—breastfeeding, or half-glimpsed through a doorway; she also paints her husband, fully clothed, asleep in a chair. A third G sets off for a new life in a new country, where she wrestles with images of the female figure that she has inherited from men (she also marries a cruel and controlling husband). Then there’s a G whose large-scale sculptures of the female form include suspended knitted dolls and giant black spiders. The final G is a French filmmaker whose own mother dies without knowing her son is a world-famous auteur. Woven through these chapters are alternate strands of narration spoken by a different set of voices, sometimes an “I,” though more often a “we.” These narrators have little claim to identifiable personhood, and often speak with the same voice, whether in first or second person—impersonal, disembodied, cool and calibrated, given to flourishes of startling visual description.