Parade: A Novel

"Let me kick off with Rachel Cusk’s latest offering, Parade. Every new novel by Cusk is a major literary event, although her experiments with form—and her unpicking of what she has previously called the “ underpinnings ” of narrative—are often initially received with bafflement . Parade is an extended exploration of identity in which multiple individuals, all identified as ‘G’, muse on the creation of art. Slowly, Cusk has been stripping away the layers of the novel—starting with plot, now character—to reveal its fundamental mechanisms. And so, though Parade is far from a light beach read to throw in your carry-on case as an afterthought, it’s certainly a notable new novel that pushes at the very bounds of what it means to write fiction. (It feels, reflects LitHub , “so much like the next stage in a complex journey the author has been undertaking for decades now.”) Parade is not the most obvious starting point if you are new to Cusk’s work; if you’ve never read her writing before, try the Outline trilogy first to get a feel for her (scalpel-sharp, intelligent, sometimes contemptuous) style."