PARADE

The stories of a half-dozen different artists, each identified solely by the initial G, investigate the nature of art, artists, reality, and family relationships.

Readers of Cusk’s previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader’s expectations about what fiction can or should do. An omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the thoughts and emotions of some Gs: an insecure male artist famed for painting upside-down and his unhappy wife; a male filmmaker fleeing repressive parents; a female painter spurred toward art by a miserable childhood, mired in a dysfunctional marriage with a man who inspires the same feelings of shame her parents did, then liberated by his death. At other times, a first-person narrator profiles Gs whose lives and work she has read about or seen: a female sculptor of cloth forms; a 19th-century female painter dead in childbirth at 31; a Black male painter marginalized by his peers. This narrator, sometimes “I” and sometimes “we,” also chronicles episodes from her personal life, including a grimly unforgiving account of her dead mother’s toxic parenting and a lengthy restaurant conversation among five people associated with an exhibit of one of the Gs’ works, closed for the day after a man dies by suicide at the museum. That conversation makes explicit questions that animate all the stories: What drives people to make art? Do artists perceive reality, or invent it? Can women artists with children create as freely as their male peers? Why is family life so fraught? Simmering underneath all the stories and talk is the desolate sense of how alone people can be even, perhaps particularly, in the most intimate relationships—existential issues by no means limited to those who make art. Cusk’s prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights.

Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.