Parade

A Novel

By: Rachel Cusk

Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt

This program is read by actor Genevieve Gaunt, who has appeared in Doctor Who, The Royals, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

From Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, comes this startling, exhilarating novel that once again expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.

Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.

When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 Rachel Cusk (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

No clue what it was about…

….But I loved every minute of it. Every interaction was perfect to the smallest detail or the most unjust comment. Pure joy.

Very Insightful, a Wow for me!

Are you ready for it? It’s not a happy read. It’s not a book just about artists, it’s about all of us. An open and honest look at gender, suffering and expectations within relationships, life’s disappointments, artists and their poop (this had me rolling with laughter in Diver), parenthood and the endless shards of glass we all walk upon in this Parade called life. This is a novel that disposes of conventional structures of character and plot and I’m here for it. I also enjoyed the puzzle of discovering who the G’s may be referencing and looking at their artwork. One of my best reads and listens of 2024!

A challenging listen

Due to the experimental nature of writing in this book, it is a challenging listen. About multiple artists who are all named G, it can be confusing when she transitions to a new artist's story. Parade is a heavy book examining themes of power, motherhood, death and creativity. Each chapter is based on a specific real artist. As an artist myself, I found it depressing though accurate about many of the challenges woman artists face. I read it with my art book club and nobody liked it except possibly myself.

Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense

It is rare that I ever truly detest a book. I like to keep an open mind and am able to enjoy a wide variety of different writing styles on the basis of their own merits, and I’m typically the person in my book club who looks for things to like about a book even if it wasn’t my personal favorite. So my nearly-immediate hatred of this book actually shocked me.

The writing style of Parade is self-indulgent to an extreme, abandoning any plot development or even sense of linearity in time in favor of an insufferable spiral of obsessive navel-gazing about gender and fine art. There is something to be said about how this sort of obsession could form in the deeply misogynist culture that we come from, but in 2025 I have a very difficult time relating to any languishing self-victimizing narrative coming from the perspective of a successful white woman (both within the fiction and from the author). Misogyny is very much real and worthy of discussion, but anyone who blames every single minuscule aspect of their suffering in life on gender politics is imprisoning themselves more than anyone else ever could.

Given that the perspective on gender and sex in this book seems rooted in second-wave feminism at best I was stunned to learn just before writing this review that it was released in 2024… and then I wasn’t, when I remembered the current state of gender politics in Britain and how prominent voices like JK Rowling have shaped the narrative of misogyny to revolve solely around the biological processes of people assigned female at birth. Reality is not so simple. It is regressive, depressing and inaccurate to reduce the experiences and marginalizations of all of womankind solely to this concept of a childbearing nature. Please let women be more than that.

And as a side note, the fine art discussion also calls to mind parodies of art critics where the critic turns every single image they see into a confirmation of their own preexisting worldview, turning every little thing into a deep commentary about some philosophy of life that the writer carries. I am an artist myself; while analysis does have its place, sometimes a painting really is just a damn painting.
Narrator was fine, nothing exceptional about the performance. To be fair it’s hard to be exceptional when you’re given source material as dull as this.