Toward a New Realism

Rachel Cusk is a novelist famous for a midcareer breakthrough, an episode of artistic reinvention recounted in multiple profiles and reviews of her Outline trilogy (2014–2018). In 2012 she was the acclaimed author of seven novels and two memoirs when she published a third memoir—elliptical, reticent, yet bearing an unmistakable touch of grievance—about her recent divorce. Called Aftermath, it was savaged in the press, leaving Cusk devastated. She found herself unable to write for almost three years; autobiography felt off-limits, yet fiction now struck her as “fake and embarrassing.”

Other novelists were murmuring the same sort of doubts about realist fiction in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but Cusk may have had particular reason to feel that she had reached a dead end with suburban satires and family melodramas. Her last novel before the break, The Bradshaw Variations (2009), about the domestic lives of three adult brothers, contains a revelation of spousal abuse, two separate life-threatening illnesses (one suffered by a child), and the accidental killing of a dog, all of which take place in the course of a single year.

Cusk’s powers of observation seemed too fine for these contrivances; her insights were cheapened when she ran them through the machinery of unfolding, suspenseful events. At the same time, she was overreaching, stretching in the wrong directions. She knew well the appetites, trepidations, vanities, and marital compromises of a slice of the middle-aged professional class, but she strained to inhabit the consciousness of an eight-year-old Bradshaw child, or the Bradshaw grandparents, or a Polish boarder living with the family.

Leo Bradshaw, the youngest of the brothers in The Bradshaw Variations, feels stymied and inauthentic in the presence of his parents and more successful older siblings, Cusk tells us: “He says things he doesn’t feel, and what he feels most keenly he doesn’t say at all.”

This is the omniscient narrator’s conceit: she can be with her characters in their inchoate privacy, the site of their deepest authenticity. It’s not much changed since the late 1890s, when Chekhov wrote his famous passage in “The Lady with the Dog” about the banker Gurov:

Everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him…was on the surface.

But a century later this conceit—which John Berger called “a contract agreed between writer and reader” based on the premise that the two of them can understand a fictional character “more fully than he can understand himself”—had come to seem shaky, presumptuous, a dubious bid by the novelist for his own importance.

In Outline (2014), Cusk dispensed with it. Characters would say what they felt most keenly, or they would try their best and go a long way toward succeeding. She would work only with the sayable and the said; what her characters didn’t say, she wouldn’t presume to know.

A series of recalibrations followed. Instead of writing about thinly veiled writer-surrogates—a television producer, a university lecturer, a high school English teacher—Cusk would allow her new narrator to be what she herself was: a novelist who taught writing classes, participated in conferences, and gave interviews to the press. Instead of describing small, geographically rooted communities—the mothers of an affluent suburb, the members of an extended family—Cusk would describe the various daily social encounters of a single peripatetic narrator. The new narrator would recede, listen, mostly withhold her judgment, and relay what people said to her almost as if she were gathering testimonies. Instead of peering into all these secondary characters’ souls and reporting on what she saw there, Cusk would lure their rich interiority to the surface.

Her geographical scope widened: we were no longer in England but in Europe. Writers, translators, editors, students, and journalists cross the Continent to teach seminars, speak at festivals, hole up at writing retreats. A Greek novelist tours her book in Germany and Poland. The British narrator joins a Portuguese novelist in a panel discussion of feminist writers in Amsterdam. It’s a Europe in which writers admire and influence one another across differences of language, a world in which gatherings of polyglot European novelists seem more natural than meetings of global Anglophone writers, linguistic barriers apparently being easier to overcome than the geographical distances, colonial histories, and cultural differences that might separate writers working in English around the world.

English is, of course, the language of conversation at the gatherings and the language in which the writers read one another’s work. Cusk herself has written appreciatively of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard and the French novelist Annie Ernaux. Her Outline trilogy is indebted to the German novelist W.G. Sebald’s revelatory uses of paraphrase and summary in his essayistic first-person novels. Cusk’s own paraphrase is smooth and formal, mostly free of slang or characteristically Anglophone deployments of overstatement or understatement. The trilogy thus lends itself well to translation—as if Cusk, herself receptive to international influence, were doing her part to facilitate the free movement of literary ideas across the Channel and around the Schengen Area.^*

Yet in the Outline trilogy, Cusk didn’t actually abandon omniscience, not quite. She broke it up and disguised it, hiding most, but not all, of the traces of her authority. It’s true that the books have a first-person narrator. But as we read them we do not feel that we are alone with Faye. Not the way we’re alone with Sebald’s narrator, or Knausgaard’s, or Ernaux’s. In the trilogy we feel that someone else is there with us, the faintest rustle of another authorial presence.

The anecdotes that Faye hears acquire a kind of autonomy—as the speakers keep going, as their stories grow in density, complexity, and suspense, they seem to exceed the bounds of Faye’s narration. They acquire their own texture, their own pull. Before we know it, the interlocutors become characters in the old-fashioned sense: Cusk has seen into their souls. She knows all. She just chooses to let them speak for themselves, with some help from Faye. When characters are sympathetic, Cusk’s withdrawal feels like tact. When they’re deluded or smug, her withdrawal seems an ingenious device to tempt them into self-implication. Either way, we’re in the presence of someone who knows how people are and has produced and patterned these confessions to make their tendencies visible.

Cusk’s new novel, Parade, is set largely in the same crisscrossed Europe as the Outline books, but this time the landscape is so devoid of regional specificity that it seems almost obliterated. Artists, curators, scholars, and writers drift among unidentified cities—“a northern city,” a “foreign city,” “another city.” In a set of loosely connected chapters with multiple narrators, Parade introduces us to six different artists referred to as G, all based on actual historical figures. Three of them are living; three belong to earlier generations going back as far as the late nineteenth century.

The atmosphere is moody, characters tend to think in theoretical terms, and a lot of lines are not so much said or thought as intoned. A character looks at his wife of many decades and wonders: “With her malformed freedom was she free also of history and of responsibility for the past?” Another narrator asks, “Was our mother a function of capitalism?” Signs point to social breakdown. One narrator gets punched in the head in a seemingly random attack by a homeless woman. Elsewhere (or possibly in the same place) a group of art-world professionals gather to talk shop in the aftermath of a city parade that has left the streets strewn with trash: “People had eaten and drunk and thrown their packaging to the ground, as animals in the wild leave the carcass of what they have eaten on the ground.”

With Parade, Cusk returns, in part, to third-person narration. It’s a bumpy reentry. Freed from the discipline of having to make characters speak, she seems at a loss to vivify them. She’s still working with the art of summary, of telling stories in outline, but now the lines are not so much suggestive as schematic, the narrators’ observations insistent rather than sparing and earned.

One of the G’s is a prolific, renowned filmmaker (whose life and work seem to be based on Éric Rohmer). As a young adult, this G briefly took a job as a schoolteacher. He thought teaching “would naturally fit” with his creative goals. “But in fact,” the narrator goes on, “there could have been nothing worse than to encumber himself with the obligation to form and control children.” It’s notable for a narrator of realistic fiction to trade so confidently in counterfactuals, to suggest that she has run through all the possible courses of a character’s life and determined which is worst for his career. We begin to suspect a point lurks here, a contention about gender and child-rearing, an implicit contrast to some of the female G’s who encumbered themselves with the formation and control of their own children. The role of gender in shaping the lives of artists is one of Parade’s main concerns, and children are the female artist’s chief menace.

Another G, the most fully elaborated of the artists in Parade, is a female painter in the middle of her career. She achieved early success in her twenties, we learn, while living alone in a squalid studio, painting all day and working as a bartender at night with little regard for standards of hygiene and sociability. Her talent was quickly recognized; after three years she was making enough money to quit her bartending job.

Her semiferal bachelor life came to an end; she went to openings and parties and became socially visible, and the first thing people saw was her gender: “Somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.” A critic at a party asks her “whether she was in a strong relationship and said that he hoped that she was, because the degree of attention she was about to receive might be somewhat destabilising for a young woman.”

The art world’s casual sexism and unexamined double standards don’t directly impede G’s career, but the ambient assumptions about female fragility worm their way into her consciousness and nudge her toward marriage to a man, a lawyer who comes to one of her gallery openings. She becomes pregnant. (He wanted to have a child; she didn’t not want to have a child.) When her pregnancy begins to show,

a dreadful truth, the truth of her female caste, came slowly and inexorably into view, with its smouldering fires of injustice and servitude. She was toying, she saw, with inferiority, and she regarded the clean-cut bodies of men in terror, hating them while wanting to retain kinship with them.

This is Parade’s major subject, one that has occupied Cusk for nearly two decades, both before and after her stylistic breakthrough: the points at which gender imposes itself as a burden on women who had previously worn womanhood lightly.

What is gender, in this case? Cusk refers to it above as a “caste,” a fixed place in the social hierarchy, but the word itself doesn’t entirely account for the complexity of G’s experience: Cusk sees her “becoming” a woman in something like Beauvoir’s sense, through a combination of subtle external pressures and equally subtle internal responses. Subtle, that is, until she becomes pregnant and fears—too late—that she faces an imminent, dramatic plunge in status.

The plunge may be a matter of “injustice,” but Cusk’s focus is not so much the social mechanics of misogyny as the psychology of women’s unwitting acquiescence and the moment when they realize that they may have followed their desires into a trap.

Once G is pregnant, her own dread, rather than the attitudes of people around her, becomes the dominant note: not only will she be seen as a mother, but she will be one. Thus far, she has been most salient to herself as an artist and has taken her claim to subjectivity for granted. What if, after having a child, she can’t find an imaginative path back to the way she used to feel?

It reminds me of a passage from Kudos (2018), the third installment of the Outline trilogy, in which a writer tells the narrator that she tries to avoid doing housework

because those kinds of chores made her feel so unimportant that she wouldn’t have been able to write anything afterwards. She supposed they made her feel like an ordinary woman, when most of the time she didn’t think about being a woman, or perhaps didn’t even believe she was one, because at home it wasn’t a subject that came up. Her husband did most of the domestic work, she said, because he liked doing it and it didn’t have the same effect on him that it did on her.

Household chores, caring for an infant, carrying a visible pregnancy: characters are blindsided by a kind of shame and a depressive force associated with traditionally female—and culturally and economically devalued—tasks, an emotional downward drag that can’t always be outrun or outthought. Cusk’s characters suggest that this taint is felt only by women—it doesn’t stick to a husband mopping the floor or taking care of a baby. This seems debatable, but in any case Cusk’s interest is in the particular, unsettling situation of doing women’s work while female, which makes some of her characters fear that they will disappear into chores and never be heard from again—not because others will stop them from painting or writing but because their confidence and self-regard can’t survive the work: they will no longer have the nerve to impersonate a writer or an artist.

A host of circumstances needs to be in place for a female artist to quake at the prospect of women’s work: she must, on the one hand, have experienced alternative expectations and modes of life. (She has been able to live alone, to paint and show her work; she has seen men do housework.) At the same time, she must be sensible to the precarity of her status.

Cusk is writing, in other words, about the experience of a particular generation—or, more precisely, cohorts of women across one or two generations, their circumstances well documented by journalists and sociologists: a rough gender parity obtains in many professional and creative fields until workers become parents, at which point women disproportionately encounter obstacles and setbacks.

The accomplished painter G, feeling that she is “flirting with inferiority” by becoming pregnant, is caught in the characteristic bind of what seem to be her time and place and milieu. (Some of the details of G’s working life echo those of the painter Cecily Brown, profiled by Cusk in The New York Times Magazine, who was born in 1969.) And though these problems have not been resolved, they don’t continue to have exactly the same broad power to blindside women that they did twenty-five or thirty years ago: we have named them, studied them, discussed them. Anyone who read Arlington Park (2006), Cusk’s satire about suburban mothers, was well warned nearly twenty years ago. Consciousness has changed, slightly.

Yet among the many circumstances Parade effaces is historical time: dates and chronological markers are as superfluous as names. It’s hard to tell which eras the various G’s belong to, a fact that would certainly matter when it comes to the effects of gender on their prospects for becoming working artists. In earlier novels, Cusk captured a lot of contemporary maternal and conjugal agita without suggesting that the mothers of Arlington Park or the introspective middle-aged literati of Kudos are suffering a universal female lot. In Parade, Cusk gestures repeatedly, though always vaguely, toward “the element of the eternal” in female experience.

Walking around an exhibition of a major midcentury female sculptor who worked with fabric (apparently based on Louise Bourgeois), a narrator calls her oeuvre “a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral. How could the female sex be commemorated in stone? Its basis lies in repetition without permanence.”

But this G didn’t work only with textiles—her hallmarks are large-scale bronze sculptures of spiders. The narrator doesn’t attempt to reconcile the swagger of giant bronzes with the diffidence of cloth, musing instead that the spider figures

resemble the special insanity of the female body itself. Hideous and humble, incessantly fabricating, the spider’s body doomed it to utility…. They represented everything that is denied and suppressed in femininity, everything that remains darkly continuous behind its volcanic cycles of change and yet is unknown.

Cusk uses terms whose definitions are fiercely contested, words laden with cultural, philosophical, and political freight—“male,” “female,” “freedom,” “eternal”—as if they were straightforward and self-evident. She doesn’t register the way that “male” and “female” now vibrate with uncertainty. If the book’s tone weren’t so solemn, I would suspect mischief. What is denied and suppressed and darkly continuous in femininity?

One senses Cusk really wouldn’t want to have to explain. It would spoil the mood, especially if she had to contend with the vast body of feminist debate banked behind such a question or to account more precisely for the social and historical conditions of her G’s. She rings the tragic note, invites awe, seems to find something magnetic in the idea of an appointment that can’t be evaded, the end of the line for the liberated woman when she, like the fisherman’s wife, is greedy for more than her share of life.

As a novelist, Cusk is of course not obligated to define her terms or proceed by argument. She is not obligated to consider—much less depict—fathers who have had to give up creative pursuits upon the arrival of a child, or queer couples whose division of domestic labor is not based on gender, just as she is not obligated to consider female artists working with industrial materials rather than textiles. She need only—only!—make her observations feel true and justified within the scope and in the terms of her fiction.

But a highly discursive novel does have to forge some sort of recognizable relationship to the vast flux of discourse on its chosen themes. Parade can neither absorb nor vault clear of the deluge of chatter, journalism, scholarship, and philosophical inquiry about the various conjunctions of gender, art, domestic labor, and child-raising. Cusk seems to have settled on her own private usage of publicly circulating terms, her own restatements of much-theorized and widely debated propositions, but she has not developed a fictional world to support her idiom: she seems very much to be referring to some vexing matters of our world, in naive terms.

One doesn’t want to have arid little arguments with Cusk’s premises, but the fact is there’s often not much else to do. Critics have said of Cusk’s Outline trilogy that it contains little plot, but this is misleading: the stories that characters tell the narrator are often breathtakingly suspenseful; Cusk’s insight in those books is that compression and summary can make quotidian episodes more exciting, not less. In Parade, however, the narrative is slack, while the characters are thin, the setting is indeterminate, and narrators come and go without our learning much about them.

The rough work of Parade could be the beginning of something new, but it feels more like the end of something old, a clearing out of excess Cuskian gestures to make way for something else. Perhaps because reproduction is so much at issue in Parade, the metaphor of afterbirth suggests itself: vital ideas that fed her earlier work are here expelled in clumps.