Toward a New Realism

Parade

by Rachel Cusk.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 198 pp., $27.00

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