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.

NUBClub was not much of a fan of Cusk's experimental novel about art and how it intersects with the stuff of life. Cusk's story is a set of vignettes circling around an artist named G. In different sections of the book, G is a different person, changing gender and home and forms of art. But the novel is more about the characters around G and how the art and artist affect their lives. Most of NUBClub didn't like this conceit -- it was hard to make sense of why these scenes were put together and what was supposed to be consistent about G throughout. Nick defended the work, arguing that some of the scenes, notably the restaurant scene of the failed conference about G, were beautiful examples of Cusk's minimal descriptive prose, but the majority of us didn't find anything to connect to. It's an interesting concept, but we recommend you look at Cusk's Outline series to get a better sense of her brilliance. This was an experiment that didn't land for us.