Anna A.'s Reviews > Parade

Rachel Cusk takes her signature 'annihiliated perspective' to another level in this posh meditation on identity and (bless her!) non-feministically approached womanhood. In four main chapters, third-person reports of various artists called G are braided together with first-person narratives that may or may not be related to the artist storylines.

As opposed to her Outline trilogy where the first-person singular narrator gradually reveals herself as she rebuilds her inner core after relationship trauma, here the intimate perspective dissolves itself, taking on a plural form, with the singular barely there in only some of the instances. I take this as a welcome manifesto against the obsession of identity as a core that separates and, more often than not, stirs up conflict with no real benefit or purpose.

What we are is not who we are. It's extraordinary how Cusk portrays this mysterious, live and viable 'who' precisely against the unfavorable, or at least dialectic, backdrop of the inevitable 'whats' attached to our selves as social beings.