'Parade' by Rachel Cusk

The new Cusk is very good. The first of the four movements is the weakest, it gets stronger as it goes along. The dinner party sequence is amazing. Zoe said everyone says the book is terrible. Who cares what people say, the taste of the literati is crystal clear shit. If you read it as a whole, Parade is rich with feeling, principle, philosophy, nuance, subjectivity, and discomfort. It’s a brave departure from form, and truly haunting. How people seem to be misreading it, willfully, brazenly through the lens of their own contexts robs the novel of its right to exist within the context of itself, its traditions, its derangements, and its own making. Cusk isn't saying anything about Rachel, and she certainly isn't saying anything her reader is required to believe or embody. The work performs a merciless disturbance with language. It reveals the operation of language's limitations to describe, and the concerns of her vignettes continually chill and rekindle the ever-mutable active, inactive, and active again human mind. The resistance to take Parade as a novel, for a novel’s sake—a story of the origins of art and unbecoming, loss, power, pain, repulsion, reclamation, and false dualities—reinforces my belief that the literary world is, like, at best brain-damaged en masse. Lole.