Parade

January 1, 2024

Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Award winner and Guggenheim Fellow Cusk returns after Second Place with a novel the publisher is positioning as demolishing the conventions of storytelling. It is about art and family, seeing and being, and follows an artist, a mother, siblings, and more. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2024
Cusk (the Outline trilogy) delivers a stimulating experimental novel about contemporary artists contending with familial and societal constraints. The book comprises four distinct sections. “The Stuntman” focuses on a painter named G, whose work depicts himself and his wife upside down on the canvas, revealing, his wife thinks, “something disturbing about the female condition.” In “The Midwife,” a female painter also named G leaves behind her “wild” youth to marry and have a daughter with an oppressive husband. Cusk remarks subtly on the “incomprehensible fate” of women such as G by juxtaposing her story with a parallel narrative focused on a defunct utopian community run by a repugnant man and his competent, long-suffering wife. “The Diver” portrays a group of art world professionals discussing the recent derailing of an important exhibition (descriptions of the unnamed artist’s work suggest Louise Bourgeois), after a visitor dies by suicide in the museum on opening day. In “The Spy,” the rise of a filmmaker named G is juxtaposed with the story of adult siblings visiting their domineering mother at her deathbed, where they consider what they’ve learned after having children of their own. Though the connections between the sections can feel tenuous, the author’s spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

April 1, 2024
The stories of a half-dozen different artists, each identified solely by the initial G, investigate the nature of art, artists, reality, and family relationships. Readers of Cusk's previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader's expectations about what fiction can or should do. An omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the thoughts and emotions of some Gs: an insecure male artist famed for painting upside-down and his unhappy wife; a male filmmaker fleeing repressive parents; a female painter spurred toward art by a miserable childhood, mired in a dysfunctional marriage with a man who inspires the same feelings of shame her parents did, then liberated by his death. At other times, a first-person narrator profiles Gs whose lives and work she has read about or seen: a female sculptor of cloth forms; a 19th-century female painter dead in childbirth at 31; a Black male painter marginalized by his peers. This narrator, sometimes "I" and sometimes "we," also chronicles episodes from her personal life, including a grimly unforgiving account of her dead mother's toxic parenting and a lengthy restaurant conversation among five people associated with an exhibit of one of the Gs' works, closed for the day after a man dies by suicide at the museum. That conversation makes explicit questions that animate all the stories: What drives people to make art? Do artists perceive reality, or invent it? Can women artists with children create as freely as their male peers? Why is family life so fraught? Simmering underneath all the stories and talk is the desolate sense of how alone people can be even, perhaps particularly, in the most intimate relationships--existential issues by no means limited to those who make art. Cusk's prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.

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May 1, 2024
A writer is the focus of Cusk's acclaimed Outline trilogy. In Second Place (2021), she delves into the art world, a risky realm she further explores in this precisely rendered, episodic, and riddling tale of an artist's multiple embodiments. When famed artist G begins painting things upside down, his wife feels that he, a man who "believed that women could not be artists," has "inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition." That precariousness is made visceral when she is assaulted out of the blue by another woman. A further shocking act of violence occurs when a man hurls himself to his death at an exhibition of the gender-interrogating work of G, a radical woman sculptor. Later the shaken museum director and her disconcerted guests--a splendidly thorny, cosmopolitan, brainy, and complexly interconnected group--meet for dinner in a bravura scene shaped by Cusk's phenomenal gifts for luminant description and witty, revealing dialogue. G, a successful painter, finally catches on to her husband's malevolence. As a male filmmaker and writer using an alias, G is obsessed with ambiguity and the "pathos of identity." Shifting from first person to second and third in narrations of poetic nuance and forthright assertions, Cusk's haunted characters grapple with arresting and provocative conundrums pertaining to creativity, self, recognition, gender, motherhood, love, and death.

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Starred review from May 24, 2024

An artist known only as G begins to paint upside-down pictures; his wife is especially troubled by an upside-down nude of her. An unnamed female refugee is attacked by a homeless woman who pauses and turns for one last look (like an artist looking at a piece of art). And there is another G--a woman sculptor... Yet there is little demarcation betwixt and between them all. Cusk (Second Place) gives a kind of Kafkaesque quality to the confusion in her latest novel, leaving readers with little more than possibilities and questions, ponderabilities, one might say--until, in the end, those very qualities become not the meaning of the book but its purpose, and in some sense, its inexpressible wisdom. With skill and a disturbing sense of menace, the strands of the seemingly plotless story seem to unravel before readers' eyes. Cusk's genius is that, even unmoored from plot, she holds attention, still keeps fingers (and imaginations) always turning that next page. VERDICT Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk's new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see.--Herman Sutter

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.