Parade

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.