Book Review: Parade

Parade
By Rachel Cusk
Review by Jack

Parade is Rachel Cusk at her peak. She takes all the classic ingredients that we know and love – exquisite prose, interrogations of art, gender, violence, and love, and a heavy atmosphere – and innovates yet again. This novel is capacious, well intentioned and incredibly stylish. I did find it to be denser read than her other books like Outline, but it’s just so clever and expansive. I think Parade is so effective in that Cusk doesn’t seek to create a world inside the book – instead, she creates a network that projects out into our world, requiring the reader’s own experiences and interpretations for completion. Overall, Parade is Cusk’s most challenging but sophisticated offering to date.