In ‘Parade,’ Rachel Cusk persists in a relentless dismantling of the novel and the self

Book Review Parade By Rachel Cusk Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 298 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Cusk followed the “Outline” trilogy with the novel “Second Place,” a retelling of the writer and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s epic spiritual war with the toxic D.H. Lawrence, which Luhan chronicled in her 1932 memoir, “Lorenzo in Taos.” Lawrence is one of Cusk’s favorite writers, and his influence is felt perhaps most keenly in “Parade.” When Cusk writes about the erasure of women, whether on the page, in society or in relationships, she means it literally. Books Elusive leaps of grace and daring: Rachel Cusk’s ‘Kudos’ Freedom — its boundaries, its fantasies — is the provenance of “Kudos,” the new and final novel of Rachel Cusk’s austere, critically acclaimed triptych, following closely on the heels of “Outline” and “Transit.” When the nameless narrator of the next story of the section is assaulted on the street by a stranger, she is not surprised. Or is it actually a distinct existence and a distinct spirituality in itself?” In the second section of the book, “The Midwife,” another version of the “painter G,” a female one, remembers toiling away in her squalid studio as “a complete erasure or absence of an exterior self.” It’s only when she begins to exhibit her work and secures gallery representation that “she had become identifiably female. “Shame had always stood behind G,” Cusk writes of the female painter, “colossal and constrained, like water behind a dam.” In the third section, “Divers,” the character Julia asks, “doesn’t everybody feel their mother could have been an artist?