This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Rachel Cusk is one of the most interesting writers in Britain today, for both the content of her books and the path of her career. She started out as an extremely good practitioner of a well-established form: the comic novel of middle-class manners. 

Yet books like The Country Life (1997) and Arlington Park (2006) had a philosophical meatiness in their thinking that set them apart. And when the scathing response (“one of the worst things that ever happened to me”) to her memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath led to a creative crisis, we might have known that Cusk wouldn’t go quietly.

Her response was to reforge her work in a way comparable to T.S. Eliot’s with Four Quartets: a new form for a new way of thinking about the world. The trilogy Outline, Transit and Kudos sought to tell their stories “without the imprint of identity”, so the narrator was effectively an outline, listening to other people. And in her recent work there is a resistance to the florid invention we think of as one of the characteristic pleasures of fiction, in favour of stories that seem to come from life: Cusk’s, or other people’s.

This is an austere, rigorous approach — these days her books even use sans-serif typefaces — and her new novel Parade is her most austere yet. I like a bit of literary austerity, as it happens, though I wondered how much further Cusk could take it after her last novel. I had also wondered with the one before that, and the one before that.

The answer is that she has settled on a combination of story and essay — not blended, but alternating. Parade comes in four parts, each switching between a memoir-esque first person and essayistic sequences about a series of artists. All the artists are given the anonymising initial G, though they are recognisably inspired by real people — Louise Bourgeois here, Eric Rohmer there.

The essay sections are stoutly provocative and interesting, though written with such an impersonal tone as to feel inert at times. The story of a painter who began painting upside down (Georg Baselitz is the model here) addresses the position of women: here a man can “unchain himself from the predestination of identity” and be free, but a woman can’t. 

In the second section the archetypal domestic space of the kitchen becomes a theatre of war with its “battalion of gleaming implements”, and a female painter has “contorted her whole being” in an attempt to appease her parents’ authority (coping with parents is a very Cuskian theme). Later, another artist “was selfish and cruel and egotistical. She was as bad as any man, and as good as any man.”

Even in the more fiction-like sections, the approach remains stark: the landscape when the narrator and her partner go to stay on a farm is “stunned” by “brutal heat”. There is little dialogue, until the third section which, satisfyingly, becomes a sort of symposium between its characters, thrashing out issues explicitly. 

In some ways parade reads, as all Cusk’s post-crisis fiction has, like an attempt to come to terms with the powers and limitations of creativity, and writing in particular, in capturing the world. A mountain with its “jagged white head flung wildly into the sky” will “never become familiar or have its strangeness mastered”. The artists in the book are always evolving, seeking new ways to tell the truth — just as Cusk is.

Parade is a strange book, but there are echoes of the early, storytelling Cusk — even the funny Cusk. In the third section a character complains about the inconvenience of having her journey delayed by a death on the train tracks, and suggests they should install suicide booths at railway stations: “they could even put a simulator in there […] with the sound of a train approaching”. 

And there’s a comic self-awareness of Cusk’s own reputation as someone who meets the world and forever finds it wanting, when one character says she used to admire another “for criticising everything. I thought it meant he was intelligent. Then I realised that while he was outraged everyone else was just having a good time.”

With Parade Cusk has furthered her project of becoming a writer whose work is easier to admire than to love, yet the admiration I felt for stretches of this book did approach a sort of love. In one scene, where austerity reaches out-and-out coldness, a nanny is talking about her childhood home, where a busy road passed in front of houses, and where one day a truck didn’t stop as a mother and her pram were crossing the road. “It hit the pram,” the nanny says, “and the woman was left standing empty-handed by the side of the road”. “Empty-handed” to capture the death of a child! It takes balls — man or woman — to write a sentence like that.

Much more interested in showing the reader a traditional good time is Israel-born, Netherlands-based writer Yael van der Wouden, whose debut The Safekeep “was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US”. There’s something undignified about plastering this information on the author biography, but it adds to the sense for the reader that this is one of the season’s must-reads. Well, we’ll be the judge of that.

Happily, the investment was largely worthwhile. The Safekeep is about finding and losing things — or having them taken from you. Set in the Dutch province of Overijssel in the early 1960s, it’s seen through the viewpoint of Isabel, a young woman living alone in her late mother’s house. The house is the subject of tension in the family: found for them after the war by Isabel’s uncle, it has now been bequeathed to Isabel’s brother Louis, though she lives there with his permission.

Then Louis returns, with new girlfriend Eva (who’s “pretty in a way men think women should be pretty”). Isabel resents Eva, not just for her presence — she insists on sleeping in Isabel’s mother’s old room — but what she represents: a free spirit against her own buttoned-up existence. When Isabel begins to notice small items going missing — a thimble, a fork — she suspects Eva, who teases her in response. “What danger am I, hmm? Small as I am?”

A friction builds, and it’s not very surprising to see how things develop between the odd couple of Isabel and Eva. The narrative is tightly controlled, so that although we are in Isabel’s head, her motives are often a mystery to herself, the effect at once restrained and extravagant as repressed emotions boil over. Yet there is a twist to come in the final quarter of the book, which gives context to everything that came before and provides both emotional and historical depth.

It’s a clever book because the historical context provided in the final section chimes with contemporary — evergreen — concerns on Europe, without losing its anchoring in the story. There is perhaps a neatness to the closing pages which could have been left untidied, but that is a small niggle in the context of a novel that satisfies as much as it surprises.

Some books come around regularly, like comets. Russian writer Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden first appeared in English in 1987, seven years after Tsypkin completed it and five years after his death. It attracted just one review — in the Yorkshire Post — and disappeared, until Susan Sontag discovered a copy on Charing Cross Road, declared it one of the century’s “most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements”, and enabled its republication in 2005, when critics like James Wood also lavished praise: “an amazing and beautiful little book”.

The novel’s re-republication almost 20 years later, by the resourceful folk at Faber Editions, enables us to see both why it is loved by luminaries — and why it keeps falling out of print nonetheless. It’s a novel that both welcomes and challenges the reader, telling the story of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s trip with his young second wife Anna (“hadn’t just his name really attracted her?” he frets) across Europe to the resort of Baden-Baden. 

But this is framed within the narrator’s own account of a train journey from Moscow to what was then called Leningrad. The narrative is impressionistic rather than chronological, dotted with photographs for Sebaldian verisimilitude, and written in long paragraphs that are punctuated occasionally by full stops but mostly by dashes which give a disarming voltage to the prose akin to Emily Dickinson’s poetry. 

As for the story, we get an authentic if turbulent account of Dostoevsky’s life — penal servitude, first marriage, literary success, antisemitism (“loathsome little Jews”, of which Tsypkin was one) — and the sentences are rarely contained within one topic. It is as disorienting for the reader as it is for Dostoevsky to switch between memories of being beaten and visions of an audience cheering him on as though at a performance.

The reader is driven on by the propulsive energy of these dashed sentences, so that by the time Fyodor and Anna make it to the roulette tables of Baden-Baden, we feel rewired to accommodate the style. Later, when Dostoevsky’s antisemitism comes into focus once more — his diary filled with “hackneyed arguments […] about world Jewry which has ensnared practically the whole globe in its greedy tentacles” — we see that there are good extra-literary reasons why the book still seems relevant, and keeps coming back. 

Catch it while you can — or wait another 20 years, and it will no doubt reappear once more.