Rachel Cusk’s Parade appears in its early pages to uphold a grand tradition: the novel about an artist. G is a painter, much admired but “angry and hurt by the world.” G, notable for rendering images upside down, works in a somewhat gimmicky mode, but he’s more than a showman. “At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake,” Cusk writes, “but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality.” Cusk’s cursory description of this work—“slender birch trees in sunlight,” “a man cowering alone in bed”—suggests she knows that art’s power is ineffable, beyond its appearance.
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