My first goal for this essay was to pinpoint exactly where Rachel Cusk’s interest in visual art began. I am not sure why the chronology seemed so important—perhaps because of the persistent delusion that beginnings are in some way definitional, and that to uncover the starting point of a story is also to be shown its ending and its purpose. The jacket copy for her 2009 travel memoir, The Last Supper, informed me it was about a summer in Italy spent “searching for art and its meanings,” exploring “the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, of beauty and ugliness.” (I love jacket copy for its banalities. The back of Cusk’s previous novel, Second Place, limpidly tells us that it “reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.” The jacket copy for her latest novel, Parade, tells us the book “expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.”) The Last Supper is a curious object, her second nonfiction book after her controversial motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work, and in some ways a prequel to Aftermath, the equally controversial divorce that followed.
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