To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant retracting a claim about Cusk’s ability to hold the reader spellbound. This “anti-novel,” he wrote, “fails the Hardwick Test”: that it “must be consistently (‘each page, each paragraph’) interesting.” For New York Magazine’s Andrea Long Chu—writing as the tribune of those who had soured on the “aura of unimpeachability” (as Janique Vigier once put it) that Cusk had acquired thanks to the Outline trilogy—Parade revealed its author as the “paranoid custodian of an idiosyncratic gender fundamentalism.”
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