Back at university, my first impression of Rachel Cusk was her Outline trilogy, which commences with a woman flying to Athens to teach a summer writing workshop. On the plane, she meets a charming Greek man who changes the trajectory of her trip. He invites her to ride his boat (three times!) and, together, they discuss love, autonomy, and optimism, basking in the soporific sun. For that reason, Cusk has become a summer author for me, and I always start the sweltering season with one of her novels in my greasy, sunscreened hands.
Once it was finally published in paperback (superficially, I needed it to match the rest of my collection), I grabbed a copy of her latest offering, Parade. And this year, more than ever, Cusk’s formidable writing style was especially compelling. Something to take the edge off.
Here, Cusk is austere, unsentimental, and unapologetic. She continues to challenge the expectations we have of novels – yes, even hers – with a series of four loosely interconnected vignettes. It’s a gallery of ideas, like stepping into a room with four paintings that have only a vague style and colour-palette in common. But they are striking, nonetheless, both as individual pieces and a collective whole.
Parade – however – has received a frosty, mostly perplexed, reception from critics. Cusk has been condemned as too esoteric, perhaps elitist, in this latest exploration of art, gender, motherhood, and capitalism. The New York Times said “It is the way you might begin to speak if you were raised solely in the Tate and the Whitney and had never eaten a hot dog.”
They suggest she has become almost a parody of herself; the literary it-girl favourite finally strayed too close to the “no plot, just vibes” sun. But I beg to differ.
For me, it was the antidote to my current fatigue with AI, to get to read something that is so thoroughly human and such a celebration of art only humans could create. ChatGPT’s servers would need to be cooled by every gallon of the Thames to craft something half as good. Should we punish her for that?
So, what is “no plot, just vibes”? Why is that a term of literary endearment? And how did Cusk become its patron saint? Let’s dive in.
“No plot, just vibes” is essentially the TikTok-ification of Ursula K Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory, in which she explores the importance of gatherers rather than hunters.
Le Guin’s argument is this: most historians have claimed that the spear was the first human tool, but this makes little sense – most things eaten by early humans would actually have been gathered, not pierced: “Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food.” So, instead of the spear, Le Guin suggests that a ‘carrier bag’ would have been the first tool used by humans, in the form of a sling, a shell, or a gourd. Basically, any vessel for carrying more than the hands could manage.