Prism Break

An unnamed narrator opens the final chapter of Rachel Cusk’s novel Parade: “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did — the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” The balance consists, in part, of their revelations after the drawn-out death of their unknowable, distant parent. Months after her funeral, they visit a museum where an anonymous artist’s paintings give way to thought: “We realised that the death of our mother’s body meant that we now contained her, since she no longer had a container of her own. She was inside us, as once we had been inside her. The pane of glass between herself and us, between the dark of outside and the day of inside, had been broken.”

Parade is a hall of mirrors, a “meeting of darkness and light across shards of broken glass.” In this prismatic, liminal space, Cusk questions how we carry other people forward after death. Like her other works, the seventeenth book from the British Canadian author...