Rachel Cusk's Life of M: A Distant Portrait of Celebrity
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- M, the celebrity at the center of Rachel Cusk's novel "Life of M," closely resembles Natalie Portman — a child star turned fashion-brand face whose first film's sex scenes were cut at her mother's insistence (mirroring Portman's 1994 debut "Leon") and whose ballerina movie is recognizably "Black Swan."
- Rachel Cusk adapted her New Yorker short story "Project" almost whole into the opening chapters of the novel, which then expands to intercut M's episodes with the narrator's own reflections.
- The nameless, genderless narrator proposes writing M's autobiography but abandons the project after an unsatisfactory lunch; the two do not see each other again "for a long time," yet a book about M still materialises.
- M's sections are rendered like film clips, with "meticulous descriptions of place" prefacing each scene as if they were stage directions from a script.
- The narrator's first-person voice morphs into a plural "we" — sometimes the narrator and partner, sometimes a consuming public — a shift the reviewer calls epigrammatic but "puzzlingly specific."
- Cusk's 2018 declaration that "I don't think character exists any more" is cited as context for her stripped-down approach, which the reviewer says lands hardest when rooted in concrete detail.
- The reviewer judges "Life of M" "powered by a formidable intelligence and shaped with exceptional technical skill," but concludes it is "a book to admire enormously, but not one to love" — hampered by detachment and a thin supply of Cusk's usually reliable dark humor.
Why it matters: Rachel Cusk is among contemporary fiction's most distinctive formal experimenters, and "Life of M" extends the inquiry into performance and authenticity she began with the Outline trilogy. For readers tracking her evolution, the novel introduces new structural risks — including the shift into a plural "we" — that some will find bracing and others alienating. The book's demand is intellectual rather than emotional, positioning it as serious literary fiction rather than accessible page-turner.
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