Rachel Cusk's Life of M: A Portman-Inspired Novel Reviewed — SkimNews
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- Life of M centers on M, a celebrated film actor whose career parallels Natalie Portman's — including sex scenes cut from her debut at her mother's insistence (as with Portman's 1994 film 'Leon') and a ballerina role resembling 'Black Swan' — a resemblance the press has 'gleefully seized upon.'
- The narrator meets M only twice — once for coffee at a luxury hotel, once for an unsatisfactory lunch the narrator calls 'a mistake' — before the pair do not see one another again 'for a long time.'
- M is described as determined to 'become real, or rather to acquire some reality,' while the narrator concedes their own falseness: 'It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.'
- The novel grew out of Cusk's New Yorker short story 'Project,' with that story carried 'almost whole' into the opening chapters and expanded for the longer form.
- The narrator shifts from first-person singular to a plural 'we' — sometimes the narrator and their partner, sometimes a public 'we' functioning as the counterpoint and 'rapaciously hungry engine' for fame.
- The reviewer calls the book 'powered by a formidable intelligence' and 'shaped with exceptional technical skill' but concludes it leaves 'an impression of detachment, even disdain' — a novel 'to admire enormously, but not one to love.'
Why it matters: Cusk extends her post-character project beyond the celebrated Outline trilogy by replacing the vessel-like Faye with a narrator who mirrors M's celebrity, yielding prose the reviewer calls dazzling but emotionally cold — a novel explicitly admired 'enormously' yet 'not one to love.'
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