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M is a celebrated film actor. A star since childhood, now the face of a major fashion brand, she has been famous all her life. That her career closely resembles Natalie Portman’s has been gleefully seized upon by the press, something Rachel Cusk must surely have anticipated: in the novel, M’s first film has its sex scenes cut at her mother’s insistence, as happened with Portman’s 1994 debut Leon, while her ballerina movie is recognisably Black Swan. M is also, in the words of the nameless and genderless narrator of Life of M, “a good sport”. When the narrator suggests writing M’s autobiography, M likes the idea. “Would you just make it up?” she asks.
A celebrity autobiography is seldom the work of the celebrity herself. And yet any suggestion that the narrator will serve as a kind of ghostwriter to M is dispensed with in a few pages. The pair meet for coffee at a luxury hotel and, after the narrator’s partner falls suddenly and seriously ill, for lunch in a restaurant. The lunch is unsatisfactory, an attempt at intimacy that the narrator acknowledges afterwards to have been a mistake. Though M is determined to live as normal a life as possible (“her personal task is to become real, or rather to acquire some reality”), the narrator is uncomfortably aware of their own falseness with M: “It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real. It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.” After that the two of them do not see one another again “for a long time”.
And yet a book about M, or at least partly about M, materialises. Episodes from M’s life are intercut with observations from the narrator’s own experiences. The M sections are precise, specific: an acting class led by a renowned theatre director, a difficult encounter with a controlling ex, a holiday in an immaculately curated villa in Greece. The impression is of clips from a film, an effect heightened by the meticulous descriptions of place that preface each scene like the stage directions from a script, detailing everything from furniture and layout to the specific texture of the artificial wood floor in a five-star hotel suite. In a world where everyone is acting, Cusk seems to be saying, the appearance of things is all the certainty we have.
In this post-saturation era of social media exposure, the intersection of appearance and authenticity has been exhaustively picked over. Cusk’s insights are not strikingly new. Her power lies in the authority of her sharp, spare prose, the glittering exactness of her sentences. She writes with crisp acuity about the frictionless (and therefore strangely lifeless) existence of the celebrity, the corrosive effect of fame on family relationships, the blend of fervent purity and crushing cynicism that delimits a person forged in the forcefields of power and pretence. At Cusk’s startling best, and there is a good deal of that here, her ideas land like punches or uncomfortable secrets muttered in our ears: it is a shock to realise that they are our secrets too.
Life of M, like Cusk’s previous novel Parade, grew out of a piece published in the New Yorker, in this case a powerful short story titled Project. While the story has made its way almost whole into the opening chapters, the larger scope of the novel form gives Cusk the space to explore M more deeply. She may have famously declared in 2018 that “I don’t think character exists any more” but, stripped though her work is of the ordinary conventions of character and plot, her ideas land with greatest impact when they are rooted in the particular: a flaming sunset reflected on a switched-off television screen, a room in a museum meticulously curated to give the impression of a lived-in space, an “indifferent” fan approaching M for a selfie “as though M were a tourist monument”. M’s most compelling scenes, like those told to Faye in Cusk’s celebrated Outline trilogy, thrum with detail.
Faye was a deliberate absence, a vessel for other people’s stories. The narrator of Life of M is more a mirrored surface, their reflection of M’s celebrity as much a part of the illusion as the celebrity itself. What begins with a first-person singular narrator quickly morphs into a plural “we” which sometimes appears to represent the narrator and their partner, sometimes a more public “we”, both the counterpoint to and the rapaciously hungry engine for fame. Perhaps Cusk intends to co-opt the reader, to make us complicit. Perhaps she means to throw us off balance. What is certain is that the prose in these sections has an epigrammatic absolutism that, while occasionally brilliant (“We do not, as we did when we were young, see the evening as a mysterious kingdom in which we might meet our destiny”), is more often puzzlingly specific. How is it that “we” visit the apartment of a psychic with “frazzled hair” or recall that “our longest relationship was with someone who now frightens us”? It is not always clear what these parts add to the whole. Jokes, a reliably dark pleasure in Cusk’s work, are in regrettably short supply. Life of M is powered by a formidable intelligence and shaped with exceptional technical skill, at its best it leaves one reeling, but the impression it leaves is one of detachment, even disdain. It is a book to admire enormously, but not one to love.
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