Rachel Cusk has spent a decade dismantling the novel from the inside, and Life of M is the latest controlled demolition. M is a celebrated actor — childhood star, fashion-brand face, her career mapping closely enough to Natalie Portman's (Black Swan, Leon with sex scenes cut at her mother's insistence) that the press has gleefully seized the comparison. Cusk must have known they would. The roman à clef framing is not a bug; it's the first move in a long argument about what it means to be perceived. The nominal premise — a nameless, genderless narrator proposes writing M's autobiography — collapses almost immediately. Two meetings: coffee at a luxury hotel, a lunch that goes wrong. The narrator notices their own falseness beside M's strange authenticity: '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, they barely see each other. The book that emerges anyway is not an autobiography but something stranger: a mosaic of M's episodes (acting classes, a controlling ex, a curated Greek villa) intercut with the narrator's own observations, each scene prefaced with stage-direction-precise descriptions of place — furniture, layout, the texture of artificial wood flooring in a five-star suite. The structural gambit is Cusk's most formally interesting since the Outline trilogy. Faye, in those books, was a deliberate absence — a vessel. The narrator here is a mirrored surface, which is a different and more unstable thing. The first-person singular drifts into a collective 'we' that sometimes means the narrator and their partner, sometimes means the audience, sometimes means something uncomfortably like you, the reader. Cusk seems to want to co-opt us into the machinery of fame — to make us the rapaciously hungry engine she's diagnosing. The problem is that the 'we' sections misfire more often than they land. '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 the kind of epigrammatic absolutism that earns its place. But how does 'we' visit a psychic with frazzled hair, or recall that 'our longest relationship was with someone who now frightens us'? The specificity that makes Cusk's M scenes thrum — the indifferent fan approaching M 'as though M were a tourist monument,' the sunset reflected in a switched-off television — abandons the narrator sections, which collapse into a puzzling universalism that isn't universal enough to land. The insight at the book's center — that in a post-saturation world of social media exposure, appearance is the only available certainty — is not new. Cusk knows this. Her edge has never been novelty of idea; it's the authority with which she drives the sentences home, the way her observations arrive like 'punches or uncomfortable secrets muttered in our ears.' That authority is present here, and at its best it makes the reader physically uncomfortable in the way only the sharpest prose can. The jokes, a reliably dark pleasure in her previous work, are in regrettably short supply. Life of M is a book to admire enormously, but not one to love — and the review you're reading, and the one in the Guardian, suspect Cusk would consider 'not one to love' a compliment.
