Book Review: ‘Life of M,’ by Rachel Cusk

LIFE OF M, by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels have arrived in America sleek, white-covered and unen***bered, like yachts. The newest one, “Life of M,” comes towed by a squat little tugboat of good old-fashioned gossip.

Having denounced the concept of character in 2018 — smarties on Substack are still turning this over — Cusk now often gives the people she writes about initials rather than names. (Perhaps plot is next to go, and all of narrative will soon be a calculus problem.)

“M” refers to one of the novel’s two protagonists: a famous movie actress who Cusk, in an interview with my colleague Alexandra Alter, refused to concede was based on Natalie Portman. For legal reasons perhaps we should think of her as Not-alie Portman.

The second is a writer with obvious resemblance to Cusk but of strangely indeterminate gender, who doesn’t get an initial other than the first-person I, and who wants to write a book about M.

There are stretches of first-person plural, too, where homeless encampments or self-effacing servants are observed — the setting is a city like Paris, where the real-life women live — and ponderous pronouncements are made.

“In the midst of our lives we sometimes wake in the darkness and hear the sound of our own heart thudding in our ears” — that kind of thing. “There is a moment of blank emptiness before the memory of who we are and of all we have done and have yet to do slowly begins to fill us.”

At such moments you might want to fling “Life of M” aside and instead fire up “Life of Brian.”

Our M is not the Messiah, either. She appears in bus-shelter ads “wreathed in the pink flowers of spring,” as Portman has when representing Miss Dior perfume. M’s mother intervened to tone down the ***ualized script of her first film (nonetheless, appearing in it “immediately brought her childhood to an end”), which sounds a lot like what happened with Portman’s 1994 big-screen debut in “Léon: The Professional.”

Most resonantly, with all the extra-textual clanging about Natalie and Rachel — The Hollywood Reporter called the situation a “pas de deux” — M is cast as a prima ballerina in a movie that resembles “Black Swan.” Who can forget Portman playing a danseuse in distress, sprouting feathers and murderous impulses as she transformed from the sweet, innocent Odette into the dark, sensual Odile?

Then, her rival was stabbed in the stomach by a shard from a backstage mirror. Now what’s crack’d from side to side is the Zoom screen of Nat’s Book Club, where in 2022 the actress conducted an admiring interview with Cusk about her novel “Second Place.”

Two years later, upon the publication of “Parade,” Portman declared in an Instagram post that she was “forever in awe of Rachel Cusk and the way she disrupts form and the conventions of storytelling.” According to Page Six , though, Cusk’s latest disruption of form and the conventions of storytelling has since curdled awe into annoyance.

Understandably so. “Life of M” suggests a cl***ic scenario of seduction and betrayal, with M greenlighting the writer’s experiment (“Would you just make it up?” she asks) but later recoiling at the portion she reads.

“I don’t like the way you portray me,” she says. “Actually, it’s hurtful.”

She has been rendered as less fully realized human than creature visiting from Planet Celebrity: unable to empathize, for example, with the concept of depression. “The notion that a person could be dominated by an internal idea is alien to her,” her observer writes. Artistic integrity “is like a vital organ that was removed from her early on and for which she is forever trying to find the replacement.”

When the writer’s partner goes into hospital with a mysterious illness, M’s offer of help is framed as performative. “Part of M’s freedom was her freedom to choose how to be. Of all the things she could have chosen, she had selected goodness.”

She moves through the world with comforts supplied and maintained by unseen hands, chatting briefly with a pretty Eastern European nanny before grasping that “with her questions she made the girl her responsibility, and that she has no intention of fulfilling that responsibility.”

Perhaps worst of all, in a book where food is described often and sensually, the actress is … weight-conscious.

“M does not eat pastries. She doesn’t know what would happen to her if she did.” Encountering a contented bookstore clerk who looks like but does not recognize her — an uncanny double who points out a hovering wasp; is the wasp meant to symbolize Cusk’s sting? — M notes the “unexpectedly full hips and sturdy legs beneath her slender upper body” that would have torched her own career.

Maybe M stands for “me-ow”? Even more than pastry, Cusk is preoccupied by cruelty. “No cruelty, no book,” says the mother of a rags-to-riches memoirist depicted in the novel. “And no nice home secured with the royalty payments.”

Portman’s last tabloid tangle with an author was a decade ago, after Jonathan Safran Foer published some of their email correspondence in The New York Times, leading to speculation about the end of his marriage. “Life of M” is much less titillating: Its abstracted subject luxuriates in a hotel room, reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which convey that “even the most famous person will be forgotten eventually.”

In an era when online personalities have superseded most movie stars in prestige and influence — “there’s no money in film any more,” M tells a gallerist — there’s something a little off the pulse about scrutinizing a Hollywood star, or the idea of one, to consider the nature of identity. (Now seems the moment to disclose that some years ago a certain critic, let’s call her A, wrote a profile of Portman for Allure magazine, and there was a bit of a kerfuffle after she likened the experience of fame to W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness.)

Cusk is one of the cleverest and foremost practitioners of autofiction, turning to the form after her memoirs of motherhood and divorce produced their own media discomforts. With the jet-setting heroine Faye of her landmark trilogy “Outline,” she might even be practicing aerofiction.

“Life of M” continues in that mode: rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious, a place where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. The air up there where Cusk seems to be living and writing these days is gaspingly thin. She’s missed down here on Earth.

LIFE OF M | By Rachel Cusk | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 192 pp. | $27