Rachel Cusk, a Canadian-born British writer, has stretched the boundaries of fiction with a series of interrogatory, deliberately plotless short novels, the best known of which is her Outline trilogy. It's a hard row to keep hoeing. Life of M ventures in a slightly new, rather tricky direction. The unnamed narrator of this 13th novel -- a writer eager to break out of a slump -- proposes to a famous actor, dubbed M, to write her autobiography. The actor, whom the writer barely knows, asks amicably, "Would you just make it up?"
Gertrude Stein's modernist, norm- and form-breaking Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas comes to mind, but there's no indication that it has influenced the writer's undertaking.
In fact, like much of Cusk's work, Life of M is driven by her concern with conditions that impede self-definition -- for writers, artists, and women in particular. Cusk has long lamented the tolls of domesticity and family on women's identity and personal fulfillment -- beginning with her early satiric country novels and scathing memoirs about marriage and motherhood.
On its surface, Life of M explores how celebrity and acting -- dissembling for a living -- can obfuscate a person's core. Of course, they can also expose that essence, often unintentionally. And so can writing fiction.
M -- who is rumored to be based on Natalie Portman -- is a widely recognized movie star and model for a major brand whose image is everywhere, including shop windows and bus shelters. According to the narrator, M struggles to cultivate normality, "an attempt to retrieve a lost inner world, or something that looks like one." But, the narrator comments, "There is a danger that this could become another role."
Life of M constructs a portrait of the star with a series of carefully delineated scenes. We see M at a coolly procedural meeting with movie producers in a sleek office; at the private school pickup of her unnamed and apparently fatherless child; at a publicity event staged by one of her corporate sponsors in a bookstore. The narrator is fascinated by how M, although friendly and modest, is insulated by privilege -- discreetly fawned over at an exclusive spa, whisked in limos from luxury hotel rooms to airports, ushered past security lines.
Cusk lavishes so much attention on the luxe settings of M's various activities that the novel takes on the glaring yet dull gloss of décor porn. The specificity of these descriptions -- the untouched pastries in the executive meeting room; the immaculately tailored clothes of wealthy patrons at an artist friend's gallery opening; the gold fountain pen in the richly appointed office of a "man of tremendous wealth and caprice" whose mistress M is to play in an upcoming role -- are in sharp contrast to the willful vagueness of unnamed cities, countries, characters, and even the gender of the narrator and their partner.
M is graciously polite but dutiful and detached at these various events. Like a mannequin, no heat emanates from her. When urged by the gallerist to buy one of her friend's new paintings, whose scale and pricing have escalated, M responds with "her famous smile" and the disingenuous line, "There's no money in film anymore."
If you read for plot and character, you've come to the wrong place. Cusk determinedly eschews both. Fortunately, Life of M is less abstruse than Parade, her last novel, which featured several artists who were all denoted by the same initial, G. But it's still off-putting. I don't miss plot so much as emotion. Cusk's work took a brilliant, sharply experimental turn with Outline (2014-2018), in which her narrator, a newly divorced writer named Faye, strove to find her footing by eliciting revelatory confidences from people she met on book tours and teaching gigs. These cautionary tales were often absorbing and moving.
Life of M withholds so much information and feeling that even its purportedly unflappable subject objects when the writer shows her part of the manuscript. M complains that the events are all made up, and worse, "You've made it seem like I lack humanity...You've made it seem like I'm unable to love." The narrator's response is hardly reassuring: "But you're just playing a character...The character was invented by me. So if what you say is true, then it's me that it's true of." (The writer gives M the last word in this argument, a surprising punchline which I'll leave for readers to discover.)
In other words, as in Stein's "autobiography" of Alice B. Toklas, the actual subject of Life of M is not M but the writer -- about whom Cusk reveals little. The novel is a sly twist on autobiography designed to cunningly interrogate the rub between who you are to yourself and who you are in the world, between art and artifice, and how to balance it all with authenticity and integrity.
Life of M is a further chapter in Cusk's ongoing, challenging project to express the ineffable, to pull off what she calls "the task of translating ourselves into language above the noise." While I continue to find this project intellectually intriguing, I think we'd hear her better if she turned up the volume and temperature.
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