Fast Forward

Like most good things in Europe, Rachel Cusk’s prose has been hit, since her move to Paris in 2021, by a fresh wave of austerity, with further cuts to dialogue, irony, character, and plot. Cusk likes to rail in interviews and Q&As against the stubborn materials with which she is condemned to work, as someone trapped—in her own words—in a “bad marriage with writing and language.” Unlike the abstractive potential of visual art, whose freedom to “walk away from the scene of reality” Cusk eyes with envy, narrative voice, by definition, “has to belong to someone.”

Rooted in this frustration is her struggle for “low-character” fiction, to adapt a formulation more commonly used for gluten (not quite character-free, but close enough to not give a savvy reader stomach cramps). In its pursuit, Cusk has cycled through the self-conscious novel, the memoir, and “inside-out” autofiction, which externalised, like a sushi roll, the defining experiences of the self at its heart. With all that behind her, her Parisian works aim for an even sparser mode of fiction, by chipping away at its load-bearing columns in a game of writerly Jenga. Life of M, Cusk’s latest novel, takes these cuts further—perhaps even a little too far.

Like the Outline trilogy’s Faye, Life of M’s first-person narrator is a vague (and this time ungendered) version of the author, whose brief appearances bookend the novel. The narrative begins in the aftermath of a chance meeting with M, a world-famous film star, whom everyone except the narrator seems to know: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.”

Between two initial meetings with M, recounted in the opening section, and a final one on which the book ends, the narrator works on the “project”—to borrow the title of the New Yorker short story Life of M grows out of. Its outcome, which occupies the bulk of the novel, comprises seven claustrophobic scenes from the life of a celebrity, offering a recognisably Cuskian (read: articulate and uncompromising) version of all the commonplaces the genre invariably invokes: the contamination of reality; a stunted inner life; the curse and blessing of existing outside of time. These scenes are to celebrity life-writing what Cusk’s Outline trilogy is to the autofictional novel: infused with a sense of the genre’s absurdity while remaining within its bounds, like a teenager sighing their way through an activity of which it would be too exposing to admit enjoyment.

We see M engaged in her own project of sorts: to build a character for herself and “make her life seem more normal” (minus the frustration of airport queues, public transport, and having to respect opening times). Like scenes in a film, each section involves a set change: a luxury spa; a promotional event in a bookstore; a bistro; her children’s school. Yet the writerly lens never holds M in focus. Instead, in line with the novel’s lack of proper names, an anonymising blur clouds the writing. We get the texture of M’s thoughts with no detail, and backdrops with far too much of it, but nothing comes close to defining M as anything other than a type—with the exception, perhaps, of her past filmic roles, evoked generically enough to protect Cusk from a libel case, but specifically enough to identify Natalie Portman as the main source of inspiration.