Something awful happens when you start to achieve a degree of success as a writer. All of a sudden, people sidle up to you at parties, stick up their hands at your readings, and ask questions about things other than your book. At first, all they really want to know about is your “writing process”: What kind of chair do you sit in? Do you have a favorite font? Do you line up your highlighter pens in a little rainbow every morning before you start? Later on, once word gets around that you fancy yourself as a bit of an intellectual, the questions start to take on a political tinge: Would you care to comment on this news item that has just flashed up on my phone? Was this English campus novel, written in 2022, a deliberate statement on the electoral prospects of Mayor Mamdani? If you are really successful, though — if you have toiled away for years to produce a body of work that commands both institutional respect and public adulation, if your life has become an endless string of prize-givings and ceremonial dinners, and the covers of your latest expensive hardback beam out at you from the windows of every bookshop in the land — then the questions start to get more personal. You are no longer a writer; you are a celebrity. And when confronted with a celebrity, there is only one question anybody wants to ask: What is it like to be you?
Rachel Cusk has been dealing with this question for some time. People have been wondering what it might be like to be her since 2001, when she released her brilliant motherhood memoir A Life’s Work, and the UK press promptly and gleefully speculated that she was an “unfit mother” whose children ought to be “put into care.” In 2012, she published her brilliant divorce memoir Aftermath, and commentary about her cruelty and coldness was promptly broadcast to the entire nation on Radio 4. Since then, a lot of her public interventions seem to have been designed as a rebuke to the idea that a person can ever be knownat all, at least via language: “Description and character are dead,” as she put it to The Guardian in 2014; or, as she proclaimed to the New Yorker in 2018, “I don’t think character exists anymore.” Her most recent novels, moreover, read like studies in just how far this conviction of “characterlessness” can be taken in fiction. Cusk protagonists hark back to Musil, and Beckett — “Women Without Qualities,” who drift from writing seminars in Athens to rickety guesthouses on the English coast without once expressing anything so gauche as a desire, or a commitment, of their own.
It is surprising, then, that Cusk’s new novel comes to us so thoroughly packaged up in a good, old-fashioned human-interest story. If, by some miracle, you have not heard any of the gossip that has attended the release of Life of M,here is the gist of it: at some point, while living in chic Parisian exile from the Anglophone literary world, Rachel Cusk decided to write a biography of an actress with whom she had become friends. This actress is the titular “M,” but might as well have been called “Matalie Portman” for all the good the initial does at protecting her identity. Within the first few pages, Cusk has made references to M’s childhood role in a faintly pedophilia-inflected action film that is quite clearly meant to be Léon: The Professional, and a psychically destabilizing ballet drama that is obviously Black Swan. Though Cusk’s narrator assures us M is “a good sport” about all of this, most coverage of Life of M’s publication has insinuated the contrary. According to one source, Portman is supposed to feel “violated” by Cusk’s betrayal, and is “writing it off as an unfortunate phase of her life.”
Now, how seriously should we take this? Greedy though I am for your prurient clicks, I suspect the only honest answer is “not very.” Publishers know that no one cares about literary fiction anymore unless it comes bundled up in a nice wad of discourse, and you don’t have to get very far in Life of M to suspect that reports of a betrayal have been much exaggerated. Here is a brief list of the salacious “revelations” Cusk offers about Portman’s life: she lives in Paris, feels the usual pressures of celebrity, is somewhat conflicted about the precocious sexualization wrought on her by Léon, was unsettled by the physical demands of Black Swan, experiences a certain tension between the demands of work and motherhood, senses a certain phenomenological weirdness in the profession of acting, and has recently gone through a divorce, about which she feels pretty bad. None of it is exactly TMZ-worthy. If there is something slightly controversial in Life of M, it is the noticeable coldness and flatness of M herself, the occasional sense we have that the whole novel is being focalized through the eyes of some kind of robot. In other words, if Cusk has committed a sin against Portman, it is the sin of writing Portman as a Rachel Cusk character.
If we can wade past all the discourse, though, we do start to notice some interesting things about the choice of Portman as a vehicle. First, there is the interesting conceit of having a Cusk character who is an actor. In a sense, the actor is a walking endorsement of the kind of theories of character that Cusk has been espousing since 2014: someone for whom characterlessness is a professional prerequisite — who is capable of letting go of the fixed attributes that supposedly determine her every course of action, emptying herself out. The few definitive pronouncements Cusk does make about the arrangement of M’s psyche emphasize this essential openness, the rare ability M seems to have to identify totally with the objects of her attention:
[G]enerally speaking, M was not ruled by emotional states or states of mind. . . . Acting involved pretending to be other people, whose own emotional states — such as she understood them — could preoccupy her for a time.
To render this openness, Cusk has devised some ingenious techniques. Most of the scenes in Life of M begin with long, detailed descriptions of decor, like the action lines in a film script. Each one begins with the same, curious formula: “It is a hotel room in a foreign city . . . ”; “It is an office, square and high-ceilinged, with walls of panelled wood . . . ”; “It is the interior of a limousine . . . ”; “It is a brasserie on a grey boulevard. . . .” Over time, the “it is” constructions start to call attention to their own indexicality. What is, we begin to wonder? Is “it” really just a synonym for “the setting”? Or might it mean something more metaphysically radical — something like “that which exists,” thereby implying that for M, the professional shapeshifter, her immediate consciousness is all that exists, with all the other trappings of normal human life falling away? I suspect Cusk is well aware that M shares her initial with Beckett’s famous “M” characters — Molloy and Malone and Mahood — who are tortured by the metaphysical realization that they are being ceaselessly reinvented in each new moment. I suspect she might also be teasing a comparison with Proust’s great Parisian actresses, La Berma and her own namesake, Rachel, whose slipperiness is gradually built up, over seven volumes, into a grand theory of character as a kind of indeterminacy or undecidability that looks a lot like Cusk’s own. At times, M even gets close to making this point herself. In an acting class, she is asked to share a secret, a task which her less famous classmates have no trouble performing; when the teacher reaches her, however, she becomes nervous. “My secret,” she says, “is that I have no secret.”
The other interesting technique Cusk employs is the inclusion of the occasional long chapter written in the first-person plural, punctuating the main narrative like a kind of chorus. Cusk has used choric interludes in most of her recent books, particularly memorably in her blockbuster Outline trilogy, as a way of defamiliarizing the world, laying bare its overlooked, sociologically important processes. At the beginning of Life of M, such passages appear to have this function, too — drawing attention, for instance, to the garbage lorries that rumble along, leaving behind them “the empty bins . . . all askew, like the discarded shells of things whose meat has been taken.” As the novel progresses, though, Cusk gets bolder. Concrete imagery falls away, and the “we” voice is used to offer up some of the most explicit theorizing about the limits of “self” and “character” to be found anywhere in her oeuvre:
We work; while we are working we forget about our children, our friends, our histories, our obligations. Thoughts of those things would destroy our concentration. We wonder whether everyone experiences this, the dissolution of all ties in the face of work. It feels like something that could easily bring about catastrophe. At other times it feels like freedom. Most work involves concentration of some kind. Who are we when we concentrate? . . . Concentration is like a white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time.
It was at this point in Life of M that I began to experience my first, faint misgiving. Yes, Cusk was making the case againstcharacter and personality as skillfully as anyone writing today; she had established herself, beyond doubt, as the 21st century’s heir to Zen Buddhism and David Hume and the Zhuangzi and Sartre. But was there not also something slightly antique about the whole project of a philosophical manifesto for ego-death? It was one thing for Parisians to undertake long performances of existential openness in the mid-20th century — but these days, if anything, people suffered from a hypertrophied sense of self, a neurotic preoccupation with questions such as What kind of person am I? and Does this behavior suit a person of my demographic status? and Does this social media post fit my personal brand? Were these questions ever grappled with in Life of M? What, if anything, could the curious case of Natalie Portman teach us about that?
One possible answer is to be found in the middle third of the novel, during another one of Cusk’s choric interludes, when the unnamed “we” voice is narrating various forms of expensive self-care and pampering that “we” undertake. “We go and see a woman,” the voice says, “a kind of psychic”:
Everything she says is said from a perspective other than our own. She speaks about the hidden sadness of our mother, which we never detected. She speaks about the cruelty of our father, whom we trusted. She speaks about the man who claimed to love us but now hates us so passionately he wishes for our death. In a strange, high voice she speaks as our child self, crying out for protection and love. Then she speaks in the voice of another child, our own child.
Hidden maternal sadness, domineering paternal figures, giving voice to childhood selves — this is therapy-speak, and the “psychic” in question is, quite clearly, some kind of mental health professional. But via its filtration through M’s consciousness, this therapy speak has been drastically altered. An actual psychologist would use the language of causation: you feel this because of your mother’s sadness, your father’s cruelty makes you do this. Cusk’s grammar, by contrast, permits of no causation whatsoever: the therapist speaks of one thing, and then she speaks of another; different phenomena simply pass serenely by, just like in the causeless world of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. As a result, we suddenly intuit the emptiness of all the fashionable psychologistic talk with which we are bombarded, that is spat out by HR departments and university administrators and advertisements for affordable CBT, that leads an undistinguished half-life in celebrity gossip mags and A24 movies and TikTok self-diagnosis channels and whatever other shallow attempts human beings have devised to try and make their inner lives make sense. We feel ashamed of the society that might produce it. We long to levitate into that bright, white field.
There is, of course, a catch. How different is the kind of interpretation the psychotherapist offers from what the reader is doing? There is something about the form of the novel that induces us, automatically, to look for psychological throughlines and causal linkages, to form judgments about “character” and “personality” in the way Cusk, and her narrators, profess to deplore. This is the irony at the heart of Cusk’s books: they only work if we resist her poetics, and try to detect, behind the professions of emotionlessness, some deep melancholy or trauma. It is this procedure, I think, that has given all of Cusk’s books since Aftermath their sense of massive, looming woundedness. In literary terms, it is usually impossible to say whether this woundedness belongs to the characters, or the narrator, or Cusk herself. Privately, I find it hard not to suspect it might have something to do with the fact that the years from 2001 to around 2014 were very difficult for Rachel Cusk indeed. Or maybe that’s just me, falling back into the same old psychologizing trap.
In a scene around the middle of Life of M, M is sitting in a brasserie with an unnamed man. “The conversation is of a painful nature,” the narrator informs us; we pruriently await an explanation. Surely this is Portman’s ex-husband, we think — embellished, no doubt, with some unflattering details from Cusk’s own failed marriage. But the explanation never comes. Instead, we get pure, physical feeling: “a sensation of ground glass running in [M’s] veins instead of blood.” It’s possible, of course, that M is simply not thinking anything at all at this point; that she is so overcome with emotion that she forgets her relation to the man altogether. But to my ear, the sudden swerve away from detail reads as discretion — as though someone, whether the narrator, or perhaps Cusk herself, wanted to give her friend a bit of privacy. We read the next few paragraphs desperate to figure out what is going on, who the man is, and the specific reason he provokes such horror. Then, all of a sudden, a new gaze falls on the scene, and for the first time the voyeuristic reader is given a real, human face:
Suddenly M becomes aware of someone standing at their table. The person, too, has lifted his eyes. It is a girl with a wide acne-scarred face and thick glasses. She is holding up her phone. Can I get a picture with you? she says.
Another person, presumably the girl’s friend, is hovering a few feet away watching. M, who is always unfailingly polite and obliging in these situations, unaccountably feels a flash of pure rage. The girl and her friend must have seen her from the street through the brasserie window and come inside. The girl is nonchalant, almost indifferent, as though M were a tourist monument or zoo animal to be mechanically photographed in passing. The person is watching, his eyes round with malevolent satisfaction.
I’m sorry, M says, I’m trying to have a private conversation.
The girl stares at her blankly.
It’s just a photograph, she says.
I’m sorry, M says, but no.
The girl stands there a while and then slowly steps back from the table.
What a bitch, she says to her friend and they walk away.
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a writer and academic from London. He writes for a number of publications, including The Times, The New Statesman, and UnHerd, and his first novel, Shibboleth, was released last year. He is also a doctoral student in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, researching Jorge Luis Borges.