The controversy over Rachel Cusk’s Life of M misses the point

Rachel Cusk is prone to controversy.

Her clinical gaze and razor-sharp brilliance, across a range of novels and memoirs, have long divided critical opinion, earning her a formidable reputation for both literary genius and personal cruelty.

Her latest book, Life of M , is no exception.

Review: Life of M – Rachel Cusk (Faber) The novel is premised on a writer’s casual offer to compose the autobiography of M, an actor, who, being a “good sport”, agrees.

The pair live on opposite sides of the same city and share a couple of mutual friends.

But while the writer suffers from low self worth, they (a gender-neutral presence) see the rich and famous M’s “distance from the random violence of insignificance” as equally problematic.

Identities are collapsed from the outset by the writer’s proposal to work on M’s “autobiography”, rather than her biography, and not as a ghost writer.

Initially, this doesn’t appear to make sense, but given the way the novel plays with the indeterminacy of the self, it’s a very deliberate statement.

As you might expect of Cusk, what follows is an interrogation of ideas about selfhood and character, rather than a traditional story, as she considers authenticity and pretence through the lens of M, the consummate performer.

The tangle of autofiction is further reinforced by a series of passages, written in an unexplained collective first person, which appear to represent the narrator and M in a kind of imagined conjoinment.

“Using an actor” enables the narrator to “relinquish my experience”.

Echoing this, Cusk has said that writing the novel allowed her “to almost pause being myself”.

A storm of rumours Despite Cusk’s incisive consideration of personal boundaries, projection and storytelling, and her attempt at consciously disorienting the reader with a self-destructive ending, her book has fallen prey to the very themes it critiques.

Over a month before Life of M was published, speculation about its subject matter began to brew , with reports that the title character – an actor cocooned by beauty, wealth and fame – was based on the American film star, Natalie Portman .