Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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.
