Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M – a fictional portrait of a film star – could be seen as a professionalisation of the approach Cusk developed in her celebrated Outline trilogy (2014-18). In those novels, a self-effacing Cusk-like narrator impassively relays the personal histories volunteered by strangers and acquaintances. Thanks to her posture of “absolute passivity”, these reported soliloquies seem naturalistic, which they are not: people don’t generally unfold their life stories with mesmeric eloquence – nor thread them with the loosely thematic, abstract distillations typical of Cuskian paraphrase (“By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom”). Not all of this lands but the gnomic compression is enjoyably stretching. The most implausible monologues occur in the final volume, Kudos, during which the narrator gives interviews in which she hardly speaks. The far-fetched reversal makes you realise that the narrator resembles an interviewer herself, whose seeming passivity is the source of her power – the power to make “recordings”, as Cusk puts it in Life of M.
The seemingly haphazard portraiture that composed the Outline books became more systematic in Cusk’s previous novel, Parade (2024), a linked series of fictionalised biographies of real artists, interwoven with scenes from the narrator’s life. The artists are all designated by the initial “G”, as though case studies of the artist-function. Life of M similarly cuts between scenes from M’s life and scenes from the narrator’s – though “scene” puts it too dynamically. The book opens with the narrator proposing to write M’s “autobiography” but what follows is a disconnected series of tableaux.
In this, Life of M is reminiscent of – can seem virtually modelled on – what Janet Malcolm described as her “personality journalism”, notably, her 1994 profile of the painter David Salle, “one of the brightest art stars of the Eighties”. This piece consisted of 41 reiterative fragments (“false starts”), its form cleverly expressing the slipperiness of its postmodern subject. Its ostensible failure – Salle had frustrated Malcolm’s attempt to write a straight profile of him – secures its self-reflexive piquancy, as the journalist-subject relationship itself becomes the drama.
Life of M borrows this move. At the beginning, M asks the narrator whether they will “make it up”; at the end, the narrator claims they did, after M reads some of the “project” and is unhappy about how she has been portrayed. Malcolm’s journalism was distinguished by charged descriptions of the settings in which she encountered her subjects, and Cusk deploys the same technique. The passages about M begin with set-pieces delineating the rarefied mise en scène – luxury hotel, exclusive spa, fancy meeting room, limousine (“The air inside it is scentless and still and almost without temperature.”). In M’s world, authenticity is an expensively manufactured illusion – objects give the “appearance of being handmade” or “an impression… of age” – or merely an ironic allusion: “The floor is made of a solid engineered material whose surface has been designed to evoke the grain of wooden boards. This evocation is clearly distanced from an attempt at actual imitation. It is more like a reference to, or a faint memory of, wood.” Compare Malcolm’s description of Salle’s loft: “Everything in it is sleek, cold, expensive, unused. A slight sense of quotation marks hovers in the air…”
Salle both seduces and eludes Malcolm because he is too good a subject – “a very practised sitter”: he “does it for the sport”. So, too, M: “She’s a good sport”, the narrator remarks in the opening sentences of Life of M; M is an actor through and through. It’s as though she lives in a film. Her fame makes reality “malleable” but it also eviscerates her personal life: “Her cultivation of normality is an attempt to retrieve a lost inner world, or something that looks like one.” The narrator indulges in several such Malcolmesque barbs: “Part of M’s freedom was her freedom to choose how to be. Of all the things she could have chosen she had selected goodness”; “she is skilled at giving the appearance of paying attention”.
M is identifiable (she is a “model for a major brand” and starred in “a film about a young girl chosen for the starring role in a ballet”). So is the “beautiful” city where the narrator and M live – “a masterpiece of civilisation” with an “ugly tower” that “can be seen from everywhere”. Anonymising touches have become an increasingly prominent feature of Cusk’s work: we are told that Outline takes place in Athens but by Kudos we are left guessing about which hot, steep, coastal European city we are in. This obtrusive reticence can seem a cheap trick, a shallow source of mystery and, more cynically, publicity – Life of M has generated plenty of presumably lucrative gossip. Yet anonymity is also part of Cusk’s drive to abstraction. Claiming to eschew traditional building blocks of fiction such as character and narrative – “that great delusion that wrapped itself around existence and concealed its meaning” – Cusk sands down particulars because she is concerned with what she describes in Transit (2016) as seeking “the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth”.
Cusk’s recent work is not only interested in reality’s “forms”; it is also shaped by an increasingly stringent preoccupation with literary form. Janet Malcolm’s writing is hardly revered for its warmth, but it can seem positively chatty and confiding next to Cusk’s. The controlled prose of the Outline books has a gripping neutrality. Cusk’s subsequent novel, Second Place (2021) – also a study of an artist – is far weaker because she swapped the even-keeled, shapeshifting voice of a listener for the monotonous melodrama of a talker (“And I put my face in my hands and wept!”).
The narrator of Life of M wouldn’t be caught dead exclaiming. The novel shifts between two unusual, rigidly maintained grammatical modes. The first is the stilted third person used to describe M’s world: “It is a hotel room in a foreign city. The hotel is a luxury hotel…” Utterly lacking the fluency of speech, each sentence is as scentless and sealed as the interior of M’s limousine. These odd sentences recur throughout the book but never come to feel natural. Meanwhile, passages about the narrator’s life are written in the plural first person: “When we made our recordings a spirit possessed us, a set of instincts that were as precise and exacting as scientific laws.” Rules and laws are a leitmotif of the novel, and these are the two governing its contrapuntal form: ultra-concrete inventories and fluid, collective abstraction.
Life of M is, in other words, like its protagonist, extremely mannered. Yet our sense of being presented with a grammatical exercise does not stop that exercise from working its effects. Using “we” may be a gimmick yet almost despite yourself, you are swept along by the chorus, the awareness of artifice giving way to a kind of mesmerisation. The pronoun’s reference is uncertain, perhaps shifting. At first it seems to refer to the narrator and their partner – who we are told is in hospital at the beginning – or to the narrator alone (a “royal ‘we’”). But at times the pronoun can seem more diffusely universal, a “we” with whom we, the reader, are being invited or coerced to identify. “We” as distinct from “they”, whether celebrities like M or the people who “lived in tents beneath the stone bridges”, both existing in parallel worlds, the former enclosed and fantasised about, the other in the open and ignored. These rhythmic, generic passages totter between meaningless banality and lyrical profundity, a balancing act one associates with Gertrude Stein: “We are in the midst of our lives and we talk about what we see there, what we feel, the events that have occurred and what they might mean… The evening contains information and we gather it. We go out, we see things, we meet people.”
What unites the book’s contrasting modes is that neither is an individual voice. The descriptions of M’s universe sound wooden – “It is a meeting room” – because they lack a vantage of perception. Most scenes in the novel record encounters – M meeting a friend at a café, or being interviewed by another journalist – where it is not clear how the narrator would have observed M, except via espionage or some undisclosed third-wheeling arrangement. Reading a much talked about memoir early on, the narrator admires the “unusual tone of the writer’s voice”: “neither personal nor impersonal, it possessed a deep and unmistakable authority, the authority of an object. It was as if some household item – a chair, for instance – had suddenly gained the power to speak.” The tableaux in Life of M aspire to this sort of authority, as though the description emanates from the furniture being described. The use of “we” is similarly untethered from individual subjectivity. (In her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm describes the journalistic first-person narrator as “like the chorus of Greek tragedy… an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.”)
Ugliness is a refrain in Life of M, which may be an “almost deliberately ugly” book, to borrow one of its phrases – all ersatz surfaces, conjured in prose that can seem inert and mechanical, like M’s hotel room, in which everything “is operated by codes and sensors” and where there is “no breeze or animate creature”. Cusk once said that writing for her is “pure technique” – “a performance”. The narrator of Life of M describes their work in similar terms: it “involves doing something in the right way at the right time. It involves coordination. Where we know ourselves to be lucky is in the degree of individuality we are allowed – or expected – to bring to this performance.” When M complains that “You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity”, the narrator protests that they invented the character so “if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of”. “Allowed – or expected”: Cusk’s renown is not of the same order as M’s, but literary success, while it confers freedom, also comes with scrutiny, which can be invasive, breeding self-scrutiny.
Whatever one thinks of the substance of Life of M – some reviews portray it as a bitchy stunt – at the level of form, it is a highly individual performance, achieved through a renunciation of individual style, which, for all its unnatural rigour, may be in its own way authentic. For “doing something in the right way at the right time” is ambiguous: suggestive of obedience not only to laws but to instincts. And however stylised, Cusk’s writing can also be pure: “The day is warm and blue.” The narrator’s work does not only involve “performance”, but “concentration”: the “white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time”. In a bakery, the narrator gazes “at a sliver of cake composed of countless paper-thin leaves of pastry” – “so beautiful and precise”. Who made this, they wonder, then spot the baker, “shaping long glossy fingers of dough and laying them in precise rows”. “It is as though he is acting,” the narrator reflects, “yet he is only concentrating, being intensely himself.”
Life of M
Rachel Cusk
Faber, 192pp, £18.99
[Further reading: Novelists don’t like art any more]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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