Cusk is one of the cleverest and foremost practitioners of autofiction, turning to the form after her memoirs of motherhood and divorce produced their own media discomforts. With the jet-setting heroine Faye of her landmark trilogy Outline, she might even be practicing aerofiction ... Life of M continues in that mode: rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious, a place where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. The air up there where Cusk seems to be living and writing these days is gaspingly thin. She’s missed down here on Earth.
A lost little book— undisciplined, unfocused and instantly forgettable ... The true faults with the book turn out to be less ethical than technical ... Stripped of the scandal, the book has little life of its own. It will fade.
An unwieldy book with three disparate threads, each focussed on a different character ... Despite her reputation for rigor, Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random ... At times, Life of M threatens to become a book composed entirely of vacuities ... In Life of M, there is even less of a filter between the characters’ perspectives and that of the book ... There is something at once magisterial and leadenly self-regarding about the melancholic rhythms of Cusk’s prose, with its stiff and stately syntax and its utter impatience with the real vagaries of difference.
Resolutely internal and hermetic, told from the point of view of a highly observant and self-conscious narrator ... According to internet gossip, Cusk’s M is in fact a shadow portrait of Natalie Portman ... But to think of this novel solely as a journey to the center of Portman’s mind is not only irrelevant; it cheapens Cusk’s project. What the novelist is getting at here resonates far beyond a single celebrity. This is a short, potent book that has much to say about the spiritual rot of our present culture
Cusk lavishes so much attention on the luxe settings of M's various activities that the novel takes on the glaring yet dull gloss of décor porn ... While I continue to find this project intellectually intriguing, I think we'd hear her better if she turned up the volume and temperature.
The narrator moves through obsessions familiar to readers of Cusk’s previous novels: frustration over the inauthenticity of contemporary life, the instability of identity, and a sort of neurasthenic aestheticism that makes simple activities like going to a museum distressing if the other visitors respond to the art in a too-boisterous manner ... A narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.
A new level of Cuskian austerity ... The effect is quintessential Cusk: that of some bewitching but freezing toxin snaking through one’s veins ... In theory, that sealed-off, floating state allows Life of M to meditate purely, often brilliantly, upon consciousness itself ... I will never not want to discover what Cusk is doing.
Neglects fictional elements such as story, character and setting in favor of tendentious conceptual musings about power and freedom and the like. Ms. Cusk’s signal strength is her spotless, epigrammatic prose ... I wondered whether Ms. Cusk would prefer to write a book like that—a collection of aphorisms, perhaps, in which nothing would stand between the reader and the author’s mandarin profundities.
Takes autofiction’s familiar dance of authorial ambiguity and shakes it into something odd and unsettling ... A strange book, written with cold formality. But in its final pages, it performs an astonishing rug pull that makes you wonder whether the book actually has been an autobiography all along, interested in exposing not M but the knotty and unpalatable process of Cusk’s art ... To be a writer in this way is to be parasitic—to latch onto someone real and to try to draw out their life force to make art. It isn’t exactly defensible, but for Cusk to expose that practice is deeply fascinating, particularly in a book that some were always going to see as ethically fraught ... I can’t decide whether Cusk’s willingness to delineate and accept this paradox in Life of M is admirably resolute or absolutely merciless. Or both.
Plays heavily on the reader’s expectations, refracting the ideas that devoted fans bring to her work. ... Life of M gathers all of Cusk’s signature themes, especially her frustration with character ... Sparse and mythic ... Offers some of Cusk’s most beautiful passages in years on the fleetingness of our collective lives.
Plotless ... Light on dialogue ... The writing is about ten times more embellished than a People magazine article’s, full of dramatic statements about public life ... Intentional or not, Life of M works best as a spectacle of Cusk’s rudeness ... Would the book be as compelling without all this external drama, and does that matter?
A short and electrifying novel ... A deeply enjoyable addition to Cusk’s canon concerning brilliant and divided women who are not-quite-willing participants in the worlds they have had a hand in creating ... Cusk is most successful at imagining the thoughts and private experiences of M as they occur within the layered structures she maintains to keep the world at bay.
Cusk’s fiction is increasingly experimental ... Alternates between scenes from M’s life – at a spa; the school gates; being interviewed about the repercussions of simulating sex – and episodes narrated by an amorphous 'we' ... It’s this kind of pressurised reflection on selfhood that supplies the novel’s chief motor ... An experiment in projecting Cusk’s tortured authorial persona on to a woman seen everywhere 'wreathed in pink spring flowers' looking 'very young and very happy'. Mesmeric, not to say vampiric.
We hear a lot these days about autofiction, a kind of creative writing close to reality: perhaps only the names are changed. But writers have been doing this for a very long time ... Anyone who knows anything about Cusk’s work can’t expect to get an easy ride. Her writing is acclaimed because of its relentless drilling down below the surfaces of personality and character, exposing people’s buried desires and sometimes a longing, as in M’s case, to discover who they really are – or even if they exist at all. Friends of Cusk: you have been warned.
After an enthusiastic dive into the familiar spartan beauty of Cusk’s sentences I found myself reacting with a mix of frustration, incredulity, boredom and confusion ... The reminder that Cusk’s writing can be electrifying bursts in occasionally ... Is the novel brilliant or boring? Perhaps it’s all in the twist of the wrist, and how you hold it up to the light.
Cusk’s sentences remain exhilaratingly clear and precise, every word chosen and placed with lapidary decision ... As the novel progresses and loses its way, even the 'I' of the narrator disappears, to be replaced by an undefined 'we', serving only to multiply the preposterous solipsism ... Reality is not up to Rachel Cusk’s mark.
Life of M is preoccupied with the possibility of writing about someone who is not the person doing the writing, which seems to be an activity about which Cusk is skeptical, on metaphysical grounds just as much as moral-political ones. ... A novel that explores, on the page, both the situation of the artist in the world and the problems inherent in being one ... The novel is comfortable, cultivating epistemological self-doubt from the very beginning, and brings all its attention to bear on those deep questions of art and representation ... Ultimately seems to claim for itself an assertion that there is no truth possible in art ... Thereby, Cusk has now attained the status of some sort of devious Plato, one who similarly sees art as dangerous representation, yet wishes not to repress it but to unleash it, to give unto reality a world of her own form.
Not likely to suffer from speculation that it offers an insider’s view on Portman ... It might lead to boosted sales ... As literary assassinations go, Cusk’s of M is sly and subtle, but it is lethal nonetheless ... But as is typical of Cusk, Life of M isn’t a straightforward hit job: M’s prettiness and charm are often stressed.
The clever paradox of this novel is that it is actually a commentary on Cusk’s métier ... The fictional biographer is winging it, and admits as much when M takes issue with her unflattering portrayal in these pages. This device affords Cusk some moral and creative leeway, but it feels contrived and pat ... Therein lies the rub. Suffering is indeed a currency in our trauma-obsessed cultural landscape. Friends, lovers, parents, children: all can be traded in for cash, kudos or just attention, provided you can live with the emotional consequences.
For a writer who claims to have dispensed with plot, character and cheap dramatic devices, Rachel Cusk has given us one hell of a soap opera ... The ultimate high-concept collaboration, a kind of Dior-styled Alien vs Predator with a side order of Parisian angst. Either that or a desperate gimmick ... The opening chapters are among the novel’s strongest ... However, the air begins to leak out. We are given a lot of granular detail about surfaces — clothes, interiors, architecture, optimised bodies — but almost nothing about the messy business of loving, parenting, quarrelling or desiring ... This points to what increasingly feels like the central limitation of Cusk’s project. She has spent the past decade stripping away what she regarded as the contrivances of the realist novel — plot, character, explanatory psychology — only to replace them with contrivances of her own: unnamed narrators, shifting pronouns, coy withholding and characters who refuse to disclose information they already possess. These devices once created exhilarating ambiguity. Here they feel like mannerisms masquerading as profundity.
Inventive albeit not entirely satisfying ... Life of M is possessed of some genuine stylistic oddness, beyond the now familiar Cuskisms of the sans-serif font and absence of quotation marks for speech ... It may be to flatter the worldly reader’s ego. It’s also frankly irritating ... In the attempt to represent a kind of pure interiority in starkly lucid prose, Cusk ends up demonstrating, by omission, the sociality of the self. In the end, Cusk in Life of M reveals more about herself than she perhaps meant to, which, it turns out, is also what she meant to do.
Testament to Cusk’s writerly wit, so sharp it readily punctures the screen of social appearances ... While not as experimental as Parade, Life of M is still delightfully unusual by anyone’s standards, except perhaps Cusk’s own ... Writing, after all, is performance, and this novel, like most of Cusk’s books, is ultimately about writing: a way of both revealing and concealing.
At Cusk’s startling best, and there is a good deal of that here, her ideas land like punches or uncomfortable secrets muttered in our ears ... Life of M is powered by a formidable intelligence and shaped with exceptional technical skill, at its best it leaves one reeling, but the impression it leaves is one of detachment, even disdain ... A book to admire enormously, but not one to love.
Life of M follows Cusk’s post-Outline output as an extension and escalation of these dually committed inquiries into novelistic form and the relationship between creator and creation. However, Life of M shifts the central medium to acting and performance—a narrative shift that activates a thematic shift ... By casting an actor into the protagonist role, Cusk forces a confrontation with the impossibility of separating creator and creation.
Cusk’s prose is polished, poised, exquisite, and covertly enigmatic until the final, stunning scene throws everything into question, leaving us abruptly aware of our myriad unsubstantiated assumptions. Whip-smart, mesmerizing, and provocative.
Proceeds by analogy. A screenplay, a photograph, an abstract painting, a museum, an olive grove, a psychic’s impossible perspective, even cinema itself, each returns to the same question: what becomes of reality once it has been catalysed by representation? Cusk’s answer is unsettling and original ... Life of M repeatedly entertains the possibility that our relation to reality has never taken any form that is not already once removed. The novel refuses either consolation or despair, gradually revealing performance to be as inescapable within domestic life as within celebrity. This gives Life of M its extraordinary gravity.
There’s no question about Cusk’s brilliant way with words, but this novel lacks the connection to a wide range of human experience that distinguishes her best work. Accomplished but airless.
