The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away. Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths—about the very experience of living—might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?
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 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 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.
