Rachel Cusk has made a career out of writing fiction that doesn’t play by the rules. Her latest novel, Life of M, due out at the end of August, sticks to that line with a slender, eerie sketch of a glamorous actor known solely as M, and the novelist who chooses to manufacture her story. It’s more like a fun house mirror in which identity, performance and witness continually exchange roles. It’s a pretty straightforward idea. A writer approaches film star M with a bizarre proposal: she intends to write M’s autobiography. M, a good sport, agrees. From there, the story begins to blur all lines between writer and subject.
The writer has no in-depth knowledge of M. She assembles M from the evidence of photographs, overheard voices, film roles, speculations and fabrications. M materializes in film studios, hotel rooms, holiday resorts, and black windows of taxis, but the figure he/ she turns out to be is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, a person who’s now so famous that reality itself begins to warp. What is quintessentially Cuskian about thebook is thenotion of a double, uncanny in its similarity. At the same time as the author creates a new star, she begins to embody aspects of it. Standing close to M induces a silent, painful crisis in the writer.
To be close to someone with a recognisable face makes the normal state of things seem suddenly brittle and meaningless. But at the same timethe writer’s life, with its domestic textures and foregrounded worries, pours into M’s portrait. They hover around each other until it becomes nearly indistinguishable whose investigation was whose. Cusk has long been preoccupied with the performance of various selves. In the Outline trilogy most A lot the disappeared narrator became an attentive, receptive entity through which the points of view of others moved and found expression. Now the experiment takes shape beyond the self and inward simultaneously. M has felt herself to be ever-present to the camera since childhood, and early forays onto the stage effectively foreclose any chance for a normal adolescence.
Now as an adult she moves through locations that flicker and shift to accommodate her presence, but she soon perceives this celebrity as a hollow freedom. The writer, in turn, finds that revealing another person’s true character not only doesn’t, but doubles the number of masks worn. The brevity of the novel lends it a concentrated intensity.
Cusk’s quiet, accurate prose is often slow to provide readerly indicators of emotion where other writers would leave signs; the reader must experience the discomfort rather than be told how to experience it. Fame seems to materialize less as glamour than as disappearance: the more M is known, the less sure anyone, including M, can be of what he or she (or she) is. the writer’s task of corraling a life, turns out to be more indicative of how all lives are slippery once they have been gripped and tucked in, into narrative.
