Rachel Cusk is prone to controversy. Her clinical gaze and razor-sharp brilliance, across a range of novels and memoirs, have long divided critical opinion, earning her a formidable reputation for both literary genius and personal cruelty. Her latest book, Life of M, is no exception.Review: Life of M – Rachel Cusk (Faber)The novel is premised on a writer’s casual offer to compose the autobiography of M, an actor, who, being a “good sport”, agrees. The pair live on opposite sides of the same city and share a couple of mutual friends. But while the writer suffers from low self worth, they (a gender-neutral presence) see the rich and famous M’s “distance from the random violence of insignificance” as equally problematic. Identities are collapsed from the outset by the writer’s proposal to work on M’s “autobiography”, rather than her biography, and not as a ghost writer. Initially, this doesn’t appear to make sense, but given the way the novel plays with the indeterminacy of the self, it’s a very deliberate statement.As you might expect of Cusk, what follows is an interrogation of ideas about selfhood and character, rather than a traditional story, as she considers authenticity and pretence through the lens of M, the consummate performer. The tangle of autofiction is further reinforced by a series of passages, written in an unexplained collective first person, which appear to represent the narrator and M in a kind of imagined conjoinment. “Using an actor” enables the narrator to “relinquish my experience”. Echoing this, Cusk has said that writing the novel allowed her “to almost pause being myself”.A storm of rumoursDespite Cusk’s incisive consideration of personal boundaries, projection and storytelling, and her attempt at consciously disorienting the reader with a self-destructive ending, her book has fallen prey to the very themes it critiques. Over a month before Life of M was published, speculation about its subject matter began to brew, with reports that the title character – an actor cocooned by beauty, wealth and fame – was based on the American film star, Natalie Portman. Details of M’s professional life include a questionably sexualised role as a child star, playing a tortured ballerina, modelling for a perfume brand, and living in the same city as her fictional biographer, who may or may not be a friend. All of this points to Portman who, like Cusk, has a home in Paris. The storm of rumours has made it almost impossible for Cusk’s novel to be assessed on its own merits. Dubbed “biogossip”, the book has been swallowed up in debates about the ethics of autofiction, the nature of Cusk and Portman’s relationship, and whether the author has ruthlessly exploited a star who has long admired her writing. Add to this the suggestion that Cusk, a highly intelligent woman well versed in the tactics of the media, has deliberately engineered the press furore in a cynical promotional move, and the story about the story achieves a total eclipse. The novel – assuming that’s what it is – has all but disappeared into the mire of literary scandal and the hot mess of a real-life character assassination. And yet, beneath the viral critical reception, there remains a narrative that, after throwing questions of identity into a hall of mirrors, ends by toying with the very issue of identification. In this way, Life of M seems far ahead of the reaction it has sparked. Had Cusk blurred the parallels with Portman more carefully, the central trick of the novel would have been lost. Like much of Cusk’s work, Life of M is a satisfyingly smart book that dispenses with story-arcs and plotlines, prefers questions to answers, and bleeds fact into fiction. Provocative, elegant and bold, it requires much more of the reader than a simple guessing game of who’s who. The anonymised authorBorn in Canada in 1967, Cusk grew up in Los Angeles and England. She won the Whitbread First Novel Award (now the Costa Award) for Saving Agnes in 1993. Since then, she has produced 12 more novels, three memoirs, an essay collection, and a reworking of Euripides’ Medea. Renowned for her multi-award winning Outline trilogy, widely celebrated as a masterpiece, Cusk has spent decades dealing in ideas of the self. To date, her memoirs have caused the most trouble. Her first was a brutally honest account of early motherhood that attracted outrage and acclaim in equal measure. The initial run of her second memoir, a family travelogue, had to be pulped when Cusk was threatened with a lawsuit by someone who had recognised himself in its pages. But it was her third personal outing, Aftermath, that proved too much for some critics. An emotionally exhaustive chronicle of Cusk’s divorce from her second husband, the photographer Adrian Clarke, the book drew such heated attacks from the press that she gave up writing for three years and suffered what she described at the time as a “creative death”. Eventually, she reappeared with Outline, the first volume in a trilogy of autofictional novels featuring the “annihilated perspective” of writer Faye, who witnesses herself through the stories of others across multiple scenarios. A stark contrast to the raw honesty of Aftermath, Outline centralises the self by way of apparent negation. Transit and Kudos completed the trilogy, continuing the theme of the anonymised author to brilliant effect. Life as performanceWith Life of M, Cusk turns her attention to the production of self, with the added complications of celebrity and success. The story alternates between passages narrated by an unspecified “we” and vignettes depicting M within a variety of carefully described settings, which are juxtaposed with her sparse internal landscape.Perpetually on display and continually under scrutiny, M struggles to define the boundary between her private and public selves. Validated by her image, she has fused with her persona. Everything she does involves performance, and she is unable to discern or access a sense of inner authenticity. She experiences herself as a representation, a reflection, a projection, always at a remove from the drudge and grind of reality. M drifts through her elaborate locations: her home office, a limousine, a rustic holiday house, her movie trailer, a spa and a corporate meeting room – all of which she inhabits as a star on a stage. Seamlessly accommodated, she is crystallised by her status and caught in a loop of endless self-contemplation. At her office, M pauses and reflects, pondering the ways in which she cultivates normality, although this is something she never feels or experiences. On holiday at a rustic farmhouse, her immersion in the romantic legacy of an artist’s colony is ruptured by the ugly coughing of the old housekeeper’s husband. Travelling through a city in the shelter of a limousine, she attends to her private matters by assuming the emotions she has learned to portray. In an immaculate meeting room, she discusses her contract with a perfectly rehearsed team, whose flawless performance serves only to emphasise the fact that their real lives are nothing like this. Physically separated by her affluence, M adopts a psychologically defensive focus on the present moment, which releases her from the judgement of the past and the uncertainty of the future. She has minimal contact with her family, preferring to experience herself in the now with her friends, though she keeps a similarly painful distance from them. In the company of a loving couple at a dinner party, she watches them tend to their child with “mingled sorrow and relief”. She doesn’t understand her ambiguous feelings of both wanting and being glad not to have this for herself.At a health centre with a younger female actor who, like her, has landed a modelling contract for perfume, M suddenly feels threatened, as though something is coming to an end. In a cafe with a friend who is depressed, she fails to empathise, having only encountered depression through her acting. “The notion that a person could be dominated by an internal idea is alien to her.” MasqueradesUnsurprisingly yet strangely, M feels more deeply connected to people with whom she has sporadic and specific contact, as if true intimacy can only occur at a distance, like a teenage fantasy. Having put an author she barely knows in charge of her life story, she lets down her guard with her massage therapist who “seems to know what to do with her better than anyone else”. She melts in the presence of a thoughtful interviewer, who regards her with “warm and loving” eyes, as if “no one has ever looked at her in this way”. But these are people who barely know her. They are participating in a masquerade, a literal “show” of affection. Such encounters rely on a belief in false claims and the exchange of calculated revelations.This brings us back to the question of Portman, whose personal life is not divulged in the novel. There is no mention of her current and ex-partners, children, relationships, and all manner of other intimate details. Conveniently, this fact seems to have been overlooked in the media frenzy.When the writer first proposes the autobiography, M asks: “Would you just make it up?” Does she want the writer to fabricate her life? Or is she trying to determine their intentions? Perhaps she is in on the joke, glad to support a false version of her story told by someone assuming her identity. Either way, she doesn’t offer an opinion, because the truth about the life of a famous actor can only ever be a hypothesis, which is, of course, the whole point.Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.