Description:
From the critically acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty, and truth--and a blazing renovation of the form.
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? In this astonishing novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for these truths without ever swerving away into self-deception. Her pursuit leads us across olive groves and beaches, behind the smoked windows of limousines, and through beautiful cities considered the great masterpieces of civilization. And at every turn, Cusk contemplates the cost of this beauty--and what we might lose when we are hypnotized by it. Life of M is a thrilling investigation of who we are, and who we pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are mesmerized more than ever by the images we see everywhere. It cuts through a world of noise and spectacle to bring us an eerie music of immense power and beauty.Brief description: Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. She lives in Paris.
Review Quotes:
"Cusk's power lies in the authority of her sharp, spare prose, the glittering exactness of her sentences. She writes with crisp acuity about the frictionless (and therefore strangely lifeless) existence of the celebrity, the corrosive effect of fame on family relationships, the blend of fervent purity and crushing cynicism that delimits a person forged in the forcefields of power and pretence. 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: it is a shock to realise that they are our secrets too . . . Life of M is powered by a formidable intelligence and shaped with exceptional technical skill . . . It is a book to admire enormously."
--Clare Clark, The Guardian
--Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times "Life of M, Cusk's newest book, takes autofiction's familiar dance of authorial ambiguity and shakes it into something odd and unsettling . . . 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 . . . Deeply fascinating."
--Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic "With the release of her novel, Life of M, comes a new level of Cuskian austerity . . . "Life of M" [meditates] purely, often brilliantly, upon consciousness itself . . . I will never not want to discover what Cusk is doing."
--Joan Frank, The Boston Globe "A terse, singular meditation on time, fame, innocence and self-creation."
--The New York Times "Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman a clef about a celebrity."
--Laura Miller, Slate "A dark examination of authenticity, reality, and fame."
--Vulture "Life of M gathers all of Cusk's signature themes, especially her frustration with character. Like Parade, the novel is sparse and mythic, composed of a series of hazily drawn impressions cut by acute portraits of urban malaise . . . Life of M also offers some of Cusk's most beautiful passages in years on the fleetingness of our collective lives." --Grace Byron, Dissent "This novel is Cusk pushing the boundaries of fiction even further than she did in the Outline trilogy. It is clever, sharply insightful."
--Leyla Sanai, The Spectator "A sly twist on autobiography designed to cunningly interrogate the rub between who you are to yourself and who you are in the world, between art and artifice, and how to balance it all with authenticity and integrity."
--Heller McAlpin, NPR "A smart, thoughtful, and powerful look at the invisible forces that shape the way we live and the people who have our permission to use them."
--Emily Burack, Town & Country "The author of the Outline Trilogy reprises her cool, cerebral technique in a novel about a film actor . . . Rachel Cusk balances the trappings of M's life--luxurious hotel rooms, Italian coffee machines, desserts swimming 'in pools of sweet sauce'--with philosophical musing on what it all means."
--Hamilton Cain, Time "Cusk's sentences remain exhilaratingly clear and precise, every word chosen and placed with lapidary decision."
--David Sexton, The Standard "This is Cusk at her most explosive."
--Hannah Nathanson, Elle (UK) "But to suggest that Cusk's autofiction is simply a marriage of fiction and autobiography isn't quite right either -- instead, what readers and critics enjoy about her novels is how they deliberately dissolve a distinction between the two . . . the novel explores how we all "act" every day, how the boundaries of reality and creativity are ultimately false, and how, particularly in the age of parasociality, we can even claim to know who another person is at all . . . When it comes to these kinds of existential insights, Cusk is terribly clever; she brilliantly turns the mundane stuff of life into pearls of wisdom."
--The Toronto Star "Unsettling and original . . . Representation is always a falsification of reality, yet 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."
--The Skinny "Fans of Cusk's cool water prose will not be disappointed by her latest novel . . . There is something hypnotic here, as we are invited to peer into one space after another, and something profound too."
--Literary Hub