Rachel Cusk’s 3-Thread 'Life of M' Pushes Anti-Novel Experiment Further

3 articles · Updated · The New Yorker · Aug 20

“Life of M” splits into 3 strands—I, M and We—using unnamed or initialed figures to strip away character, plot and stable identity almost to the point of nonfictional abstraction.
That design extends Rachel Cusk’s long campaign against conventional narrative, a project sharpened after the hostile reception to her 2012 memoir “Aftermath” and developed through the 2014-2018 “Outline” trilogy.
M, an actress widely read as echoing Natalie Portman, becomes less a person than a device for arguing that public and private selves are all performances, while the novel’s most vivid detail goes to luxury settings rather than inner life.
The review argues the experiment fails to cohere: the three sections never fully integrate, the prose drifts into generalized art-theory language, and the book becomes Cusk’s weakest novel yet.
More broadly, the critic sees Cusk’s pursuit of freedom from gender, character and social convention as producing a work that questions whether a novel can survive once personhood is dissolved.