Rachel Cusk’s Protest Against Personhood
The protagonist of Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Life of M,” has a peculiar technique for falling asleep. She “visualizes a brick wall. It fills her field of vision; its perimeters are out of sight. With a narrow implement she begins chipping at the mortar around a first brick, usually the one directly in front of her. She works steadily and calmly. The mortar loosens and falls away piece by piece. When it has been removed she pushes the brick forward with her hand. It falls down the other side of the wall, and now in its place there’s a small rectangle of blank white light. With her implement she begins chipping at the brick beside or above it, and then at the one beside or above that. The white shape made of light gets bigger and bigger. When it is big enough, she crawls through it.”
It is as good an image as any for Cusk’s own trajectory. The reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged, she is renowned for her cool, glassy prose and her stark austerity of vision. Her reputation rests on three works that she published to great fanfare in the twenty-tens—“Outline” (2014), “Transit” (2016), and “Kudos” (2018). Their reticent narrator, Faye, resembles her creator insofar as she is a divorced British writer with two children, but we learn almost nothing else about her, and she rarely speaks on her own behalf. Instead, she operates like a recording device as she listens to a series of long-winded interlocutors at literary festivals and dinner parties.
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Cusk, by her own account, began to tire of traditional novels in 2012, when she endured a bout of what she described, in an interview with the Guardian, as “creative death” following the publication and hostile reception of her controversial memoir “Aftermath,” which details her acrimonious separation from her husband. For several years, she could neither read nor write fiction, which had come to seem “fake and embarrassing” to her. But a careful examination of Cusk’s work reveals that she had been preparing to jettison the rudiments of the form well before then. She had scarcely started writing novels when she began taking them apart, brick by brick, in search of the white vacancy glaring beyond them.
Cusk’s first three books, two of which were published before she was thirty, are outfitted with all the traditional amenities: scenes, characters, plots, and, for good measure, self-conscious allusions to Jane Austen and the Brontës. These early efforts are funny, cynical, and so overwritten that it is hard to believe they were produced by the same woman later hailed for her spare, sleek style. By Cusk’s fourth novel, however, she was staging an understated revolt against the form she had chosen and had evidently already started to disdain. “The Lucky Ones” (2003), “In the Fold” (2005), “Arlington Park” (2006), and “The Bradshaw Variations” (2009)—the products of her middle and best period—are more like interlinked character sketches than like plotted novels. Each presents a group portrait of a handful of disaffected British suburbanites—husbands who resent their deadening jobs, toddlers who whine and interrupt, and, above all, hassled wives subsumed by a crush of household obligations.
These bleak, formidable novels of domestic desolation are crisply written but slightly old-fashioned, not only because they contain characters and dialogue (devices that Cusk would later dispense with) but because they are about upper-middle-class families living in spacious homes, typically on a single income. (A Cusk novel is always set in a piece of aspirational real estate, often one inhabited by that increasingly obsolete creature, the affluent housewife.) Still, for all their quaintness, the books of her middle period are icily virtuosic. In the prim suburbs that are Cusk’s specialty, women are swallowed alive by parts they have no choice but to play. Motherhood, perhaps even more than marriage, serves to restrict and entrap them. In Cusk’s smartingly honest 2001 memoir, “A Life’s Work,” she likens having children to enduring a period of incarceration upward of seven times. “Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world,” she writes. It was a “cell,” a “trap,” in which she was an “inmate.”
As chronicles of social imprisonment, Cusk’s middle novels are impressive, but as stylistic feats they are more dazzling still. In them, her prose tightens into something gleaming and aerodynamic. Its imagery is merciless and meticulous: sun falls through windows in “great slanting slabs,” and a pair of pajamas sprawls across a bed like “the discarded skin of a snake.” The affect of these books—brisk, unsentimental, exacting—serves their diagnosis. They are clinical portrayals of a familiar feminine malady, the life too tidily compacted to be free.
And if there is one word that Cusk repeats throughout her corpus, it is “freedom.” Freedom is something that her characters—particularly her female characters—long for and lack. What do these wives and mothers, with their ample back yards and their afternoon coffee groups, hope to be free of? For Cusk, freedom involves wriggling out of the social and historical integuments that enclose a person into a bounded self. “I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told Alexandra Schwartz in 2018, in an interview published in this magazine—but the women in her best novels certainly struggle to cast it off. For them, character not only exists but functions as a compound, a cell, a trap. To achieve freedom, then, is to escape character, and with it the whole edifice of novelistic contrivance. Cusk seems to see the conventions of womanhood and the conventions of fiction, in its most traditional and mannered incarnations, as isomorphic: she consistently discusses motherhood and marriage in explicitly narrative terms. In “A Life’s Work,” she reflects, “My loves have observed the conventions first of the familial narrative, then of the romantic. I have never sought to rewrite these conventions. I have accorded with their cadences, their plot.”
Beginning with the “Outline” trilogy, however, Cusk sought to rewrite them by way of rejecting plot altogether. Everywhere Faye goes—to an elegant wine bar, to a relative’s sprawling country house, to an island off the Greek coast—people talk at her, and the trilogy consists of prolix monologues occasionally punctuated by a “he said” or a “she said.” A man sitting next to Faye on a plane tells her about having to put his dog to sleep; a playwright recounts her divorce and a later assault; everyone speaks vaguely and grandiosely about love and death. Silverware clanks. The tide laps softly against the shore as the sun sets. One character remarks, “Fate . . . is only truth in its natural state.” Another muses, “I hadn’t realized . . . how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.”
These surprisingly cheesy lines are not always devoid of irony. Some are delivered by characters Faye evidently believes to be pompous and pretentious, but some are delivered by Faye herself—and, at any rate, Faye’s voice is indistinguishable from those of the people she meets. Whether she sits down next to a stranger on a plane or strikes up a conversation with a worker renovating her apartment, the ensuing pseudo-philosophizing is the same.
The trilogy is the logical culmination of Cusk’s project up to that point. With its calculated omissions, she removes another brick from the façade and comes that much closer to the white glow waiting beneath. In interviews, she has explained that she was trying to capture a world in which individuality has been supplanted by a set of stock cultural experiences. The soliloquies to which Faye is subjected are meant as a reflection of the general point of view, the kind of shared perspective expressed by the chorus in a Greek play. As Faye puts it in “Outline,” she is in search of the “sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts and the individual was blotted out.” Character is obsolete because we have all collapsed into one (comfortable, healthy, well-travelled) person who talks in high tones about heartbreak and aesthetics at literary festivals and expensive restaurants overlooking the sea.
So what is left after the demolitions of the trilogy? What remains to undo? In “Kudos,” Cusk stopped naming places. The city where most of the book takes place is just “the city”—any city, every city, the proper setting for a narrator who is any and every person. In her post-trilogy period, she stopped naming people, too, truncating them into letters. In “Second Place” (2021), a woman called M invites an artist called L to paint on her property. “Parade” (2024) goes even further: it is about a series of artists (some of them clearly modelled on real-life analogues) all called G.
The mush that is G is Cusk’s best attempt to imagine what comes after selfhood. But she cannot quite picture it; formlessness is hard, by its very nature, to formalize, and “Parade” (which really is a parade, a procession of characters who bleed into one amorphous non-character) is full of toothless abstraction. Anemic observations such as “Pure perception . . . involves no interaction, no subjectivity,” are all that’s available once separate selves have liquefied into gelatinous generality. “Parade” is almost mystical in its erasure of delineation, and, like all mystical texts, it is always on the verge of quavering into meaninglessness. One of the gaggle of Gs creates installations in which a piece of cloth is “suspended from the ceiling,” embodying “human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being.” A similarly floating being—so devoid of friction, so bereft of drama, so predictably boring—is the narrator of “Life of M,” Cusk’s weakest novel yet.
“Life of M” is an unwieldy book with three disparate threads, each focussed on a different character (or a different protest against character). Several sections are narrated by I, about whom we learn almost nothing; I could be male or female, young or old. All we know is that he or she has a partner (also a nameless and genderless nonentity) who winds up in the hospital with an unspecified disease, and that he or she lives in a city (though it, too, remains aggravatingly schematic). Perhaps most important, I is a writer who befriends an actress called M. One initial confronts another.
Third-person sections about M—sections that we understand to be I’s perhaps inaccurate imaginings—make up the meat of the book (part of which began as a story in this magazine). “A little while ago, I told the actor M I was thinking of writing her autobiography,” the novel begins. What follows is presumably the narrator’s effort to make good on his or her threat. But there can be no autobiography without the “auto,” and no biography of someone who lacks a first-person perspective. In lieu of a stable identity, M has only a string of parts that she plays consummately. She sees herself as her audience might see her, imitating the cohesive person she cannot quite become. “She has acted the parts of depressed people, but she has no evidence that depression is real,” the narrator writes. “Humans struggling with their feelings . . . forms a large part of her acting repertoire,” but authentic emotion remains alien to M. Her chief characteristic when she is offscreen—insofar as any celebrity is ever truly offscreen—is her affability. But even the hallmark of this approachability, “the indefatigable mechanism” of her smile, has something artificial about it.
Perhaps because M has no inner life, she is defined largely by the lavish settings in which we find her. The phrase “it is,” followed by a brief description of M’s locale, recurs at the start of the fragments that make up M’s sections: “It is the interior of a limousine”; “It is a spa on the top floor of a tall building”; “It is a restaurant, hidden away down a passage.” Because so many of the places that M frequents are luxurious, her sections have the sheen of a life-style magazine. It is hard to credit the novel’s dutiful condemnation of the actor’s vapidity, given that the only passages with any sensory texture are those describing opulent hotel rooms, beach houses, and rooftop spas. In almost loving detail, Cusk lingers over the furniture on the terrace of a vacation house that M is renting—an “elegant round marble table with four powdered steel chairs,” a “long and wide teak daybed with taupe-colored cushions.” How much more tactile are these sentences than any of Cusk’s writing about M, much less about I!
But what distinguishes M from the rest of us in the narrator’s eyes is not that she seems disembodied, or that she is almost always playing a role. Cusk repeatedly suggests, with unsubtle vehemence, that actors are not as different from private citizens as they may seem—that, in fact, we are all beholden to the parts we perform. M is unlike an ordinary person only insofar as she flits with unusual frequency from one role to the next, forgoing the definition that more enduring performances afford. Even the vestiges of a personality elude her.
The question that has been most persistently posed by the press—whether M is based on Cusk’s real-life acquaintance Natalie Portman, who is reportedly offended by the implication—has an answer as obvious as the very line of inquiry is tedious. M’s filmography bears a marked resemblance to Portman’s: she began her acting career as a child, as Portman did, and she appeared in a movie that is readily identifiable as “Black Swan,” Portman’s greatest success. But, in the book’s final, metatextual scene, M tells the narrator, “I don’t like the way you portray me,” and the narrator protests that he or she has written not a biography but a novel: “But it isn’t you. . . . It isn’t anyone.” Cusk’s crime is not that she has used a real person as inspiration for a character, as writers have done since time immemorial, but that the protagonist of her novel “isn’t anyone,” that she is little more than a device for thematizing the dissolution of the self.
The third thread that makes up “Life of M” is narrated by We, and it presents an even more dogged refusal of specificity. We is “not young” and “not old,” and, like I, they are neither male nor female. They, too, live in “the city.” Readers familiar with the outline of Cusk’s biography—she lives in Paris with her current husband, the painter Siemon Scamell-Katz—can divine hints of her life in the scant details that We reveals. “The city” is teeming with tourists, and it boasts an Eiffel-like tower. But, without the benefit of this auxiliary information, We would remain so hazy as to be almost illegible, like a shape becoming indistinct in the mist. They lead something that has the silhouette, but none of the weight or the substance, of a life. “We are in the midst of our lives and talk about what we see there, what we feel, the events that have occurred and what they might mean,” they report. What do they see there? How do they feel? What events have occurred? Can anything more than the most desultory gesture at a novel emerge while these questions go unanswered?
In the end, the I, M, and We sections are never satisfactorily integrated. Cusk’s final affront to the novel is to disaggregate it into unreconciled elements without making any concession to cohesion. Despite her reputation for rigor, “Life of M” is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random. As Cusk has become more disdainful of fiction and more insistent on the documentary function of art, her work has become vaguer and less concrete, fading like old ink into blurred indeterminacy. Her ambition for the style of her latest book is stated clearly enough in its narrator’s admiring description of a memoir about sexual abuse. The tone of this memoir “was neither personal nor impersonal, it possessed a deep and unmistakable authority, the authority of an object.” But should a book be written with the authority of an object? The authority of objects derives from their imperviousness—but too total an imperviousness precludes writing and action altogether.
In light of her dream of disintegrating the particularities of selfhood into the warm liquid of universality, it is no surprise that Cusk has invented a new sort of novel that is nearly unidentifiable as such. After all, the novel as we know it concerns itself with people bound by the dictates of the social world, not people approximating the point of view of things. In interviews, Cusk has contrasted “seeing the world” in a way that relates to “society” with seeing it in a way that relates to “art,” as if the highest instances of the novelistic art—Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors,” Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”—weren’t suffused with social observation. We is so antisocial as to be decidedly anti-novelistic: what results is less like fiction, with its vibrant evocations, than like undergraduate art theory. “Many of the popular painting exhibitions feature abstract art,” We observes. “It is difficult to know what these paintings mean. Their distance from reality seems assured, yet what in that case are they showing? People stand in front of these paintings as though waiting for them to explain themselves. Sometimes, standing in front of paintings such as these, it has seemed possible that we too could become abstract.”
At times, “Life of M” threatens to become a book composed entirely of vacuities like these, especially when squishy imprecisions infiltrate M’s sections, too: a beautiful seaside view “seems to still the heart and unfold it into the substance of time itself.” (That ugly near-repetition of “it” and “itself” to refer to two different nouns in the span of a single clause!) In the end, deprived of the possibility of self-revelation or action, We is reduced to baldly stating their intentions: “We are struck by this element, character, which is at once so defining and so limiting. . . . We do not operate any longer through character.” It is hard to imagine that, after a renunciation of everything that might lend texture or fascination to a book, there is anything left to say, but the novel rattles on for nearly forty more pages.
There is another word that Cusk uses almost as often as “freedom”: “fate.” Her characters yearn for freedom so acutely because they are mired in the morass of fate, which, in a Cusk novel, takes the form of the bourgeois family and—as the critic Andrea Long Chu has astutely argued—of a femininity understood in regressive biological terms. “I could hardly be said to have any choice in the matter,” Cusk writes of motherhood in “A Life’s Work.” In 2019, she declared in an essay in the Times Magazine that “motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being.”
Although Cusk has claimed in recent interviews that she no longer “feels gendered”—she has aged out of motherhood now that her children have grown up—her recent fiction demonstrates that she has trouble envisaging life after gender in any concrete detail. The inescapability of the female condition is so central to Cusk’s world view that she can sooner imagine the end of personhood than the end of a way of being organized around heterosexual marriage and childbearing. The narrator of “Life of M” has at last succeeded in breaking free of the binary—in the final scene, M asks, “Are you a guy or a girl?”—but only at the expense of breaking free of anything we could understand as humanity. Unlike many thinkers wedded to a retrograde and restrictive conception of womanhood, Cusk seems to take no joy in what she perceives as the natural order of things. Her traditionalism derives from her fatalism: she is enough of a feminist to lament the lot of suburban mothers ensconced in their houses, but she subscribes too instinctively to the elementality of gender to believe that its terms can truly be altered.
If womanhood is an immutable fact, Cusk seems to conclude, she can at least do compensatory violence to her fiction. She can slash at that artifact of heteronormativity, the form that began with the marriage plot and has always essentially concerned the domestic indignities that most gall her: the novel. What we cannot do in life we are doomed to rehearse in fiction, even if we do so by attacking the very basis of fiction as a human practice.
Still, very much despite herself, Cusk has not succeeded in expunging character from her work. It obstinately intrudes, even in the books from which she has most arduously endeavored to exile it. Is she achieving kenosis by amalgamating the cacophony of competing voices that usually enrich a novel? Or is it the height of narcissistic self-magnification to suppose that the universal voice sounds so much like your own—and therefore that the universal voice speaks only from well-appointed rentals on the Mediterranean? In the trilogy, what masquerades as self-abnegation serves in practice to recast the world in the image of a particular kind of person: humorless, cosmopolitan, self-important. In “Life of M,” there is even less of a filter between the characters’ perspectives and that of the book. M sounds like I sounds like We, and the distance between the airy abstractions that they all repeat and the novel’s own commitments collapses entirely. In both cases, there is something at once magisterial and leadenly self-regarding about the melancholic rhythms of Cusk’s prose, with its stiff and stately syntax and its utter impatience with the real vagaries of difference.
Yet I would rather dislike Cusk’s voice than read a book—would it even be a book?—without a voice at all. Someone who had really divested herself of personhood would simply exist without intervening in the world, the way a rock does. That Cusk goes on writing is evidence that she cannot really envision the negation of self that she claims to desire. In “Parade,” she confesses that “a novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone.” If she ever succeeds in becoming no one, she will stop writing novels that wish they weren’t novels. Instead, there will be only a flash of white light, originating nowhere in particular, beaming out into the uneventful void. ♦