Life of M
Cusk is one of the cleverest and foremost practitioners of autofiction, turning to the form after her memoirs of motherhood and divorce produced their own media discomforts. With the jet-setting heroine Faye of her landmark trilogy Outline, she might even be practicing aerofiction ... Life of M continues in that mode: rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious, a place where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. The air up there where Cusk seems to be living and writing these days is gaspingly thin. She’s missed down here on Earth.
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An unwieldy book with three disparate threads, each focussed on a different character ... Despite her reputation for rigor, Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random ... At times, Life of M threatens to become a book composed entirely of vacuities ... In Life of M, there is even less of a filter between the characters’ perspectives and that of the book ... 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.
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The narrator moves through obsessions familiar to readers of Cusk’s previous novels: frustration over the inauthenticity of contemporary life, the instability of identity, and a sort of neurasthenic aestheticism that makes simple activities like going to a museum distressing if the other visitors respond to the art in a too-boisterous manner ... A narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.
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