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.
