Rachel Cusk — Life of M (2026)

I spent the recent Bank Holiday reading the new book from Rachel Cusk. A continuation of her project to—seemingly—remove not just plot but character from the modern novel, it arrives freighted with some headline-grabbing buzz about the fact that the ‘fictional’ actress of which it purports to be a portrait is a (very) thinly-veiled Natalie Portman. I found it a somewhat frustrating read. Cusk’s language remains mesmerising, but here it’s pointed in a distinctly ungenerous, perhaps even unkind, direction. If the person depicted in the novel were entirely the product of Cusk’s imagination, you would say that she had made it her exercise to centre the novel around someone for whom the reader is invited to feel unsympathetic. So clear are the allusions to Portman’s career, however, that it begins to feel like spite. The bulk of the slender novel is bracketed by conversations between the actress and her would-be biographer, with the closing pages seeming to contain a report of the moment…