In the few weeks since its publication, Rachel Cusk's novel, LIFE OF M, has sparked considerable controversy over whether or not it's little more than a thinly veiled takedown of Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman. While acknowledging some obvious correspondences between Portman's life and career and “M,” the subject of this story, regardless of where one lands in that debate, it's much more interesting to consider the book on its literary merits than merely as highbrow movie star gossip. On that score, it's an elegant and closely observed, but at times arid, glimpse of celebrity culture that likely will appeal most to those already familiar with Cusk's style, while leaving others less impressed.

LIFE OF M centers on an unnamed narrator --- a writer --- who informs the eponymous actress that she's “thinking of writing her autobiography” after they meet in a bookstore in the city (likely Paris) where they both live. Initially enthusiastic about the idea, M responds enigmatically, “Would you just make it up?” From there, the novel unfolds mostly in a series of brief set pieces involving the titular character's movement through a world where all of the rough edges of life that daily confront ordinary mortals have been sanded away. 

"We leave M's world not knowing much more about her than we did before we started, but perhaps with a slightly better understanding of a life far less attractive from within than it appears when glimpsed from afar."

These episodes all begin in similar fashion: “It is a hotel room in a foreign city” or “It is a brasserie on a gray boulevard.” Whether it's a glass-walled spa atop a tall building where the bodies “have a kind of plasticity or neutrality about them, as though their mortal element had been removed,” or the “lit-up glass front” of an art gallery that “seen from the blustery confusion of the street is like a shining citadel,” Cusk offers vivid descriptions grounded in impressively concrete details that briskly convey the weightless, airless feel of M's environment. There are meals, business meetings, an acting class and other interactions in which the narrator takes the opportunity to examine, mostly superficially, the “frictionless surface” across which M glides, an “eternal present-tense in which there is no memory and therefore no judgment.”

Despite its lack of dramatic incident, LIFE OF M could succeed as a character portrait if it did a better job evoking any tangible emotional response to M. Instead, she appears almost as a freeze-dried product lacking much in the way of human qualities with which we can identify. Even M’s musings on her status, as this one when she visits a former mansion transformed into a museum to research an upcoming part, leave us less than engaged: “To always be playing a part is to have no home, she thinks, nor any history, nor any coordination in time, no room like this one where what is felt is as real and true as the earthy substance from which it was made.”

At times, the novel hints at how, to a not inconsiderable extent, each of us participates in a project similar to M’s, carefully crafting an identity that will serve us in our interactions with the world around us. For all of us, Cusk suggests, the boundary separating artifice from reality is highly porous.

There is the baker, for example, who appears “as though he is acting, yet he is only concentrating, being intensely himself.” And there are the nanny and skipper of the boat carrying M on an excursion who are “like two actors talking on the side of a set; they are doing a job that involves playing a role, and so the possibility --- or the threat --- of sincerity is extinguished.” 

In a conference room that's the setting for a business meeting that alludes vaguely to M’s contract and “some future possibilities,” she wonders “to what degree people have learned to behave in certain situations by imitating what they have seen in films.” And in one of the sections of the novel that rather puzzlingly introduces a first-person plural narrator, Cusk writes of the decision to move to Paris: “We realized that we could play a role in creating ourselves, rather than simply being created, as we had been before.”

By the end of LIFE OF M, the status of the narrator's project, never well-defined to begin with, has become less appealing to its subject and decidedly more ambiguous. We leave M's world not knowing much more about her than we did before we started, but perhaps with a slightly better understanding of a life far less attractive from within than it appears when glimpsed from afar.