Review: Some say this hot new novel is about Natalie Portman. They're missing the point

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewLife of MBy Rachel Cusk Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pages, $27If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Rachel Cusk is not a people pleaser.The prolific, award-winning British author’s novels are often plotless, discursive and frustratingly obtuse.

Yet Cusk has found a large fan base for her work, mainly because she is a deft excavator of the human psyche, a writer who can articulate emotional states with uncanny precision and insight.On a formal level, Cusk’s new book, “Life Of M,” closely adheres to the rigorously calibrated approach that has been so successful for her across 11 novels.In classic Cusk fashion, “Life of M” unfolds from the inside out.

It is resolutely internal and hermetic, told from the point of view of a highly observant and self-conscious narrator.When Cusk writes that a character’s smile “had a sweetness that almost seemed to reproach those who looked at it for their dim and suspicious view of life,” it’s that “almost” which saves the line from sinking of its own weight, one of Cusk’s nuanced brushstrokes that give her prose lift and bounce.“Life of M” is a two-hander.

The primary driver of the narrative is an unnamed writer who has approached a famous actor — the M of the title — with the proposition of ghosting her autobiography.This is the extent of Cusk’s setup.

The novel is about as stark and stripped of biographical details as a Samuel Beckett story.Cusk is far more interested in how the writer’s identity is unmoored by the actor, and how the world bends to M’s will and thus changes its shape in her presence: “Standing in the street, I realized that I could not be myself around M.

She was friendly, generous, disarmingly modest, yet ev...