I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
The New Yorker’s recent review of Rachel Cusk’s Life of M made me want to know more about Cusk. I had read her divorce memoir Aftermath shortly after it came out, in 2012, the year of my own divorce. It didn’t particularly engage me. I read at least one of the Outline Trilogy books, probably the first, Outline, in which she builds a character through reporting the conversations that character has with other people. This trilogy of books established Cusk as the “reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged.”
Interestingly, Cusk experienced a kind of death before Outline came out:
“Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.”
For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was “fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry.” Using herself as the “template” was judged by some readers as a “wilful exposure of self, a washing of dirty laundry in public”.
Her memoir Aftermath hadn’t been received well, either by critics or the general public. The New York Times reviewer Emma Gilbey Keller writes that “her intellectualism… often comes across as pretension,” and “Most striking about the discrepancy between her fiction and nonfiction is that her made-up characters seem far more real than her real ones.”
Keller continues:
Yet as a whole this book doesn’t work. Cusk’s biggest problem is her main character. Her self-absorption is still acute. The way she analyzes her every mood does not make her likable. Nor does it make for an interesting narrative. Frankly, the book is often tedious.
At the time Aftermath came out, Cusk was a celebrated novelist. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and her seventh, Arlington Park, was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize.
I might like to go back and read some of her early work. In The New Yorker review, Becca Rothfeld writes:
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.
In order to leave the constraints of the standard novel, Cusk traveled through a place of despair and creative death, not to mention a publically considered divorce.
With Life of M, Cusk continues to invent and reinvent her ways of writing, writes Rothfeld:
Despite her reputation for rigor, “Life of M” is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random. As Cusk has become more disdainful of fiction and more insistent on the documentary function of art, her work has become vaguer and less concrete, fading like old ink into blurred indeterminacy.
I’m fascinated by stories of reinventions like these, especially ones where a person goes through periods of acknowledged brilliance (with the writing of the Outline trilogy, and earlier, with her first novels) and struggle (with the publication of her memoir and now, perhaps, with her latest experiments in fiction).
Media speculation and details from the book itself have suggested that Life of M is about actor Natalie Portman, a friend of Cusk’s. A reviewer on Goodreads writes of this situation:
While the novel might be based on Natalie Portman, it is not about Natalie Portman—and that is part of Cusk’s self-referential mocking. This novel is about a novelist projecting onto an actress, imagining the inner life that is kept from the public, and thereby eliding her even as it seeks to elucidate her. By conjuring the actress Natalie Portman, the novel also disappears her into a realm of fantasy and abstraction. The unstated truth of the novel is not that fame dehumanizes the actress but rather that it desensitizes everyone else to a real person, robbing them of the ability to see the actress clearly as an individual with real experiences. So the novelist invents an actress troubled by her own unrealness. It’s irony all the way down.
I wonder how much Cusk is taking her own experience of fame (as she is a famous and celebrated novelist) and projecting it onto her imaginary version of Portman.
I ask myself: do I want to read this novel?
And I think: no I don’t. Reading the very well done New Yorker review was enough for me, and I feel almost exhausted by it.
But it’s another piece of evidence or, perhaps, insight that I can use to develop my own understanding of how fiction can emulate life, or vice versa.