Life of M
Cusk is one of the cleverest and foremost practitioners of autofiction, turning to the form after her memoirs of motherhood and divorce produced their own media discomforts. With the jet-setting heroine Faye of her landmark trilogy Outline, she might even be practicing aerofiction ... Life of M continues in that mode: rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious, a place where the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. The air up there where Cusk seems to be living and writing these days is gaspingly thin. She’s missed down here on Earth.
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A lost little book— undisciplined, unfocused and instantly forgettable ... The true faults with the book turn out to be less ethical than technical ... Stripped of the scandal, the book has little life of its own. It will fade.
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An unwieldy book with three disparate threads, each focussed on a different character ... Despite her reputation for rigor, Life of M is not a disciplined dismantling; it is discombobulated and haphazard, a machine breaking down at random ... At times, Life of M threatens to become a book composed entirely of vacuities ... In Life of M, there is even less of a filter between the characters’ perspectives and that of the book ... There is something at once magisterial and leadenly self-regarding about the melancholic rhythms of Cusk’s prose, with its stiff and stately syntax and its utter impatience with the real vagaries of difference.
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