Clare Clark at The Guardian:
In this post-saturation era of social media exposure, the intersection of appearance and authenticity has been exhaustively picked over. Cusk’s insights are not strikingly new. Her power lies in the authority of her sharp, spare prose, the glittering exactness of her sentences. She writes with crisp acuity about the frictionless (and therefore strangely lifeless) existence of the celebrity, the corrosive effect of fame on family relationships, the blend of fervent purity and crushing cynicism that delimits a person forged in the forcefields of power and pretence. At Cusk’s startling best, and there is a good deal of that here, her ideas land like punches or uncomfortable secrets muttered in our ears: it is a shock to realise that they are our secrets too.
Life of M, like Cusk’s previous novel Parade, grew out of a piece published in the New Yorker, in this case a powerful short story titled Project. While the story has made its way almost whole into the opening chapters, the larger scope of the novel form gives Cusk the space to explore M more deeply.
more here.
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