There’s a 1996 episode of British sitcom As Time Goes By that begins with two young women looking, with snark and admiration, at a photo of a sexy-looking model in a newspaper. The first says, “Let’s console ourselves with the fact that intellectually, she’s a vacuum.” The other counters, “We don’t know that, do we. The first replies, “No, but we can think it.”

Imagine a spectrum of slim, bookish-vibes brunettes who’d seem interchangeable from a great distance, but who are not. I’m at one end of that spectrum, megastar Natalie Portman the other. The acclaimed as well as quite pretty British author Rachel Cusk falls somewhere between us.

The narcissism of small differences sets something off in people. Larger differences, not so much. I cannot imagine summoning an emotional reaction of any kind to what I’m like, physically or in terms of success, in comparison with Natalie Portman. These are different stratospheres. With Rachel Cusk, absolutely. By the same token, someone in Cusk’s position would, in theory, be capable of caring how she adds up relative to Portman.  

Life of M, published in late August, explores the sentiments a Natalie Portman-like person might inspire in a Rachel Cusk-ish one. The extent to which real life events are represented, I have no idea. Yes, the actress called M in the book appears to have the biography and filmography of Portman. There’s no mention of Jewish or Israeli background, but Black Swan and other works are alluded to in ways where, if you know, you know, and even if you don’t know, you know. This is a book that gestures at being about Portman. That much is clear.

That does not, however, say anything definitive about where Natalie Portman the real person enters into any of this. Maybe these two are friends or artistic collaborators and Portman’s in on the joke. Maybe Portman’s fuming at her portrayal as a vapid celebrity, a woman who’s always performing, and who views normal human life as a curiosity—a reading the book’s ending encourages.

Maybe none of the novel is really about Cusk or Portman, but is just fiction with a few broad-strokes details inspired by things that exist in the world. The narrator’s name is never established, nor is their gender, nor that of their partner, who falls seriously ill during the story. These are abstractions, teasing at being about things in the world, which is in a sense true of fiction generally, but true here in a different, more clever way. This is effectively how Cusk herself describes it, and is the only explanation that makes sense. The narrator knows things about M’s moment-by-moment inner life that would be inaccessible to anyone but M. Omniscient narration of this sort is the stuff of fiction. 

It’s a complex book, but one whose conceit is laid out in simple enough terms in the novel’s opening sentence: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography.” Life of M is not this experimental autobiography. Rather, that work........

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