Emily Witt: Proust is in the room

Emily Witt

Acelebrity entering a room produces a reality distortion field. The energy shifts towards her, accompanied by a general self-consciousness about where to look or avoid looking. To be ordinary and receive a celebrity’s attention can breed self-importance. We have archetypes – the name-dropper, the starfucker – for those who seek out proximity to fame. The tasteful thing is to be nonchalant, to pretend it’s no big deal.

Rachel Cusk is not a name-dropper. In her novels she often avoids naming things directly, which can make reading them a little like being a contestant on a quiz show. ‘Pastel de nata’, I thought to myself, after reading a passage in Kudos (2018) about a tart invented by nuns. ‘The 400 Blows’, I thought, after she summarised the movie’s plot in her new novel, Life of M. This obfuscation is meant to slow us down, force us to contemplate experience rather than gliding by on the shorthand of nouns. Cusk asks her readers to re-examine what they thought was settled, including, in Life of M, the way each of us relates to the very famous. The celebrity doesn’t need a proper name because she is easy to recognise. She is the avatar of everything we are conditioned to desire: beauty, wealth, Dior.

Life of M begins with a proposal: ‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.’ The suggestion of writing an autobiography, instead of a biography, implies transmutation. The unnamed narrator doesn’t want to write about M, they want to inhabit her, so yes, they will just make it up. In the end, however, they decide to write in the omniscient third person. The novel is set in a city that seems to be Paris – it’s described as ‘a masterpiece of civilisation’ dominated by ‘a big ugly tower’ – although it too is unnamed. M and the narrator both live in this city but aren’t native to it. ‘Like the ugly tower we see everything from where we are, except ourselves,’ Cusk writes. ‘Fame is perhaps this tower, an ultimate entrapment in the self that is also a deliverance from it.’

As in other novels by Cusk, Life of M has a narrator who resembles her and seems to share her outlook. M’s biography lines up with that of Natalie Portman, and Cusk gives plot descriptions of the movies Léon: The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux without naming them. The fictional Portman has fictional thoughts in opulent settings and from inside the muted aquarium of a limousine moving through a city, like a series of outtakes from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, starring Natalie Portman. M’s thoughts as imagined by the narrator never really seem like her own: ‘I don’t like the way you portray me,’ she tells the narrator at the end of the book. We learn the basic details of M’s career and almost nothing about her personal life; as depicted by the narrator, M’s main preoccupation seems to be her own status and the way her wealth and fame distance her from the rest of the world.

Cusk seems to be seeking intimate knowledge of that which is ubiquitous but unattainable: the interior world of a projection, the promise of a three-dimensional reality on the other side of a screen. As a journalist, I sympathise with this fantasy of total access to one’s subject. We write about famous people in the hope that some of the popularity will rub off on us. A journalist assigned to profile a celebrity will beg the famous person’s ‘team’ for exclusivity and negotiate over access to ‘scenes’. The least desirable sort of scene – and the most common – is lunch at a hotel restaurant, where the writer lists details (what the celebrity orders, what she is wearing, her nervous tics) in an attempt to give the impression of having captured her interior life. Journalists are taught to push for more natural material: an ordinary day with the celebrity in her home, a chance to record her speaking in professional or social settings. We often settle for nonsensical outings or activities which in the finished articles read like bad dates.

Working on such pieces I have often fantasised about being able to write a profile of someone I already know well. There are journalistic biographies of an intimate – Emmanuel Carrère’s account of his sister-in-law in Other Lives but Mine, say, or Michael Herr’s Kubrick, based on his friendship with the director – but it’s a genre that’s still relatively unexplored. I can see why Cusk was drawn to a lightly fictionalised version of such a project and why she hoped a certain famous actress (if the conversation that opens the book really happened) might be interested in taking part. In an experiment along those lines, the made-up details the narrator injects into her autobiography of M could serve as a substitute for actual intimacy. Unfortunately, in this novel Cusk’s vision seems constrained by the conventions of the celebrity profile. Even with unlimited imaginative access to her subject, she gives us a description of the celebrity having coffee with the narrator in the garden of a fancy hotel.

M is self-effacing. She tells the narrator that she is ‘merely an element in the creations of others’. She uses her own artistry not to create ‘but to try to make her life seem more normal’. She runs errands she could easily pay others to do: dropping off her children at school, walking her dogs. When the narrator’s partner falls ill and is hospitalised, M sends a get-well-soon message. The narrator sees the gesture as calculated: ‘Part of M’s freedom was her freedom to choose how to be. Of all the things she could have chosen, she had selected goodness.’ The narrator seems to think M can only feign concern, because her status exempts her from ordinary human relations: ‘She is skilled at giving the appearance of paying attention’; her ‘guesses at normality are made … by observing and imitating’.

It’s hard to pity the very famous when they beg for privacy. I didn’t ask to know about you either. But the idea that celebrities have no authentic way of being in the world seems mean-spirited, even embittered. M doesn’t eat pastries, the narrator observes: ‘She doesn’t know what would happen to her if she did.’ At a middle-class dinner party, ‘the alien amid this terrestrial scene’, she quietly avoids the main course, which the narrator takes as a sign of her emotional remove. ‘But Natalie Portman is vegan,’ I thought, in M’s defence.

The narrator thinks of fame as a primary metric of importance. ‘All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was,’ she tells us. No novelist is really a celebrity, not even Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. Writers more often settle for the minor fame of flying to literary festivals, giving interviews and attending residencies – a world Cusk describes well in her Outline trilogy. But sometimes a writer is called to ascend momentarily to the status of celebrity: to walk in a catwalk show or model in an advertisement. In Life of M the narrator attends a staged literary panel for an unnamed fashion label. A bookshop has been turned into a set. The supermodel included on the panel is a bimbo. A cultural journalist is there ‘to supply the grain of integrity required to make the events seem authentic’. Before the filmed conversation begins, there is a fake conversation so that the participants can be photographed. M happens to be a dedicated reader, the point of connection between her and the narrator, but in her world books can only function as props. It’s a mutually assured irrelevance: one of the few people in the novel who fails to recognise M is a bookseller.

The narrator isn’t given a gender, a fact that is only made explicit in the final sentences of the book. I had been reading them as a ‘she’, a stand-in for Cusk, and found this gotcha a little underwhelming. Chapters dedicated to existential musing are written in the first person plural. ‘In the midst of our lives,’ one begins, ‘we sometimes wake in the darkness and hear the sound of our own heart thudding in our ears.’ Sometimes this ‘we’ seems to refer to the narrator and M navigating the city in which they both live; sometimes it seems to be the narrator and their partner walking their dogs; sometimes it’s a broader ‘we’, perhaps of bourgeois city dwellers who read Rachel Cusk novels, go to museums, wonder about whether they should exercise, visit a psychic or have craniosacral therapy (not that it’s named: ‘With their warm clean fingers they touch us lightly, almost imperceptibly, at our body’s vulnerable and potent locations’).

The first person plural sections alternate with those focused on M, whose surroundings are announced in terse sentences: ‘It is an office’ or ‘it is the interior of a limousine’ or ‘it is a brasserie on a grey boulevard.’ These surroundings are beautifully described, like flicking through Vogue. M takes a Mediterranean holiday; she waits in a plush trailer for her next scene; she goes to a rooftop spa and endures a cold-water treatment reminiscent of waterboarding (‘M suddenly understands that if this were reality she would not survive it’). She gets to skip the security line at the airport; waiters trip over themselves to make her comfortable; she is plied with vases of flowers and exotic fruit.

But M is constantly beset by the envious. An elderly ballerina criticises her performance in the ballet movie. A fan calls her a bitch after she refuses a photo. Men are eager to let her know how little she impresses them. She has been told by unnamed counsellors to tolerate a powerful man she loathes: ‘He is permitted to insult her; she has been advised to turn the other cheek.’ Arriving at the middle-class dinner party, in a flat where the furniture is scuffed and coats have been piled up on a bench (‘she has privately wondered how they survive in this minuscule space’), M encounters an ordinary dinner party boor: ‘Occasionally, in humble places like this apartment, she meets men of a startling confidence and entitlement.’ The perfume ads, M tells a younger actress, are their compensation for the gender pay gap.

Fantasising about M’s life serves as an escape valve for a narrator reckoning with some of the disappointments of late middle age. The narrator’s children are grown up; their partner’s hospitalisation is unsettling. Writing in a notebook in a café, ‘we’ reflect on the life unspooled behind us. Some of this is familiar from Cusk’s previous novels and her memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012): the childcare responsibilities were unequal and took ‘us’ away from work, but in the end ‘our unselfishness has given us a different, more elevated perspective.’ Ageing has robbed ‘us’ of the capacity to fall in love. ‘The realisation that we no longer love those people that we once loved is unsettling. It is as though we no longer love ourselves.’ A peace sets in: ‘We see that there was nothing especially intentional about the wrongs that were done to us. It was simply the collision of another character with our own.’

Reflections on the passage of time and the ephemerality of love, a fixation on a person of elevated social status, Paris (maybe): Proust is in the room. But Cusk is writing at a time when celebrities – as the object of fascination and gossip – have taken the place once occupied by aristocrats. The narrator reassures us that the country in which M lives has a centuries-old nobility, unlike the unnamed place where she grew up (I will assume it’s called the United States of America), where ‘breeding is an indeterminate value.’ M, for all her 21st-century worldliness, still can’t achieve the poise of an aristocrat: ‘Years of training stand behind them.’ Nor is she afforded the esteem Proust gives artists in his novel. Her acting is almost an afterthought; when M attends a theatre workshop, it’s presented as another excursion among the commoners.

The narrator never says what drew her to M in the first place. They can’t quite admit to the mortal desire of celebrity worship. ‘We had met in a bookstore,’ they say. ‘We knew a couple of people in common.’ The narrator feels ugly next to M, which isn’t her fault: the whole point of the economy she propels is to make everyone else feel inadequate. But M also becomes something to fixate on, a distraction from the narrator’s own thoughts. As the book reaches its conclusion, the narrator discovers what readers of gossip magazines have known all along: ‘It was this abandonment of myself that had helped me. It had enabled me to leave and go and live in someone else.’

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