Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is essentially plotless. It bears an ambivalent, sometimes winking, relationship to character. It is suffused with meditations on art, freedom, and femininity in language so brittle, it is liable to shatter and lacerate its readers at any moment.

If this sounds familiar, that is because it is: Life of M is a predictably Cuskian anti-novel. It opens with a frame narrative that sets up the premise: a bookstore employee encounters a famous actress, M, and asks whether she might write her biography. (Much has been made of the real-life identity of M in pre-release publicity, but even this—the thin veiling of a character whom Cusk subjects to pitiless judgment—is now a well-worn trope in Cusk’s fiction.) “Would you just make it up?” M asks the narrator, who doesn’t recognize M when she first meets her and who knows very little about the actress. We don’t hear the narrator’s answer, but shortly after this encounter we are plunged into the biography that she has written, which alternates between two different modes whose central aim is not to advance a narrative of M’s life nor to offer an account of her as a person, since doing so would be antithetical to Cusk’s belief that the novel no longer requires plot or character.

The “biography”—if we are to call it that—takes up the majority of Cusk’s novel (we return to the frame narrative very briefly at the end of the novel), and it alternates in two modes. The first of these modes picks up exactly where Cusk’s last novel, Parade (2024), leaves off: it is composed of a series of vignettes narrated by a collective “we” that turns away from M and the biographical premise altogether, offering instead a biography of some collective group that readers come to understand stands in for all mothers, all women. This collective “we” is placed in quotidian scenes: aimless strolls around the city, listless observations of a photography exhibition, travel to the countryside, banal errands like walking the dog; but these excursions don’t serve a narrative purpose, they are mere occasions for philosophical meditation on selfhood, fame, mothering, and care. In one such instance, the narrator—“we”—goes to “meet our friends, washed and dressed, the night trailing behind us like an animal’s tail” but this quickly turns into a philosophical meditation on the impossibility of really knowing someone, of being able to penetrate their inner life: “We wish that we could see [our friends] as a hidden camera would see them, alone at home, when they thought themselves unobserved.”

The second is a series of vignettes ostensibly about M, offering brief glimpses into her life as she travels to a hotel in a foreign city, lunches at a brasserie with a friend, participates in a “literary salon” at a bookstore. Sometimes we get brief glimpses into her inner state: “M feels she has a double, a soul in darkness who dreads revelation, who observes in the gradual slippage of formality and caution a fiction in the terrifying process of breaking down.” The majority of narrative space is handed over to the description of these settings. By and large, both modes of vignettes rarely impart knowledge about M. The biography of M, in other words, offers little in the way of actual biography.

With Life of M, Cusk remains one of the most formally restless novelists of our time. The trouble is that this inventiveness may now be outpacing Cusk’s thinking; the novel’s experiments in form are more compelling than its increasingly familiar—and increasingly flat—abstractions about freedom and gender.

Cusk has spent the last several years using her (anti-)novels to elaborate a new theory of the genre that has led her to eviscerate, with typically clinical detachment, many of the conventions we have come to recognize and cherish as standards of the novel. Many of her readers have watched with a mixture of delight, enthrallment, and morbid attention as she cuts out dialogue, plot, and character from the novel with the precision and stoicism of a surgeon excising a cancerous lump. Which element, one wonders, will be transformed next in this “gut renovation” of the novel?

In Life of M, it is setting. Though the novel’s premise, with its focus on biography and fame, suggests that Cusk may be revising her theorizations of character, setting emerges as one of the novel’s central (and most interesting) concerns.

Across her work, Cusk has maintained an unflagging attachment to setting. However, her rendering of space has become increasingly experimental over the course of her oeuvre. In her earliest novels, setting is geographically specific and rooted in particular, nameable places. In Saving Agnes (1993), for instance, the reader is concretely situated in 1990s London. The first two novels of the Outline trilogy (2014–8) hop around various European locations—Athens, London, and the in-between spaces of transit like the airplane cabin.

But something happens to Cusk’s representations of setting sometime during the publication of the Outline trilogy, which has since become Cusk’s signature: her representation of space has become less geographically determinate even as these descriptions grow more densely described. In Kudos (2018), she stops naming the geographic locations of her novels.We are in southern Europe, though we can only make qualified guesses at which country we’ve landed in. Second Place (2021) is set entirely in an unnamed marsh, though some have noted it bears a striking resemblance to Cusk’s Norfolk home. By the time we get to Parade, even such vague geographic signifiers have been done away with, replaced by conceptual spaces; the only thing we can say with certainty is that Parade is set in that strange and hostile place some call the artworld. Cusk’s descriptions of space become more generic, even as they continue to overflow with hyper-specific detail. This tightrope act produces settings that feel both vivid and unmoored.

We see this descriptive practice again in Life of M, where descriptions of setting feel disarmingly traditional but are used toward unfamiliar ends. At the level of sentence-by-sentence description, the spaces read like traditional realist settings. Yet Cusk strips them of the coordinates that would anchor them in a social milieu or a geographic context.

The novel features long passages moving through the streets of an unnamed city with keen attention paid to the minutiae of the cityscape:

In the mornings, leaving the house, the pavements and shrubberies smell of dog shit. Children are walking or being walked to school, their small forms clad in padded coats and backpacks. The streets are full of cars. The cars seem to accelerate towards the people crossing the streets, as though they mean to harm them. … Men on motorbikes and electric scooters fly along the gap between the cars and the pavements at dangerous speeds. They wear hard shiny helmets to protect their heads, though the heads of the people walking next to them on the pavements and crossing the streets are bare.

This mode of observation can produce passages that make the reader feel as though she has been plunged headfirst into a naturalist novel. Associated with 19th-century writers such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser, naturalism is a novelistic genre that treats environment as a powerful force shaping human behavior. Its dense, minutely detailed descriptions of spaces—often factories, tenements, or mines—are made emblematic of broader social conditions or used to explain a character’s moral failings. Cusk borrows naturalism’s descriptive density, but she resists the urge to make descriptions of the city determine the psychology of the characters that appear in Life of M.

In some of the most remarkable descriptions of setting, these accounts of space are used to the opposite ends of literary naturalism. Instead of using space to explain character, it’s used toward the erosion of character. This is clearest in the vignettes that describe M. Take, for instance, the first of these vignettes:

It is a hotel room in a foreign city. The hotel is a luxury hotel and the room is a large long rectangle with tall smoked glass windows at the end. The walls and ceilings are painted white. The rectangle is divided not by partitions but by suggestion, using lowered ceiling panels that hang above the theoretical spaces – a sitting area, a bedroom, a kitchenette, a dressing area – as a means of demarcating them.

Cusk spends two pages describing this hotel room before M appears. When she does, she is rendered almost as inertly as the objects around her: “M is lying on top of the large bed. She is clothed, in the casual garments she wears when she is away from home to prevent or delay the moment in which she is recognised.” In these vignettes, which all follow the same pattern, M is transformed into effigy, into furniture. Character, which Cusk has famously declared to be over, is transmuted into setting. If classic literary naturalism uses setting to demonstrate how environment determines character, Cusk inverts this basic premise, using setting to erode or overtake character.

If in earlier novels Cusk has been at work excising plot, dialogue, and character, here she might be said to be performing a transplantation, taking naturalism’s descriptive apparatus and putting it to work effacing rather than producing characterization. It is in moments like this that Cusk’s command of the history of the novel’s form is clearest, and where her experiments in form can feel the most promising.

In the meditations on gender and freedom, it can feel like Cusk has run out of steam, and as a result, her prose loses its usual vitreous quality, settling into language that can feel closer to calcified platitudes than to discovery.

Still, reading Life of M, I cannot help but wonder whether the fascination with the Cuskian project is on the verge of curdling into boredom, weariness, even perhaps antipathy, for even her most ardent readers.

Though Life of M confirms that Cusk remains, above all, an incisive theorist of the novel, attuned to the form’s history and therefore able to reinvent it with exhilarating originality, it can sometimes feel as though, from the perspective of content, Life of M is recapitulating many of the ideas that Cusk has spent well over a decade working out, sometimes in ways that are much less nuanced or granular than past instances. In the meditations on gender and freedom, it can feel like Cusk has run out of steam, and as a result, her prose loses its usual vitreous quality, settling into language that can feel closer to calcified platitudes than to discovery. This is particularly true in the first mode of vignettes, which take on the quality of a Greek chorus whose role is to convert individual experience into collective, universal condition in order to dole out conventional wisdom.

Take, for instance, this investigation into labor and freedom, a question that for Cusk is always tangled up in the figure of the mother: “When our children were born they presented the greatest possible threat to our concentration. We could no longer access the white field [of concentration] because we could not forget them: our bodies wouldn’t allow it. To learn that this was not the case for men diminished men forever.” Cusk’s technical mastery is, again, clear here, but it has diminishing returns: she infuses the prose of this section with an aphoristic quality that reinforces the choral structure of these vignettes to communicate received wisdom. Yet this feat of formal canniness has the effect of flattening a more complicated insight into something like a maxim: Motherhood produces a particular form of unfreedom, one that men never experience, and that lack of experience impoverishes them.

Cusk’s earlier investigations into motherhood’s disabling effects are more nuanced, precisely because they register the stunning cruelty and injustice of even such banal observations about life as we know it. They also remain attentive to ambivalent, ugly feelings—to envy, to ressentiment, to the seductions of male freedom, as well as the infuriating injustice of it all—in ways that the aphoristic quality in Life of M cannot. In Second Place, for instance, the narrator describes herself as a “young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom [L’s] paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.” Here, Cusk’s young mother does not simply register male freedom as an undefined condition from which she is excluded; rather, her unfreedom is constituted against it and in relation to it, in ways that leave room for desire, for longing, for resentment.

Generally speaking, Cusk’s representation of gender throughout the novel will do little to stem the critique that her fiction traffics in “flatly essentialist” depictions of gender, not least of all the novel’s provocative final line, in which M asks the narrator: “This might sound stupid, she said, but I’ve been wondering. Are you a guy or a girl?” But even for those who disagree with such a critique—who find in Cusk’s earlier fiction a rendering of gendered experience too textured, too self-aware to be dismissed wholesale—will find little to defend in Life of M’s descriptions of gender.

When we return to the frame narrative, M has read the biography that the narrator has written (and, presumably, which we have just read) and is unhappy with the product. “You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity, she said. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love,” she complains. The novel’s frame narrative seems to anticipate critique of the biography, inviting a set of unsettling questions: Are we, like M, meant to recoil from this portrait of collective “womanhood”? Are we meant to recognize, as M puts it, that the narrator’s portrayal of M is a distortion that falsely presents her as an“atomised victim”? In that case, M’s complaint would register not only as a rebuke to the narrator, but also as an implicit critique of the novel we have read: The same pressure to generalize, abstract, and render experience from the outside is what can make the vignettes feel less like acts of interpretation than acts of flattening.

To M’s complaint, the narrator protests: “But you’re just playing a character, I said. The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of.” If the cruel misrepresentations that inhere in a work of art reflect less on their subjects than on their creator, as the novel concedes in its final pages, then Cusk seems to be priming us to ask: What do the characters—collective and individual—in the Life of M reveal about Rachel Cusk?