Review: Life of M

Life of M by Rachel Cusk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected to dislike this book. And I did dislike it.

But I disliked it for so many different reasons – and with the sense that maybe Rachel Cusk wants me to dislike it as a commentary on contemporary selfhood and fame – that I think it turns out to be a peculiar kind of success.

There’s a lot of notoriety around this one. Several reviewers have noted that the title character, “M,” bears consistent indicators that she is the actor Natalie Portman. M was in several movies as a young woman where she was put into sexually charged moments. She starred in a movie about ballerinas. She is the face of a major perfume ad campaign. And she presents herself to the world as a well-read, thoughtful person, someone very much part of our artistic and entertainment world.

In the book, our unnamed narrator – who speaks in the first-person plural most of the time – befriends M briefly and their lives mostly split. The handful of scenes where they spend time together give way to a flatly narrated series of scenes where M presents herself to the world.

The M who comes across in interviews and performances is as admirable as any star might be. She listens to others. She shares credit. She commits to causes worth supporting.

But our narrator paints her as ultimately an empty vessel. The trappings of fame – in particular the time-resistance of film performance (since film exists in a ‘forever state’ even as its actors age) – have hollowed her. When she is in the world at large, she has to remind herself to perform as if she is a “normal” person even as waiters and security guards, catching a glimpse of her, bend over backwards to accommodate her whims. (And she doesn’t recognize them as whims, just as things ordinary people do even as she loses sight of all that’s involved in giving her such ordinary pleasures.)

In one memorable scene, M encounters a saleswoman who looks, at first glance, a lot like her. She even has the same facial expressions. As a result, we get the fleeting sense that someone else, this saleswoman, might have experienced the (seemingly) great fortune of her career. Then, when the woman walks away, M sees that she is chunky with heavy legs, and she gets the chance to recollect that she is herself an unmatchable beauty, and that’s what has brought her such fame.

All that said, many of those same reviewers have asserted, or maybe just implied, that Cusk actually knew Portman and that this is an attempt at something like a real biography – even if it is, as M casually suggests at the start, our narrator has chosen to invent everything in it.

I understood that to be the case before I picked this up, and that’s what made me anticipate not liking it. There’s a cruelty in befriending someone and then, on so little evidence and with so deliberately one-sided an approach, to paint her as an incomplete human.

And, as part of that approach, Cusk writes in a monotone, drawing heavily on flat, stative-sentences with verbs of being rather than active ones.

And, nothing happens. There’s nothing at stake and no narrative (unless you count the little-explored fact of the narrator’s husband undergoing a frightening surgery).

As I reflect on this, though, I realize I have no way of knowing whether Cusk knows Portman – or, if she does, whether she knows her as the narrator knows M: as two women whose daily lives briefly intertwined enough for them to share a few intimacies.

In that case, I can see that Cusk might be using Portman as a lens to explore what it means to be a person – a self – in a time when so much of our lives is filmed and therefore performed. In that light, M is a powerful doorway into what fame means in a world that Andy Warhol foresaw.

M might be empty, but she is no more empty than the rest of us, just far more present.

I’m still not sure I like that message, but I like the way Cusk is asking us to play the game alongside her. Her idea of self-ness is harrowing, and her sense that fame – even fame granted to someone whose surface reactions are unimpeachable – exacerbates that idea is all the more troubling.

In asking us to think of Portman who, for all we know, may be in on the literary joke or may simply be the paragon Cusk has chosen to work through, we’re asked to read this with the possibility of it as a roman-a-clef and with the possibility of it as a serious philosophical novel.

I can’t decide what it is, and I don’t its message or its style.

But I do enjoy that Cusk has made me think about it, and, for that, I am surprised to find myself recommending it.


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Review: The Land of Laughs

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a great premise, one that’s hard to talk about without a (view spoiler)[

Thomas Abbey is the son of a one-time famous movie star, and that’s made him the product of stories that others tell about him. People are constantly asking him what his father was like and how it felt to be his son. As such, he has a hard time defining himself – telling his own story, if you will.

The exception to that came in his passion for work of the C.S. Lewis-like writer, Marshall France. Reading those books entrances him, and he feels fully himself when he’s immersed in the writing. Early on, he has a meet-cute with a fellow fanatic, and the two of them embark on a mission to try to write the definitive biography of France. To do that, they relocate to the small town where he lived and where his daughter still lives.

Eventually – and here’s where the real spoiler comes in – we learn a strange and beguiling truth about the town. Other than Anna and a man named Richard, everyone there is a living, breathing person…but also the fictional creation of France. That is, sometime after France wrote his early best-selling books, he discovered that the things he wrote about the town began to happen. When he wrote of births, the kids were born, and the deaths he described happened just as he described them. When he decided he didn’t like a couple he’d invented, he had them transform into Bull Terriers and become beloved pets.

What’s compelling in all that is the way the characters appreciate living in a universe that’s all been written for them. They don’t fear random death. Since they’ve all read what France wrote about them, they know when they will die and how. Without that surprise, they don’t have the existential dread of the rest of us. They know the end of the story someone else has written for them, so they can live and appreciate every moment they have.

In recent months, though, something has changed. People are dying outside their prescribed narrative, and it’s profoundly unsettling. France had warned them it might happen after he died, but now they’re on the brink of having to confront the uncertainty of real mortal lives.

But the even deeper spoiler comes toward the end when we learn why Anna has given Thomas permission to write the book. France has warned his creations that, in such an event, they will need to find someone who has something of his writerly gift – someone who can write his biography in such a way that he will return as a character that biographer has written.

I loved – really loved – the clever conclusion, which, while taking place in the final two pages, is the biggest spoiler of the, all. Thomas has escaped the town (they have killed his girlfriend Saxony) and, on the run from Richard who’s been assigned to kill him, he has written his own book: a biography of his father.

Then, just as Richard has cornered him with gun drawn, Thomas’s father – brought back to life by the biography – distracts Richard long enough for Thomas to pull his own gun.

I’m retelling it too quickly to give the full effect, but it’s satisfyingly clever and worth hanging onto this until the final pages. (hide spoiler)]

All of that is a great and creepy premise, and it’s lingered for me as a tightly and originally plotted story. Very original.

There are a few dated references here that take away from the edginess of it all – it’s a product of the pop culture of its moment rather than a timeless story. And there are stretches where the narrative seems to drag more than necessary. (Including, for instance, a mostly gratuitous first chapter.) So, I can’t quite give it the full five-star rating.

But this is definitely a pleasure to read, and I have Carroll on my list of writers to come back to.


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Review: Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In some ways, this book is a bait and switch. The title and back cover copy tell us it is an account of how North and South America came to be peopled by prehistoric pioneers from – probably Asia but maybe from South Sea islanders – who became the ancestors of the vast and varied New World peoples.

It is that book, but only after it’s another one first.

That book is, it seems to me, Rath’s grappling with the ethics of European-descended white anthropologists doing work that can fly in the face of Native American origin myths. Who are any of us, she asks, to recover long-buried bodies, test their DNA, and then hypothesize about their distant origins.

Her answer is that we have to be respectful at all times, not simply asking for permission but entering into the work with the recognition that Native perspectives are even more valid than our scientific ones. If they tell us that Kenewick Man deserves to be reburied – despite his body’s capacity to tell us so much about nine millennia for which we have no other souce – then he deserves to be reburied.

She is right, of course, but it sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed, and it comes as introduction to the scientific work she has promised us. I’d be open to that other book, but I’d want it to be the acknowledged center of the work rather than something that, as here, comes as a long prologue – and repeated refrain – to the work she has promised us.

As far as that work, her unpacking of what the latest ancient DNA analysis suggests about the peopling of the New World, things can get a bit clunky.

I’ve read a lot of excellent science writing lately, and Raff doesn’t quite have the same facility with translating the frontiers of her field to a lay reader. She falls back a lot of acronyms which, even though she defines them, come to feel like buzzwords. She refers often to the theory that the last great ice age, which lowered sea levels to the point that there was a “land bridge” across the Bering Strait. (I put the term in quotes because, as she explains, it was not a slender piece of dry land but rather a vast space in which prehistoric humans lived rather than simply passed over.)

So, even the promised parts get hard to follow,

There are some redeeming elements, though. She does paint a good outline of the competing theories in her field, noting that she is part of a younger generation contesting the previous consensus that the New World was peopled by the Clovis group with its high-tech stone arrow- and spearheads.

She also has a nice sequence on how it feels to do the actual bench chemistry work of extracting ancient DNA. It’s laborious, and even trained scientists fail in as many attempts as they succeed in.

So, this is something of a mixed bag. I learned some from it, but I don’t find it as successful as some of the other recent work on the subject.


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Review: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I agree with the thrust of this book’s argument: American capitalism took a dark turn in the early 1980s when a “Greed is good” mentality took over. The idea of “corporate citizenship” came to seem quaint, and whatever good corporations might once have done – it’s a dubious good, but there is evidence of corporate culture that enabled the growth of many middle-class families and their communities – turned into history.

Gelles locates this transformation in the philosophy and work of Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric who pioneered the notion – or at least pioneered applying the developing philosophy – that shareholder returns trumped all other concerns. That meant offshoring production, breaking unions, skimping on research and development, and ruthlessly turning over personnel who were -- rather than a company’s asset – a company’s expense.

At his most extreme, Gelles tells us, Welch actually tried to ban the company directors from using the word “loyalty” because he had come to see everyone attached to the company as there for purely transactional reasons.

I don’t doubt Gelles ’s account of all this. I’m old enough to remember some of it taking place, and I remember “Neutron Jack” as the kind of corporate blowhard that my long-haired college friends and I alternately cursed and laughed at.

And I do admire Gelles ’s passion in showing how Welch’s legacy has turned so sour. The man once haled as the “CEO of the century” had the company he built melt away under his successor and had his various disciples run, raise, and ruin a series of other major corporations.

What I do question is how much of the blame he assigns to one man. In Gelles ’s view, Welch is the architect of all that went wrong. While I acknowledge that he was a major player, I’m inclined to see him more as a symptom rather than a creator of that social sickness.

Gelles ’s approach makes for a very thin narrative. He has a lengthy introduction that tells more or less everything there is to say about Welch’s life and career. Then, in the next several chapters, he retells it. In some of those later chapters, I had an odd sense of déjà vu, a feeling that I was hearing something I’d heard before.

Then I remembered that Gelles had said it in the introduction.

I take that repetition as supporting my concern about the thinness of the narrative. Welch played a pivotal part in applying theories that people like Milton Friedman were proposing, but this book might have been just as successful if it focused on Friedman and his influence rather than Welch and his practices.

Or, maybe this could have centered on the Reagan-era deregulations that made possible the corporate growth, acquisitions, and under-scrutinized accounting that underlay Welch’s work.

My point is that this corruption of American capitalism has many authors. Putting Welch at the center of it is almost an optimistic move. It suggests – as the final chapters do – that we can return to a more benign economic structure of only we counteract his legacy through more enlightened corporate practices.

I don’t pretend to know the solution myself, but I can see – in many ways from the evidence of this book – that it’s bigger than one man. This story tries to make it about that one man, when – depressing legacy that he no doubt leaves – it’s really about a culture that lost its way.


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Review: The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder

The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn’t realize what I was getting into when I picked this one up, but it’s got some amazing material. I can’t say that material adds up to a great book, but, if you want some excellent natural science writing – with a dash of drama – you can’t do better than a handful of these articles.

I dimly recognized Preston as the co-author with Lincoln Child of a series of books I’ll see (and ignore) at library bookstores. I did not recognize him, though, as the author of “The Mystery of Hell Creek,” an article I read in The New Yorker when it first came out in 2019…and that I enjoyed so much that I read it a second time soon after.

I’ve now read it a third time, and I still find it one of the most engaging science articles I’ve ever read. (It’s about an archeological site that seems to have captured the moment of the meteor crash that killed most of the dinosaurs and led to the rise of mammals.)

There are some other excellent pieces here. “The Monster of Florence” seems like it couldn’t be nonfiction, but it is. Preston tells of how, when he worked to cover the investigation of an Italian Serial Killer,” he got drawn into the case and was eventually charged – by a man he sees as a vengeful prosecutor angry that Preston was part of debunking his pet theory – as an accessory to the crimes himself.

And then my second favorite story here is “Trial by Fury,” which is a sort of sequel to “The Monster of Florence.” In it, he recounts how the same prosecutor went on to charge American Amanda Knox with murdering her roommate. When various on-line haters of Knox found out about Preston’s earlier clash with the prosecutor, they began attacking him in ways he couldn’t imagine.

Rather than answer those charges directly, Preston looks to evolutionary biology to explain a vitriol that mystifies him. I have long been interested in “sociopaths,” whom I understand as those individuals who put their own welfare ahead of the communal. Early humans worked together to survive with everyone taking chances to benefit the collective. Sociopaths, as I see them, recognized they could let others take chances while lying low and reaping the benefits.

In Preston’s reading, we developed a collective answer in the impulse to be outraged at people who violate what some see as the collective good. So, the anti-Knox haters saw Knox (and, by extension, Preston) as shirkers who needed to be called out.

I’m not giving a great paraphrase, but I found it compelling, and I’ve enjoyed mulling it over.

So, the best of these are terrific writing. In fact, all of this is well done to one degree or another…barring the occasional overdramatization.

At the same time, I think this is less than the sum of its fine parts. There’s a vanity to the project in that it’s a collection of Preston’s best nonfiction. But his nonfiction is less creative, personal writing and more journalism. And, if journalism is the first draft of history, many of these are first drafts that need to be updated to reflect new discoveries. Preston gives us a paragraph or two of update for many of them, but that’s not quite enough.

Instead, I feel as if many of these could, properly developed, worked as full-length books in their own right. Preston hasn’t wanted to put the time in for that – and why would he when he can team up with Child for surefire bestseller – so it feels like settling for something less.

Anyway, an interesting mixed bad, and a glimpse at someone who does what he does very well.


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Review: Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song

Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song by Sara Bareilles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Janitor

The Janitor by Don Winslow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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