For decades, Natalie Portman has been one of our most cerebral stars. A 1999 Vanity Fair cover, promoting “The Phantom Menace,” asked whether the then-17-year-old might “choose Harvard over Hollywood.” She managed to do both, earning an Ivy League degree and an Oscar. Her characters in movies from “Jackie” to “May December” are often overthinkers, and her Instagram book club picks tend toward high literature.
Who better, then, to serve as the heroine of a Rachel Cusk novel?
Cusk, the experimental novelist, is set to publish “Life of M,” about an unnamed actress coping with feelings of alienation and depersonalization, on Aug. 25. Cusk’s work, like the well-loved “Outline” trilogy, favors deep excavation of inner turmoil over what might be called “plot,” and “Life of M” is no exception. Still, the obvious similarities to the known facts of Portman’s life have earned the book plenty of buzz.
To wit: M, a former child star who received her greatest acclaim for playing a ballerina, is raising children, seemingly solo, in Paris. All of this checks out, and Portman’s putative connection to Cusk — she selected Cusk’s last novel, 2024’s “Parade,” for Natalie’s Book Club, and both actress and author live in Paris — lends the enterprise a juicy overlay of gossip.
There’s no public information indicating Portman’s involvement in the project, or whether she approved it at all. (Portman’s rep and the book’s publicist at Farrar, Straus and Giroux did not respond to requests for comment.) And if people are reading “Life of M” as a document of truth, it may be in part because the novel so confidently places its reader within restricted access zones. We see M through the eyes of a narrator, an unnamed person who has obtained M’s permission to document her life. And so we accompany M to a spa, where she and a younger actress chitchat about their peers and discuss Hollywood’s gender pay gap, and to an interview at a chic restaurant, where she observes strangers snapping her picture. The access Cusk grants extends deep into M’s mind as well: With her friend, M ponders how she might help a new generation of actresses despite her own “ennui” about the industry; with the journalist interviewing her, M is burdened “by the impossibility of anyone ever understanding what she is.”
The project of this book is to help us to know a person who rejects examination, just as journalists have struggled to crack Portman, who avoids discussing her personal life in interviews. “Life of M” is not the sort of novel that one can “spoil,” but suffice it to say that M ultimately makes her displeasure at the narrator’s project plain: Being under a writer’s gaze is, for her, intolerable. M comes by this aversion to fame honestly. We’re informed that “starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,” and that press coverage of her entanglements as an adult have strained her relationship with her family. She has constructed a series of walls, and within them, she mournfully wonders why, as Portman’s fellow former child performer Britney Spears once sang, these tears come at night.
Portman may be totally uninvolved with this project, although if she were, it wouldn’t be the first time she and an acclaimed novelist indulged a creative project. (In 2016, Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer furnished their personal email exchanges to The New York Times’ T Magazine, which published them alongside a Portman fashion shoot.) But “Life of M” succeeds as a novel, if not as celebrity journalism. M’s coldness and hauteur — we’re told she is “both overwhelmed by and indifferent to certain aspects of normality, so that she can never actually be normal” — go so far that one seeks to put a face on them, and so one may well imagine Portman’s. But a point “Life of M” works to make is that the hardened, remote M is the creature that our relentless scrutiny made. And reading a work of fiction as if it might unlock a movie star never named in its pages would only strengthen her resolve to hide all but her star persona away.
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