Cusk is brilliant, but her skill has always been at reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces: the violent struggle between men and women; the primal wounds left by abuse; the emptiness at the heart of identity. In other words, obviously, a Cusk book about you is never going to be flattering. 

Is this what happened? Chatter in New York literary circles says that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is based on Cusk’s relationship with Portman. The novel, which will be published next month, is about a famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her. M’s key biographical information is very similar to Portman’s. The actress’s dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of the book, is also said to be true to life. If so, it’s ironic in the extreme, since the impossibility of identity itself — and thus of anything being, truly, “true to life” — is the book’s central theme, a fact that says more about Cusk than it ever could about Portman.

The author-character points this out to the angry actress, but to no avail.

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Life of M begins: “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.” The writer-narrator goes on to explain that she met M in a bookstore (“M is interested in books”) and that “in addition to being a film star, she was the model for a major brand, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked perspex of bus shelters.” 

Portman, famously, pulled back from acting in order to attend Harvard from 1999 to 2003, following her casting in the Star Wars franchise. She runs a book club, and often posts book-selfies on Instagram — with a coy eye peeking around the cover of whatever she’s currently reading —  so she is clearly “interested in books.” She is a global brand ambassador for Christian Dior, the face of the Miss Dior perfume since 2011; in an atomized media landscape, she is one of the few actresses whose faces still really are everywhere. The two characters live in an unnamed European capital with a central river, which could be Paris, where both Cusk and Portman reside, though the details are rendered in Cusk’s usual palette of flattening-neoliberal-global-dystopia: well-groomed men and women run along the river “like gods in the sun,” others “lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains.”  

Such material could be true of many stars, and the comparison is more pointed than this. The narrator tells us, also in the opening sequence, directly after an allusion to a book about a woman who was sexually abused as a child, that M became famous as a child, and that “the script of her first film originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character.” The scenes were cut after M’s mother objected, Cusk writes. 

Portman, famously, was catapulted to stardom by her turn in the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon: The Professional, filmed when she was 11 and 12 years old. In that movie, before we see her face, the camera dwells lovingly on her skinny and formless child’s legs and thighs — a detail perhaps more shocking in 2026 than in 1994, but uncomfortable even in that era. The Professional’s plot is about Portman’s character’s Lolita-like (though unconsummated) relationship with an adult hitman, Léon, played by Besson stalwart Jean Reno. It’s a matter of public record that Portman’s mother demanded that more explicitly sexual material be cut from the script. Nonetheless, Portman’s beautiful baby-face and gangly body are lavishly sexualized by the camera, and Portman has called her adult relationship to the film “complicated.” She has also revealed that she was harassed and slut-shamed as a child after its success, which was traumatizing for her, an experience shared by M. 

There is more. M claims in the novel’s final pages that the author-character has made her “identifiable,” yet “filled the book with things she herself didn’t recognize.” M says the book is full of factual errors, so many she gave up keeping track of them. She hasn’t been to the places the author describes or done the things the author says she has. “It isn’t you,” our narrator-author replies. “It isn’t anyone.” The portrait in the book is what anyone could have written, based on M’s publicly available work and biography. 

The statement, of course, is that of a fictional character, and unless Portman does come forth to correct the record, the truth will never be known — nor can it really matter, except to Portman. Cusk is a slippery and layered writer, and has long trafficked in the roles and archetypes that plague even ordinary mortals. The exploration of a character who is explicitly playing herself, or is trying to, but has no real self underneath, as she characterizes M’s existence, would naturally be attractive to her. In her cosmology, it is a universal condition of the haute-bourgeoise. And a character whose “self” is an object or commodity also has rich Cuskian appeal. She has always seen us as vessels; M’s container is merely more valuable than most. 

The resulting book is a feat, simpler and more direct than 2024’s Parade, with its multiple plot lines and experimental structure, but also more crystalline and just as complex beneath the surface. Cusk is also at her best with aphorism and insight here, always a strength of her work. For readers who have yet to fall in love with Cusk, this might be the book to start with. 

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book also brims with juicy revelations about M’s psychology. It feels like we’re catching a glimpse of Portman. “M had told me that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,” the author-narrator recounts. This event, with its swirling undercurrents of sexual abuse, is a primal violence of a kind that the author also believes she has suffered, a violence that detaches both women from reality and their own identities. The writer is secure in her craft, but it becomes the actress’s healing quest “not to create, but to try to make her life seem more normal.” M occasionally picks up her own children from school; she goes to parties and talks to non-famous people; she reads the news with touching sincerity, as if it will teach her how to be human. 

M wants to be real, but for her “there was nowhere to go back to. There was no dream country where the original self might one day be found.”

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To anyone other than Cusk, it might seem cruel to dash M’s dreams of normality and selfhood. But a darker, more fascinating portrait of celebrity emerges, in which M is both bewildered perpetrator and victim. Yes, she lives in a cold, palatial house that is “like a big doll’s house, with her as a doll inside of it.” She attends meetings in gloriously expensive, ruthlessly designed rooms, takes vacations in equally luxurious faux-farmhouses, and goes to a spa that is “a stern and celestial oasis in the sky.” Everywhere doors are magically opened for her, conveniences are arranged, and she is served by people with “specialized roles,” there “to do M’s bidding.” Cusk’s penchant for satire of this nature — especially the embedded satire of the movie star with pretensions to reading — could not possibly have pleased the real-life Portman, if the behind-the-scenes speculation is true.  

And M wants to live this way. She is secretly irritated when ugliness and inconvenience intrude on her environments: the farmhouse’s sick caretaker coughing, for example. When a visiting relative is hit by a car, and M has to supervise the recovery, it isn’t an opportunity for compassion and connection, but “an episode of primal confusion.” She finds listening to friends talk about themselves in cafés a little challenging, and so on. Still, we feel sorry for her, as the true extent of her alienation sinks in. The bodies of the homeless that litter the story begin to seem a metaphor for M herself.  

It is one of Cusk’s regular narrative innovations to include in her works sections told in a choral “we” voice. Here, the “we” may be intended to represent the narrator and other writers like her, but it also may be intended to speak for herself and M, the pair of friends. In one of these sections, she speculates that “we” have lost the capacity to love — something about “our” separation from reality, or “our” awareness of the underlying truth that such separation is the basic human condition — prevents it. In this matrix, love is attached to the (naive, illusory) experience of the real. “We” are left with hatred. In a beautiful, terrifying passage, she writes about “our” longest love relationship, which ended in a “meticulous and detailed” hatred that appeared “to form a total condemnation of our character…. The hate felt like the stone or the pit that was left when all the fruit of love had been eaten.” 

Cusk tends to land in such places: hatred, somehow, instead of love. The cold intellectualism with which she approaches the human seems to naturally produce this result. As an artist, she has never spared herself the bitter fruit of her own creation — including in several memoirs. M surely should not have expected anything else from the narrator. And if the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy — including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.

Such are my conclusions after spending time on BookTok, a.k.a. the bit of TikTok where supposed book-lovers like to hang out. BookTok is massive, with more than 77 million posts, most of them by young women. Last month it launched an official bestseller list, which turned out to be full of sexually explicit romance and “romantasy” books: the kind where a mysteriously suave basilisk accidentally spills coffee over a young lady as she is leaving a candle shop, and the rest is written in the stars.

BookTok’s bestseller list is generated by combining sales figures with the activity patterns of users. A typical post involves filming yourself holding a tantalizingly anonymous pile of books, then revealing the covers to camera, one by one, with maximum drama and enthusiasm. You have about a minute to convey your feelings without losing your audience, so there’s no need to go all Harold Bloom. “These five God-tier novels left my jaw on the floor” will do.

As well as recommendations, there are jokey self-referential vids about BookTok itself, helping to mythologize the sort of sensitive, introverted, sex-mad dreamer who uses it. Sometimes you get discussion of the classics — “The Count of Monte Cristo is CRISPY, it is CLEAN”, as one user puts it  — but mostly it features contemporary stuff. You can also find information about how to leave the house to attend a newly popular sort of event known as a silent book club — something we older folk would call “going to the library”.

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The aged generations have their own online platforms, though they are more staid and celebrity-driven. Boomers have Oprah’s book club, which has given them regular doses of uplift, inspiration, and empowerment since 1996. Amazon has just bought the rights to it. Gen X-ers have Reese Witherspoon’s hugely successful club; its owner likes to “consciously curate the stories and autonomy of women, championing voices and platforming authors too often overlooked”. Millennials have Dua Lipa’s newsletter — a subject I have visited before — now recommending “Books To Read When You’re Burnt Out & Only Have The Attention Span For A Short Story” or “Books For Reinventing Yourself Without Resorting To Cutting Your Hair”. It all feels quite intimate, like a trusted friend is talking to you, but also someone more glamorous than your actual pals: a world-renowned tastemaker, getting you in on emerging trends.

As the Economist noted last week in a piece on the rise of celebrity book clubs, the prevailing mood is relentlessly positive. Passion is a prerequisite, and joy at the reading experience non-negotiable — unless you are temporarily heartbroken by the plot. All the positivity seems inextricably bound up with progressive politics. Book clubs started off as scripture discussion groups for women, and not much has changed, mood wise. Titles are chosen for their improving messages, often tied to the admirable ethnic or sexual identity of the author. It is implicitly understood that no-one is allowed to be mean.

A blurb for a civil service virtual book club last year captures the ambiance, inviting participants whether gay or straight to “join the vibrant world of literature and inclusivity … sharing insights and fostering meaningful discussions on the power of queer narratives” — with a note about desired standards of behavior attached. “We expect that everyone attending one of our events will also choose their words carefully and sensitively.” Translation: if you are looking for an exhilaratingly savage takedown of Audre Lorde, you had better go somewhere else.

All this fastidious suppressing of bad vibes gets suffocating quite quickly. Recurring fantasies in the online book world are of a “cozy”, “safe” place for reading. Ideally, as you read you should be in a dedicated “nook”, swaddled in beige blankets. The imagery seems like shorthand for so much more than soft furnishings. Indeed, if modern book culture was an interior design mood, it would be cottagecore: a crackling fire in the grate, snow banking against the mullioned windows, a cat on your legs. Admittedly, the Gen Z version would have a sex-crazed basilisk chained up outside, and the Gen X-ers would have a serial killer peering through the window; but still, as Léon once said to an approving Emma in Madame Bovary: “what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?”

Here Flaubert was satirizing an approach which treats novels as a means of romantic escape or as emotional catharsis, though I’m not sure that the thousands of people discussing his book online have noticed his point. A modern day Gustave would have been equally devastating on the popular idea that reading is a way of improving your mental health. Dreamy, sexually frustrated Emma would have made a great BookTokker: “I adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.” She is talking about her favorite Walter Scott novels, but she might just as well be talking about Rebecca Yarros’s dragon riders.

Criticism of book club culture is generally frowned upon as snobbish and counterproductive. Publishers are not going to complain about it — while sales are generally down, their figures are heavily dependent on viral attention. Authors such as Yarros and Sarah J. Maas have sold millions of copies in the last few years, largely thanks to BookTok. And those worried about the decline in literacy might protest: shouldn’t we just be grateful that young people are reading things longer than a few lines and getting excited about them? Along with the mandatory positivity about books, there is a feeling we’re supposed to grin and bear the surrounding discourse.

But there are downsides, and not just for authors who don’t have the potential for virality, or for young men, put off reading for life by the cartoonishly feminized aesthetic. A less obvious one concerns the death of criticism, in a sense that takes account of form as well as content: a concentrated unpicking of language in terms of things like rhythm, imagery, and rhetorical devices, and the interplay of these with style, plot, and major themes. This requires attention to chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and not just the whole. It means forgetting about how a book makes you feel, or what inspiring message it conveys, and getting dispassionately deep into the mechanics. It means stopping treating the book as a cool experience like a funfair ride or a sunset, and thinking of it as a deliberate creation of a particular mind instead.

Literature departments obsessed with social justice spend less and less time on close reading; overexcited heads turn towards saving the world, and away from the text as an object of independent interest. Inevitably pressed for space, newspaper book reviews are not very good at deep analysis either; and in any case these are disappearing too. An article in the New York Times last month noted that there were only five full-time literary critics left in the whole of the States.

In this respect, I had hopes for Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s new podcast The Book Club, but they too seem to focus on the social context of narratives and on emotional effects, rather than literary technique. And you certainly aren’t going to learn how to do close reading on BookTok. It’s the sort of thing that takes concentration and time and is very unlikely to go viral.

The gap creates a problem for discernment. With the focus on the macro not the micro, there is a general decrease in appreciation of the range of effects that literary devices can create. In looking only for the emotional power inherent in a work, or what a book can tell us about contemporary society, readers are missing huge parts of what can make a masterpiece so good: anacoluthon, apostrophe, assonance, and the rest of the rhetorical alphabet, exponentially breeding meanings as they interact with one other. And more basically, lack of familiarity also means readers can totally misunderstand what is going on in the story.

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Take the case of free indirect discourse, which, it seems, is increasingly hard for present-day readers to comprehend. When Flaubert’s narrator describes how Emma, who has just taken a lover and is now looking at herself delightedly in the mirror, “was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium” we are not supposed to think he means it. Rather, in full knowledge of the heroine’s tendency to fantasize, we are invited to share the joke of her delusion.

But when popular approaches to literature urge us to search constantly for the heartfelt and sincere in a text, not the playful, witty, or oblique, you get a flat-footed literalism in the reader; one that is blind to subtle signs of something more ambivalent and interesting. And the fewer people that understand indications of ironic distance, the less likely it is that authors will try it out in new writing; for with an oblivious audience prone to misunderstanding, it becomes risky to play.

In the essay on Flaubert in his masterly Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote that “Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the character in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Léon do”. It is what a lot of us do, ultimately to the detriment of the quality of thought in the public realm. Delicately wrought tools of self-expression and communication, developed over centuries, and able to convey endless depth and interest, are falling out of use. And we are too busy feeling moved, inspired, or filled with lust about werewolves to notice.