I’m still going through it but at least I read more than one book this month!
What I read in September:
Rachel Cusk, Life of M (2026)—There’s something almost interesting going with Cusk. I think she might . . . hate writing? people? herself? Fr I came away from this “novel” with one question, “Rachel, you awlright???”
I don’t really know what to say about Life of M because I found the experience of reading it borderline unpleasant but found the process of thinking about it fairly engaging.
What was unpleasant? The structure, style, and substance of the novel, to begin with (lmao). Much like another novel I found baffling and disappointing, Life of M uses the character of an actress to explore concepts of identity, interiority, and “reality.” Unlike Katie Kitamura’s Audition (2025), Cusk’s novel is narrated by a writer who has offered to “write” an actress’s “autobiography.”1
It’s also possibly intermittently narrated by an omniscient narrator? Or it’s the original narrator switching from first person singular to first person plural in what I can only describe as a profoundly irritating demand to universalize the narrator’s worldview? Or the narrator is switching to the voice of the “autobiography” “written” by the narrator and the actress, as imagined by the narrator, who is revealed at the end to perhaps be “unstable”?2 Either way, between the switches to first person plural and the shifts to opening scenes with “It is a,”3 it’s like there’s simultaneously not enough and too much going on in this slim volume to add up to anything substantial and coherent?
and another thing: im not mad. please don’t put it in the Book Report that I got mad about the juicelessness of the fictional portrayal of the real-life person I now refer to as Matalie Portman. That’s on me for building expectations that Cusk would be completely weird in the way that Jonathan Safran Foer famously was about Portman. Cusk was weird in the way that only Cusk could be—transparently, coldly, contemptuously, and unfailingly bending everything back to herself. Sorry, I mean to the “narrator.” Life of M did nothing to advance my understanding of why writers are so obsessed with Natalie Portman, but maybe that’s the point of the novel! (It’s not).
About as enjoyable as watching an Alexander Zverev match.
As when I wrote about Audition, just now I again broke my rule of not reading reviews of the novel before completing my own report. I needed to check whether I’ve been unjustifiably and excessively hateful. Good news—I haven’t. 😏
Which brings me to the pleasure of thinking and reading about this book. Becca Rothfeld’s review of Life of M is downright thrilling. And the mess I’d hoped to find within the novel I instead found in The Guardian’s tabloidy list of “nine things you need to know about the literary hoo-haa” around Life of M. The question raised by the “mainstream interest” in this piece of literary fiction—“could more gossip solve the reading crisis?”—felt written just for me! So, thanks a lot, Rachel . . . I guess???
Aurora Stewart de Peña, Julius Julius (2026)4—Context is everything when it comes to what I think about this debut novel. Namely, Julius Julius benefits from my low expectations that a copywriter could create a “not annoying” book about advertising as well as from my recent experience reading a thin volume filled with sweeping pronouncements about the way we live now (ie, Life of M).
Stewart de Peña’s debut is like 3 vignettes of varying length told from the perspective of different employees at “the world’s oldest advertising agency,” which dates to 79 AD in Pompeii. This novel has everything: ghosts that sexually harass employees using emails with lots of emoji, 101-year-old archivists, office dachshunds named after beans and types of noodles, caves, pineapple-shaped laundry hampers, and competing briefs for tuna rebrand campaigns.
It was easy to read in the span of a morning, partly because it is interesting and humorous, and partly because it’s functionally formatted like a deck. Lots of white space, bulleted lists. “Snackable”5 copy. Whether Stewart de Peña did that because this book is above all else a satire of the world of advertising or because she is from that world and is so immersed in the style that she can’t write any other way is immaterial to me. I guess as the reader I am client and I liked the yummy snacky content!
Other things I liked about Julius Julius:
The scope—appropriately sized for the subject matter. Stewart de Peña isn’t out here trying to communicate profound truths with her anthropological jaunt through an agency. But she does get some zingers in here and there with observations about certain types of people (“Never tell an account guy about a dream you had because he’ll swear he can’t remember his dreams . . . these account guys are so committed to maintaining blandness that they can’t even admit they’ve got a subconscious” [33])
The way it reminded me of other strange, small delights from my past. Little indie novels that were charming and weird, such as Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! (2012). I’d say they don’t make ‘em like that anymore, but clearly they do
It’s pretty funny
What I’m looking forward to reading in October:
Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)6
What I’m looking forward to watching in October:
You Can See Everything (2026)
The Social Reckoning (2026)
Playoff baseball 😈
1 Because there is literally no other indication in the book that the narrator/writer would be ghost-writing the story of the actress’s life—in fact there’s basically no mention at all of writing/the book at all again until the final scene—I find the word choice of “autobiography” to be a total mystery. Maybe it’s me!! ALSO . . . It has come to my attention (I remembered because Friend of the Report, Neeru, nominated it for Book Club) that Gertrude Stein wrote an “autobiography” of Alice B. Toklas. If Cusk is trying to reference that book, she better not be.
2 An unreliable narrator. Groundbreaking.
3 “It is a hotel room in a foreign city” (25), “It is an office, square and high-ceilinged” (31), “It is the interior of a limousine” (34), “It is a brasserie on a grey boulevard” (50), “It is a terrace above an olive grove” (68), “It is a boat, becalmed, a large wooden schooner of great beauty” (74), “It is a meeting room, large and light” (93), “It is a practice room at the back of an old theatre” (99), “It is a bookstore” (115), “It is a room in an apartment” (120), “It is a spa on the top floor of a tall building” (133), “It is a trailer, approximately four metres by six” (155), “It is a restaurant, hidden away down a passage” (158), “It is a cinema in the student part of the city” (169), “It is an opening at an art gallery” (174).
4 Book Club selection for September.
5 While this term is not used in the book, it very well could have been. The world of advertising is where I first learned this hateful word, hateful because reduces things such as “language” and “ideas” to something that’s not even a meal. Snacks. Snackable. Ugh.
6 Book Club selection for October.
