Rachel Cusk’s Life of M, a roman à clef transparently about Natalie Portman, was published in late August and reviewed badly. The New Yorker called it her weakest novel; the New York Times Magazine called it “a lost little book — undisciplined, unfocused and instantly forgettable.” Colton Valentine’s essay in The Drift does not defend the novel so much as ask what its critics refused to say about it: that it belongs to a genre with rules of its own, and that judging it by the standards of autofiction guarantees the verdict before the reading starts.

The history Valentine reconstructs:

  • The roman à clef begins in early modern France — John Barclay’s Latin satires, then Madeleine de Scudéry’s thinly veiled salon novels, whose Artamène, or Cyrus the Great (1649–53) ran to roughly two million words. Its protagonist was the Prince of Condé; Scudéry wrote herself in as the writer Sapho.
  • In eighteenth-century England, keys were printed and sold alongside the books. Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709) and Pope’s The Dunciad (1728) both came with decoders, sometimes unauthorized and contradictory. “How easily Two Wits agree, / One finds the Poem; One the Key,” read one title page.
  • By modernism the genre had turned to artistic milieus: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, H.D.’s HERmione. Henry James had already dismissed the form as a “tissue of personalities.”
  • The genre’s subject matter stayed aristocratic, and its elite assumptions grated as the novel turned toward ordinary life. Autofiction, Valentine argues, is that shift’s endpoint — everyman’s prose, and the standard against which a book about a woman with a spa membership is doomed to fail.
  • Against that: Fredric Jameson’s line that genres are “literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public.” Anna Kornbluh’s 2024 complaint that immediacy aesthetics are dissolving those contracts. Valentine’s twist is that here the readers are the ones tearing them up.

The essay’s best evidence is a single withheld name. Cusk describes a beautiful city, “a masterpiece of civilization,” and the big ugly tower built there — brutal, visible from everywhere, and the subject of a local joke that the only good view of the city is from its windows, since from there you cannot see it. Most readers will picture the Eiffel Tower and move on. It is the Tour Montparnasse. Cusk has set a trap for the habit of substituting the postcard for the building, and the reviewers walked into it.

Genre is not a key to all mythologies, and readers are free to find Life of M out of touch. Valentine’s point is narrower and harder to argue with: before a novel is declared brutal or ugly, someone should say what it is.