The optical trick of seamless motion works because the human eye retains an image for the briefest of moments after it’s gone. Our mind fills in the gaps. The moving image has always relied on this fact. The key is knowing what you can leave out.

Rachel Cusk has worked in this flick-book mode for some time. Her celebrated Outline trilogy (2014–18) was linked by the gauzy presence of the Cusk-like narrator, Faye, and the fact that each book presented a series of encounters with other characters, hard to connect when you stopped to think about it but undoubtedly related, nonetheless. The Cusk-like narrator in Parade (2024), which garnered more critical confusion than praise but was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize anyway, is unnamed and floats between anonymous European cities looking at and thinking about art. Her travels are interspersed with a series of stories about artists, all of whom are given the name G. 

In her new novel, Cusk has again created a character known only by an initial. This time, her ouija board has landed on M, a letter she also used for the writer-narrator character in Second Place (2021), her ‘version’ of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s epistolary memoir of the time D H Lawrence