A novelist’s dark portrait of Natalie Portman

The actor Natalie Portman has long seemed more like a person who wants to brand herself as smart than like a person who is actually smart — and her decision to let her friend Rachel Cusk write a book about her seems to confirm this. Portman has read many Rachel Cusk books. She picked Parade, published in 2024, as the June selection for her Instagram book club. In 2022, she hosted a discussion with the writer upon publication of Cusk’s 11th novel, Second Place, and picked it for the book club as well. Yet no one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk’s work would allow her to write about her — at least, no one with a sense of self-preservation and a public image to protect. Cusk is brilliant, but her skill has always been at reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold exist