The last time I interviewed Rachel Kushner, for a live online event for International Literature Festival Dublin during the pandemic, a tech malfunction caused her interface to shrink to a tiny rectangle that framed only her nose and mouth, behind which was a very large rectangle of my own panicked head. As I stuttered through the questions, trying to continue on as if we weren’t trapped in a Beckett play, Kushner, a total pro, carried the hour-long interview in fluid, humorous, erudite fashion that will be familiar to anyone who has heard her speak in public, or indeed read her work.
Today’s interview also takes place over video call, where a thankfully whole-faced Kushner sits with her morning coffee in front of a wall lined with books in her home office in Angelino Heights, a historic neighbourhood near downtown Los Angeles. Asked to describe the locale for Irish readers, her answer is characteristically vibrant and specific: “It’s teeming with nature. I hear great horned owls hooting every single night. I hear the cry of wild rouge peacocks right now. There are packs of coyotes that wander the streets, even in the daytime. And now a train is sounding its horn, as it rolls through the industrial area a mile east.”
Kushner’s new novel Creation Lake, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is written with similar authority and attention to detail. The story of a wily American woman sent to rural France to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists, Le Moulinards, it is at once ambitious, cerebral and entertaining, easily a contender for the Booker win this November.
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While the spy plotline fills the book with tension, a second storyline, concerning the group’s enigmatic leader Bruno Lacombe, who lives in a cave and emails his theories back to base, gives Kushner a platform to talk about civilisation as a whole: where we come from, where we’re headed, and crucially, what we might have got wrong.
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This exploration of human nature, diving into the wreck, links all four of Kushner’s novels whose backdrops to date have been admirably varied: the expat life in Telex from Cuba (2008); the world of art and motorbikes in her sophomore novel The Flamethrowers (2013); a deep dive into the US prison system in her Booker shortlisted The Mars Room (2018); and now, to issues of anarchy and genetics in rural France with Creation Lake.
Kushner was first drawn to these ideas six years ago, after the publication of The Mars Room, when she started reading about new breakthroughs in the field of the genome. “I’m not a science person at all,” she says, “which is kind of ironic as my parents are both scientists and my brother is involved in the sciences too, but I started reading some of this new information which seemed to remap everything they thought they knew about prehistory and the ancient past.
“Suddenly there is this established set of markers by which geneticists can look at DNA and see a whole long written history inside one person’s DNA of every ancestor that came before them in this lineage. It seemed, not like the mystery was solved, but that the mystery was loud, that each person has inside of them this encoding of a long and unknown story.”
Initially she wanted to write a novel set in prehistoric times but after reading other fictional attempts, like William Golding’s The Inheritors, she felt it would be too difficult. “[Golding’s] novel is kind of interesting and smartly done but the limitations are beyond his talents. As a writer you’re basically tying both hands behind your back by writing into cultures whose language we don’t know anything about. I decided the only person who could do that to full effect would be Cormac McCarthy.”
Instead she chose a commune in France as a contemporary setting from which she could expound on these ideas. The Guyenne region in the book is fictional but draws on her knowledge and experience of central southwestern France where she has been going, along with her husband, the writer and academic Jason Smith, and their teenage son Remy, almost every summer for the last 15 years. “My husband is very involved in French philosophy, theory, literature, lived for a time in Paris before we met, and we sent our son to French school. He’s bilingual, grew up speaking French,” Kushner says.
Though she only started learning the language three years ago, Kushner’s love of French culture, philosophy and literature runs through Creation Lake, most memorably in this funny, merciless summary of one of their most cherished writers: “Céline was a leg man, obsessed with chorus girls. He once attended a dawn execution. He denounced, in addition to Jews, sloth, overeating, and ‘low IQ-ism’. He did not drink and preferred watching sex to having it.”
The description comes from Sadie Smith, the book’s narrator. Truly a heroine for our desperate times, Sadie is a beautiful American loner in her 30s. The reader knows very little about her back story, only that she’s intelligent, wry, mercenary, not to mention intriguingly sociopathic.
“I agree about the sociopathy,” says Kushner. “I’m always trying to figure out how I’m coming across to other people. There is constant real-time feedback to be liked and to anticipate how they’re seeing things. Sadie’s not concerned with that at all, except for in so far as it gives her information with which to manipulate others.”
Kushner spent years trying to come up with a narrator for her story before deciding that an American woman would give her “quicker, easier access to humour and a little bit of devilishness”. “It was like having an avatar that’s totally different from me, but a kind of reversal. She could have this sense of humour that was totally unapologetic and not dissimilar to mine,” Kushner says.
Humour is very important to both Kushner’s writing style and her process: “I think it might be the essence. As a person who consumes culture, I want depth of ideas. I want to be shown something that was otherwise invisible in life.” Echoing a line in Creation Lake, she says: “I think that’s what art does: it renders the unseen seen. If there isn’t a comic element in that process, a cracking open that produces terrific irony or terrible humour, then I’m not doing my job of producing truth. I question humour-free art. I’m not a fan of Anselm Kiefer, people who do big, heavy dirge-like things with no irony beneath it. I want to know that the creator of art is alive to the absurdities that surround him.”
For all her beliefs around the need for humour in the arts, Kushner is unflinching and unequivocal when discussing the current state of politics in her homeland, the tumultuous election year, and specifically the Israeli war on Gaza.
“I don’t see a big difference between the Democrats and the Republicans at this point because the moral stain is on us on account of what’s happened to the innocent civilians who live in Gaza,” she says. “I don’t see any difference in the policies of the two parties with regard to that. And I feel powerless to stop it. It’s a very heartbreaking, agonising situation and the government of my country is directly responsible for it.”
Kushner has a better idea than many Americans of the horrors. An essay in her acclaimed collection The Hard Crowd (2020) documented her experience of visiting Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem in 2016.
“There is incredible population density, 90,000 people in 1sq km, and at the time when I came back it was very clear to me that Shuafat was similar to Gaza in the sense of a very dense population being forced to live in a tiny squeezed area with a separation barrier, manned checkpoints and almost no services. It gives me some view into what the texture of Gaza would have been like before the Israeli attempt to annihilate that land and the people who live there,” Kushner says.
While she is often praised for fiction that is both personal and political, she says the quick news cycles and grabby headlines of the US media hold no interest for her when writing creatively. “I don’t feel convinced that this sort of politics in the most thin and surface sense of the word – things like the Democratic or Republican national conventions, or Trump and Biden etc – I don’t think that this is what’s inside of people. I don’t think it’s what they’re really thinking about. I always try to plumb something deeper in fiction,” she says.
Her novels involve years of thinking, researching and writing before she usually begins again at page one. The last time she visited Ireland was to promote her 2018 novel The Mars Room, and she is looking forward to returning later this month for the literary festival Write by the Sea in Kilmore Quay, Wexford, among other events.
“Ireland is my favourite place to go as a writer, it’s completely magical. For a country the size of New Jersey to have produced the most consequential, rich and genius anglophone literature in the history of the world as we know it makes it a very special place to go,” Kushner says.
“This is me essentialising Irish people but there’s a softness there that I appreciate so much and find really exquisite. I can be just walking down the road in the rain and a woman and her daughter will pull over and say, ‘Do you need a ride, love?’” she says, laughing. “And also, to have women there call me ‘pet’, that’s about the most special thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
