NEW YORK, NY.- Rachel Kushner had warned me that there might be snakes and one very mean turkey on the farm. There would also be mud; she recommended rubber boots. And, as far as she remembered, there was no cell service.
The property in Delaware County, New York, belonged to her cousin, who did not want to be named in this article but greeted me with a saxophone performance on the porch of a green cottage. Across the way was the house where Kushner, whose novels often explore society’s gritty margins, was staying for a few days early this summer.
“I was weeding for hours and hours yesterday,” she said.
Everyone who visits the farm must work. Over the years, even garage-rock band members recording music in the barn’s grain elevator have traversed rows of root vegetables in their jeans.
Kushner, 55, was used to it: In her 20s, shortly after her cousin purchased the land, she helped rescue the guesthouse from “a state of total abandon” and lived there on the weekends for a while. Years later, when her husband, a professor, received a fellowship at Cornell University, they would visit often with their young son.
The farm provided some inspiration for her fourth novel, “Creation Lake,” a sexy, noirish thriller about a 34-year-old American woman, a spy-for-hire, who infiltrates an eco-commune in the south of France.
Her mission is to disrupt its plans to sabotage government efforts to bring corporate agriculture to the area, but she finds herself occasionally distracted by warm six-packs of beer, a mysterious cave-dwelling philosopher and a communard she seduces.
Like other novels by Kushner, the book is centered on a tough female protagonist living among the political avant-garde and inside the author's playground of ideas — a combination that has earned her the notice of, and comparisons to, Don DeLillo. With “Creation Lake,” Kushner borrows more from the traditions of French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette or British spy novelist John le Carré while adding her own existential twist. She wrote the novel in 14 months.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life,” she said. “When I was writing that book, I do think that I preferred the world that I had made.
“What interests me,” she continued, “what I know, understand, is people who find ways to build their own reality.”
On the afternoon of my visit, word went out that a bobcat was stalking the farm, so the animals were locked up in the barn, including the mean turkey. Kushner introduced me to a calico kitten, Peaches, who scurried up her T-shirt and onto her shoulder.
To reach the barn, we hiked through tall grass. Like her protagonists, Kushner doesn’t mind roughing it a little.
In her essay collection, “The Hard Crowd,” which partly chronicles her coming-of-age in the Bay Area, she describes falling in with some “ratty delinquents” who skip school, take drugs and go to rock shows. It seems she was the softest in the group.
“To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home,” she writes in the title essay.
Kushner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and San Francisco, the daughter of scientists who considered the hippie movement to be conformist. Her mother sewed her brother’s clothes and made meals of government cheese. While studying for her doctorate in neurobiology, she asked the local anarchist-feminist bookstore if Rachel, age 5, could help shelve books.
At 16, Kushner enrolled at University of California, Berkeley, to study political economy, partly because her mother had told her not to major in English if she wanted to be a writer.
“I was interested in politics in those days because I sort of thought that the moral wars of my time were going to play themselves out in Central America,” she said, as they did in books by Joan Didion, Deborah Eisenberg and Denis Johnson.
Equipped with a fake ID, she worked at a nightclub called ’Til Two, intent on never having a “regular job.” She hung out with artists who weren’t interested in making objects for blue-chip galleries but in trying out more esoteric experiments.
Kushner remembered a young woman who dressed exclusively in U.S. Postal Service uniforms. Another friend, who partly inspired the character Giddle in Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers,” assumed the persona of a 1970s government worker for her job in a ticket booth.
For such people, “art is a lifelong performance and project and has deep ironies to it,” Kushner said. She admired their commitment: They would “never even admit to anyone that it is an art project.”
At 27, Kushner headed to New York for Columbia University, where she was a student in a workshop led by novelist Jonathan Franzen.
“Reading her work, you had no idea who she was or where she came from,” Franzen said in an email from the Brazilian Amazon. “From the very beginning, she was telling stories about people who weren’t her.”
Franzen referred Kushner to his literary agent, Susan Golomb, who encouraged her to pursue a novel about her family’s time in Cuba before the revolution. Her grandfather was a metallurgist and an engineer at an American-owned nickel mine.
Kushner said her debut novel, “Telex from Cuba,” published in 2008, lacks the comic sensibility of her more recent work. But it established her as a major presence in the literary world.
“It got the acclaim from all of the big hitters of the time — big guy hitters in particular who are no longer with us, including Robert Stone — because she really has a muscular style, and ambition,” said Nan Graham, her editor at Scribner.
Kushner said, “You have to have a certain kind of corny ambition to make stuff. There’s a lot of really brilliant people out there who, for reasons of social class or for other reasons to do with disillusionment, don’t have that kind of confidence.”
A few weeks later, at her home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Jason E. Smith, and their son, Remy, 17, Kushner showed me her art collection. Some of the pieces are sentimental because they hung in her grandfather’s house when she was a child; others she has written about, like the Laura Owens bicycle wheel painting she received as a trade for an essay, or a Matthew Porter print of a muscle car flying over the San Fernando Valley.
Her Los Angeles isn’t Hollywood; she said she tries to keep a distance from the film industry. (An exception is an adaptation of her third novel, “The Mars Room,” by her friend Ottessa Moshfegh.) Instead, she said, she pays more attention to “the textures and grit of real life, against a contradictory backdrop of urban brutality and incredible geographical glamour.”
When she’s not writing in her upstairs study, which has views of downtown Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium, she goes running in Elysian Park or hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains.
The day I visited, Remy, a self-taught mechanic, had been salvaging parts at a junkyard for the Dodge 360 Magnum engine he rebuilt this summer.
Though he said he had never read one of his mother’s novels, Remy has helped out with Kushner’s writing. Like his mother, he has spent most of his summers in France, but for him it has been at a summer camp whose program includes exploring prehistoric caves. When Kushner shared with him a passage from “Creation Lake” set in the caves, he had one note: Bruno, the philosopher character, “‘gives the impression he gets into the underground world a bit quickly, whereas in my experience, it is much more arduous,’” Kushner said, quoting her son.
Her husband, who was upstairs getting ready for dinner at an old French restaurant on Sunset, is the first reader of anything Kushner writes and, she said, “is key to the entire thing.” Through his knowledge of 20th-century France and leftist history, Kushner said, “I’m able to access an entire vast world through him,” and elaborate on certain details in her fiction.
They met at a mutual friend’s party in Los Angeles and married in 2007 at San Francisco City Hall, where her parents had wed a decade earlier.
“Creation Lake,” Smith said, will resonate with younger American readers “whose political and cultural lives have been defined by the 2008 economic crisis, the Occupy movement, and the pipeline blockade at Standing Rock, all of it shadowed by the slow doom of climate collapse.”
The novel is set in 2013, recent enough to feel familiar but long ago enough to give Kushner the benefit of distance.
“To write a contemporary novel in certain ways is harder, because you live in history, but you don’t have the hindsight component to get a spin on things, and yet you want to be able to recognize the warp and weft of where things are going,” she said.
With an inflated sense of her own invincibility, Kushner’s narrator, who goes by the alias Sadie Smith, thinks she has her targets firmly in her control. “If you have a good memory, and if you don’t get in the way of your constructed self, it’s not that hard, even under duress, to remember who you are supposed to be,” the character muses to herself. But it turns out Sadie’s lies and manipulations are not as smooth as she thinks.
Kushner said she wanted to explore “the idea of a narrator who thinks they are authoring the world around them.” That also describes the work of a novelist who, as “Creation Lake” suggests, may be a kind of spy, too. But Kushner said her narrator’s worldview is 180 degrees away from her own.
“People who think they have other people figured out, they’re missing out on a whole layer,” Kushner said. “Not just of that other person but of themselves.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
