There are weird people out there who have no identity

Rachel Kushner the literary titan comes through talking about her existential new spy novel, the power of thinking with your hands, and more unbeatable topics

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Rachel Kushner — she’s one of the great American writers. I (Jonah) first caught wind of her around the time of her hit second novel, 2013’s The Flamethrowers. It’s a fantastic book about a young artist who moves to ‘70s-era NYC from Reno, circulating through a demimonde of beautiful and/or f**ked-up artworld-adjacent characters. For her, art isn’t worthy of the name if it doesn’t have high stakes, and in that spirit she embarks on a trip to “draw” on desert salt flats with a motorcycle at triple-digit speeds. (It doesn’t go as planned.) She also finds time to post up at a lavish Italian villa with her hot rich art-star boyfriend and his family of cursed Milanese industrialists, and to link and build with some anarchists in Rome. It’s a brilliant book about artistic ambition, moral awakenings, labor unrest, colonial resource extraction, and trying to find the line between “genuine” radicality and its affected pantomime.

In Rachel’s excellent 2018 follow-up novel, The Mars Room, she dug deeper into the social fringes, capturing the grim inner workings of a California women’s carceral facility with a lived-in potency that had me looking up whether she’d ever done time herself. She’s also written excellent non-fiction about a variety of topics, such as life in scuzzy ‘90s-era San Francisco, in The Hard Crowd; visiting a walled-off Palestinian refugee camp for the New York Times Magazine; and meeting celebrities and looking bad in photos standing beside them for Harper’s.

Across it all — and in her brand-new novel, Creation Lake — Rachel has a unique combination of perceptiveness, vividness, curiosity, pathos, world-weariness, and sly humor. On one level, the new book is a spy thriller, and it reads just as propulsively. I wolfed it down in a couple days. But it’s also a meditation on the malleability of the self, how acient caves are trippy, and whether the key to our salvation lies in the ancient kindvibed brains of Neanderthals.

I gave Rachel a call the other day to talk about rooting against her narrator; writing a novel to exorcise demons vs. writing a novel to get revenge on a demon; her 2016 trip to meet Palestinians living in the Shuafat refugee camp; how her son is apparently a polymath gigachad; and more “unbeatable topics.”

Photo by Chloe Aftel

Blackbird Spyplane: I have a deep, built-in sympathy when I encounter stories about eco activists and animal-rights activists. It’s related to the built-in sympathy I feel for stories about bank robbers. They might be on the wrong side of the law, but they’re on the right side of a lonely fight, and I want them to win —

Rachel Kushner: “No doubt.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I’d bet that’s a sympathy most readers share, and in that context you do something bold in the new novel, which is create a narrator we want to lose. She’s a spy called Sadie, hired by shady corporate interests to infiltrate a collective of eco-saboteurs fighting the privatization of groundwater. She’s cocky, nihilistic, a dark void where a person should be. I don’t think you’ve written a narrator this harsh before. The closest is Doc, the corrupt cop in The Mars Room. I liked her less with every page. And yet in terms of narrative pleasure, I enjoyed being harnessed to her. Which is a very tricky thing to pull off. Can you talk about the choice to tell the story this way?

Rachel Kushner: “You’re the first person to bring up Doc. He was inspired by a real dude I met, an ex-cop and contract killer serving life without possibility of parole in a California prison. I was on this tour of the prison, and I remember sitting in his cell with him. He was in the sensitive-needs yard, and he didn’t ever leave his cell, because he’d be knocked off immediately if he did. But he was so proud of his contract hits that he started bragging to me about things he did that he wasn’t even convicted of. I was in his cell, feeling his essence coming into me, and I felt so overwhelmed by it that it was almost a process of exorcism that I wrote him into the book.

“With Sadie, it was different. I’d wanted to write a novel set in France for a while, about anarchists who get raided by the French police, and it finally came together with this narrator: a bad, amoral person, a kind of devil whose perspective I occupy. She’s made up, but in the novel she refers to two real-life events I borrowed from. One is, there was an eco-activist in the Bay Area named Eric McDavid who got entrapped by an FBI agent. This poor kid was attracted to this girl, and her supervisor was telling her, you need to get us proof that these people are planning sabotage — and there was no proof, so she convinced this kid, ‘Yes, you will be having sex with me, but first we will be building a bomb together.’ He was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in federal prison, and he served 9 of those years before his lawyer was able to prove she’d entrapped him. I know people who know him, and my question was, What kind of person does that? Not in a rhetorical way. Truly, what was the mindset?

Blackbird Spyplane: Nasty s**t.

Rachel Kushner: “Then there was this British undercover agent who had surveilled leftist activists around Europe. It’s complicated, but basically he was found out by one of the groups, because he had 9 different passports in his glove box — and not only was he a cop, he was sleeping with all these different women in these groups. So they confronted him, and what I heard is that he started to cry and say, ‘I’ve come over to your side, I love you guys, I’m a bad person, I’ll make it right, I’ll pass the government false information, let’s smash the state together.’ I think he was just saving his own skin. But maybe he believed it: There are weird people out there who have no identity. And a week later he disappeared into this shadowy world of private, unregulated contract surveillance.

“Originally I conceived of the book as a kind of revenge fantasy: The end would have been very dark, where Sadie would get her comeuppance. But when I got there I said, No that’s all wrong. It would seem moralizing, which is never what fiction is about for me.”

Blackbird Spyplane: An elegant thing you do is that, through Sadie’s unsympathetic narration, we encounter one of the most sympathetic characters you’ve ever written: a former revolutionary named Bruno, whose emails to the activists she hacks and recounts for us. Bruno is this eccentric old dude who has experienced tragedy, moved into a cave, and periodically emerges to send long messages arguing that Neanderthals, rather than the brute dumbasses we typically dismiss them as being, were in fact kindvibed, non-competitive, superior souls. For him, the Neanderthal traces in our own DNA represent a link back to a time “before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination,” and getting in touch with the part of us that’s connected to them is necessary for our survival. Kind of like the paleo diet, but for tapping into vestigial human goodness...

Rachel Kushner: “He’s the moral core of the book, this very gentle man with a lunatic yearning to figure out a dignified passage into the future from the place we’re currently in. And in a way he becomes Sadie’s only companion.”

Blackbird Spyplane: You reported a devastating and enraging New York Times Magazine piece in 2016 from Shuafat, an annexed Palestinian town and refugee camp walled off within Jerusalem. Are you still in touch with people there, and have you spoken to them over the last year?

Rachel Kushner: “Well, my host was murdered 12 days after I left, and I was in touch with his wife for a while through WhatsApp, but she doesn’t speak English, so that was complicated. I haven’t been in touch with her recently — I wish I would have been. Shuafat itself is kind of always under siege. Not the same way as Gaza, but people live there in incredible population density, without services, so it’s tricky to be in contact with them. I am in touch with people in the West Bank, and I actually was just invited to go there — I would have flown today. But I’ve been gone from home for a month, and I have a family, and I was exhausted and needed to come home. But I felt bad about it. Because it’s extraordinary to be invited, and the context was to have conversations with activists about the future, and what they’re doing in the West Bank, which is also, in its way, under siege.”

Blackbird Spyplane: You told an interviewer recently that, at this stage, “appeals to nuance” when it comes to discussing this conflict “seem to be functioning as a smoke screen,” distracting us from “the annihilation of a people and a culture.” You, Sally Rooney and Ta-Nehisi Coates all happen to be on book tours right now, and you’ve all been outspoken in your support for Palestinians. Coates took a reporting trip to Israel a few years ago, too, and he’s been saying similar things about how that trip fundamentally changed his understanding of the situation.

Rachel Kushner: “I’m so proud of what Ta-Nehisi Coates has done. I just saw what he said on this CBS morning-show appearance that went viral. When the interviewer asked him whether Israel ‘has the right to exist’ — these rhetorical terms that are foisted upon us are unacceptable. And what Ta-Nehisi said, that it’s people who have a right to exist, only people have a right to exist, states make their existence by force — I thought it was amazing.”

Blackbird Spyplane: You said something else recently I wanted to bring up: “I’m starting to suspect that people who work with tools, people who build machines, even if it’s outmoded 20th century technologies, have a form of richness in their life that people who just scroll phones and use modern computer technology are lacking.” I feel that, and I feel s**t out of luck, because I do some light bike maintenance, and I like weeding my yard and getting my fingers into the dirt, but I don’t build anything mechanical.”

Rachel Kushner: “I don’t really use my hands, either, but I think about this a lot. When I was a bartender in San Francisco in the ‘90s, I remember driving past these new condominiums with a big banner on them that said, ‘You could be home right now,’ and I was in my boyfriend’s truck, a Chevy C10, and he goes, [dopey voice] ‘Pretty soon we’re all gonna be ~living online~ man.’ We thought that was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. But that’s basically where some people now are: In this weird, dematerialized place that is real to them. I don’t question that it is — but it’s not real to me.

“I’m finishing copy edits now on this 11,000-word Harper’s piece about nostalgia drag-racing. Part of my interest is I’m a classic-car enthusiast and owner and driver, but my son is deeply a gear head. He’s 17, and he just built an engine entirely from salvaged and re-machined parts, a Dodge 360 Magnum high- performance motor with a reground cam that he put into his ’69 Dodge Dart.

“He did all the work himself, most of it when he was 16, and he carries all the tools in the trunk that he’d need to disassemble and reassemble the car on the side of the freeway. So this essay is partly about me and him going to nostalgia drag-racing events all around California and in Kentucky, meeting people who work on hot rods with their hands. And seeing this vibrant tradition of thinking with the hands really allowed me to introspect about what’s lost when people don’t. If part of our intelligence is in our haptic extension, what’s lost when we don’t have those skills anymore?

“And my son is doubly lucky, because he’s also a concert pianist —”

Blackbird Spyplane: My god!

Rachel Kushner: “So he has that kind of kinetic, bodily connection to the world in both disciplines. And I think there are other kids who are turning to a more material relationship to the world. They’re finding their way back into the blessed, holy world of real things, you know?”

Blackbird Spyplane: Sure, you see versions of that with the resurgent interest in vinyl and tapes, in analog photography…

Rachel Kushner: “Vinyl’s a big one. I’m sorry to keep bragging about my son but he also builds high-fidelity vacuum-tube amplifiers.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Holy moly. Incredible.

Rachel Kushner: “It’s lucky! And I don’t think he’s alone among his generation. I feel it out there.”

Blackbird Spyplane: OK let’s finish by celebrating the blessed, holy world of real things. I asked you to tell us about a cherished unique possession, and you chose a handful.

Rachel’s signed, handmade edition of Charles Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart in Its Hands

Rachel Kushner: “I didn’t know how to narrow it down to just one. The first thing is a Charles Bukowski book of early poems called It Catches My Heart in Its Hands. It was a limited print from 1963 by this beatnik press in New Orleans called Loujon — it belongs to my father, but he knows I have it, and it’s signed by Bukowski in silver pen. It’s beautiful, all made by hand, with handmade paper.

“Another thing is a painting (below left) that my friend Kim Gordon made for my husband, Jason Smith as a sweet gesture and as a joke. My husband wrote a book about automation and the future and jobs. And I give Kim little phrases — she used some as lyrics for her last album — so we were in the airport a while back, it was totally chaotic, long lines, no one knows what’s going on, and we said, Where’s my automation? I thought everything’s supposed to be streamlined! I texted it to Kim and she said, I’m gonna put that on a painting, and she gave it to Jason when his book came out.”

A painting by Kim Gordon, sculptures by Laura Owns, and a ceramic ashtray Rachel found at an Omaha Goodwill decades ago

Blackbird Spyplane: Shout out to Kim. Also, this connects back to the world of analog things in another way, because I love The Collective and if I had the liner notes I’d know that you helped out with the lyrics, but since I’ve only streamed it I’m just finding out now.

Rachel Kushner: “On a similar note, I have these ceramic emojis Laura Owens made and gave to me (above top right). That’s about my speed when it comes to the internet — this contradictory, materially manifested thing that’s supposed to be delete-able, but there they are, sitting on my shelf.

“And then I have a large and — I think — very elegant ceramic ashtray, above bottom right, that looks like it has a pearl-handle Smith & Wesson revolver on the top part, and little bullets where you rest your cigarette. I bought it in Omaha at a Goodwill, during a layover on a Greyhound bus trip I took during my 20s. I was supposed to fly back from Omaha to San Francisco, and I put it through the X-ray, and the person monitoring the machine was like, ‘Oh we got something!’ They were so excited. So I pull the ashtray out, and they said, Ma’am, you cannot fly with that. I said, ‘It’s hollow, it’s ceramic.’ And they said, ‘No, it looks like a weapon — you’re going to have to check it.’”

Blackbird Spyplane: I thought they were chiller at airports back then. I guess you made their day too interesting — they had to give you a hard time.

Rachel Kushner: “They were so excited. There wasn’t much happening at that airport.”

Rachel Kushner is on Instagram here. Her new novel, Creation Lake, is available from Bookshop here.