Credit: NYT
If you’re a spy, here’s a tip: don’t shag anyone in the world you’re infiltrating. It’s not uncommon, apparently – high-profile examples include FBI agents in the United States and undercover police in Europe. One policeman in the UK apparently had multiple female partners from the same community at the same time.
Rachel Kushner takes inspiration from these scenarios in her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Creation Lake. The 56-year-old American author was intrigued by what kind of person might be able to live like that, adopting a new fictional persona often for extended periods of time.
The story focuses on a group of ecoactivists who have rejected contemporary society and moved to the country in search of a better life; they live in a collective in the south of France. Unidentified authorities fear they are planning a violent attack on the state, so employ a freelance spy – Sadie – to embed herself with them and ensure that does not happen. Bruno, their leader, lives in a cave and communicates with them via email – emails that Sadie intercepts. Over the course of the book, she becomes intrigued by his ideas and eventually begins to question her own beliefs.
It’s an unusual novel, difficult to describe. In part, it explores philosophical ideas about everything from politics and alternative movements to idealism and contemporary life. For large sections, there’s not a lot of action.
Speaking via Zoom from her home in LA, Kushner says at a certain point, she had figured out the book’s milieu and setting but not the protagonist. “Geographically, I knew what it looked like: the region itself contains some of the underlying themes of the book because it’s all subtended by these limestone caves and ancient life. I knew that there was going to be a commune and that they would be set on a collision course with the French state and had a mentor who was an anti-civilisationist … I had all these pieces. I really had a world, but I didn’t know who was going to tell the story.”
“So I also imported that [spy] story, and Sadie kind of smugly uses it as an abject lesson of what to avoid when you’re infiltrating people – she only has an affair with the one hot guy in the milieu, rather than nine of them.”
Instinctively, she knew the story needed to be told by an American “because I wanted that disjuncture of a savage individuality with this group of French people, which is just a really different culture and different outlook”.
Sadie is an interesting main character, who Kushner herself describes as “semi-insufferable”. “She is an agent provocateur, who believes that she has the reality around her completely rigged to her uses. She’s going to get these people raided by the police and then leave and go on to her next job and, as she says, none of you people is real to me. She has this moment where she brags that she never has to clean up her trash because she won’t be returning to the same place twice.
Kushner’s Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake explores different philosophical ideas.Credit: NYT
“I see her trajectory in the book as moving from experience to innocence.”
Creation Lake is the author’s second Booker nomination. In 2018, she was shortlisted for The Mars Room, about a woman in an American prison – and a scathing indictment on the US legal system.
Although she doesn’t consider herself a journalist, Kushner writes brilliant non-fiction; her work has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Paris Review. A collection of her essays, published as The Hard Crowd, includes her work from the past two decades.
After finishing Creation Lake, she spent nearly a year immersed in the world of hot-rodding, and subsequently wrote a 12,000 word article about it for Harper’s. “That did include quite a lot of interviewing people and travelling around. But for whatever reason, journalism ... it’s too neutral of a term or something, for how I think of myself,” she says.
A rev-head herself, she used to ride motorbikes, including racing in the Cabo 1000, which spans the length of the Baja Peninsula and is completed in a single day. She documents the experience in The Hard Crowd in the instalment, Girl on a Motorcycle.
“I think of myself as primarily a fiction writer, that’s my big pursuit in life and it produces sensations that no other kind of writing does for me. I’m invested in both, definitely, but it’s essays in between writing novels. The novel is really the thing that moves me the most in life.”
Another essay, We Are Orphans Here, documents life on the ground for Palestinians, based on a trip in 2016, when she visited East Jerusalem and the West Bank for 10 days, along with a group of journalists from around the world. “It just seemed like such an unusual opportunity I couldn’t turn it down,” she says.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO RACHEL KUSHNER
- Worst habit? A habit, if not bad, and definitely not my worst, is not divulging my worst habits to strangers via the newspaper.
- Greatest fear? A truly great fear is, like the bad habits, not something to display to strangers. It’s to be examined, used for art, or, in certain cases, repressed.
- The line that stayed with you? Many lines have stayed with me. If you change your question to “A line that stayed with me” that would be more accurate to this answer: “There’s one thing I’m good at, and that’s looking at the sea.” It’s Marguerite Duras and I respect the hell out of it.
- Biggest regret? I don’t include regrets in my psychic economy. I include pledges, vows, occasionally interrogations, wills to joy. But not regrets.
- Favourite book? Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? I wish I owned a Courbet painting of the beach at Trouville.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I’d like to see what life was like 47,000 years ago when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens hooked up. Then again, maybe not. Better to imagine than to see. I would not mind going back for a couple of hours to the sweet days of my youth in the 1970s.
“When I came back, I felt like I did not ask to have this level of disorder and violence visited upon my life. I really couldn’t believe what I had seen. So when I wrote about Shuafat [refugee camp] I wrote about it from that place of openness and kind of non-personal investment because I’m not interested in writing polemics and trying to tell people about my point of view.”
The piece is devastating. “I really felt like the facts just speak for themselves and so just laid them out soberly, rather than with some kind of emotion.”
Kushner has returned to the US the night before our interview after two weeks in France promoting Creation Lake. It was the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration and just after massive fires blazed through LA, where she’s lived for 21 years. It was a strange reality, she says, talking about her book each day then catching up on the devastating news from home each night.
The state of national politics in America feels grim: “We’re in for dark times with Trump, there’s just no doubt. And everything is going to be worse, everything.”
For the moment, Kushner’s work has taken another turn – she is trying her hand at poetry. “It’s sort of like as much as I can – which is not to denigrate the form, as though it’s less than. But the short density of that kind of movement has appealed to me, maybe because I’ve been really on the go.”
In her essay about being a writer in The Hard Crowd, Kushner says: “Even if I stay til late, I always leave early.” It reminds me of the title of an anthology of Nora Ephron’s essays, Wallflower at the Orgy, with its suggestion of being separate from the action.
In the piece, Kushner recalls an array of extraordinary characters from when she worked in dive bars in San Francisco. She felt compelled “to produce something that felt more like a vigil, for all the people that had illuminated my life and are just strangely gone, disappeared”.
The fact those people stayed with her got her thinking about the idea that even in the moment of experiencing something, you’re often making “some recording, privately, an internal note-taking of the present”.
“Writers are people who feel somewhat separate from the rest of their peer group but maybe a lot of people actually feel that way,” she says. “It’s simply that the writer has somehow been able to wrangle the tools in order to describe that feeling that might be universal separateness.”
Rachel Kushner appears at the Wheeler Centre on March 4; at Adelaide Writers’ Week from March 1-6; and at the All About Women festival in Sydney, March 8-9. wheelercentre.com