Rachel Kushner’s on a Roll

Rachel Kushner’s latest, Creation Lake, has been called a spy novel. Shadowy corporate interests have enlisted the operative (alias: Sadie Smith) to safeguard the construction of a megabasin designed to divert local water to industrial monocroppers. In the tradition of honey-trap saboteurs infiltrating radical movements, Sadie seduces targets close to the anarcho-subsistence farmers fighting to preserve sustainable agrarian life in the region. A femme fatale functionary of corporate greed, Sadie is resolutely blank. For her marks, she feels only contempt. In the American author’s prior book, the 2021 essay collection The Hard Crowd, Kushner wrote about her deep appreciation for the novels of Nanni Balestrini, which she describes as “fueled not by contempt but instead by a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility.” Balestrini showed Kushner that style need not always be linked to cynicism. Creation Lake feels a product of this tension and epiphany. An exception to Sadie’s blanket disdain forms the heart of the novel. A one-sided love story takes shape between her and a cave-dwelling elder radical named Bruno, who doesn’t know she exists but whose emails she’s intercepting. It’s in this old man’s musings and biography, which span Neanderthal inheritance, peasant revolts, Nazi atrocities, and Guy Debord, that the novel finds, almost in spite of itself, a strand of revolutionary possibility, gentle and unyielding. Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake continues an ongoing investigation into the conditions of resilience. Her study of liberation movements feels rare in its sensitivity to the nuances of charisma and style, drawing lines between material conditions and abstract principles and also the currency of attitude, self-invention, and wit. Her previous novels Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers were finalists for the National Book Award; The Mars Room was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Creation Lake has already been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It seems unanimously agreed upon online, however, that the real prize is Kushner’s husband. The philosopher and author Jason E. Smith doubled down in fierce defence of Creation Lake on social media after its single negative review. We spoke before this viral drama erupted, gabbing about itinerant semiotics and Karen Black prior to digging into the new book and the world of its commune, Le Moulin.

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Whitney Mallett: I think about you every time I see one of those plaid bags, those ubiquitous plaid plastic laundry bags you include in The Flamethrowers. Rachel Kushner: I forgot all about those bags! I think they may have been a historical anachronism to The Flamethrowers, because I don’t know if they had become so internationally ubiquitous in the late 1970s. But it’s also the case that this novel, which is nominally about the ’70s, refracts life as I’ve known it, in my own time, as a young woman who lived in NYC in the 1990s, and it’s also secretly about the Occupy Movement, which was happening all around me as I wrote the book. About those plaid bags, which you can see at a flea market in the Dominican Republic or on Canal Street or wherever else, there’s some moment you realize that these bags are sort of upholstering reality. But they’re also saying something about transience and who has a place in the economy and who doesn’t. The bag becomes this marker. It registers vagabonding. Now in Los Angeles, it’s the baby carriage. I live in a neighbourhood where people don’t have babies. It’s not a starter-family bourgeois neighbourhood, and instead, it’s mostly young people without any children. But there are baby carriages everywhere, because unhoused people are using them to make mobile whatever their worldly possessions happen to be. There’s no baby in the carriage anymore. WM: I saw, too, that Balenciaga has their version of the ubiquitous plaid bag. RK: I haven’t seen that. It’s perfectly logical within how fashion works, but it’s also hilarious. Do you know this book by Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project? It’s this big compendium that he did, and what he has to say about fashion is so incredible and still seems to hold true today. He talks about the way the people from the upper classes usurp the aesthetic of the peasantry in order to create the sense of something new. So if everybody can buy clothes that are made with loomed, bleached cotton, then suddenly the upper class has to go for burlap. WM: Now I’m thinking about the passages describing the different styles of the people at the commune in Creation Lake. There’s the people who are expressing their identity and their counterculture-ness through their clothes. And then there’s the people where it’s the exact opposite. RK: The mark of style being the lack of style. I just went to sell some clothes the other day—which, you know, is a humiliating exercise that I decided maybe will never be repeated. I’ll just donate things. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why buyers take what they take. It feels like a personal rejection. They’re just like, “We don’t want your stuff.” It was really interesting to look at the kids who were buying, because I realized that I was completely unable to interpret what they were signifying. To dig up an outmoded and overused term, the clerks at Wasteland in Silverlake seemed truly postmodern. The dude at the counter had a moustache and was wearing a trucker hat, big pants, and hiking boots. And he was singing along to Rihanna while folding clothes. It’s really all chopped and screwed, and I just don’t have the capacity to interpret whatever he was meaning to say about himself. WM: What comes to mind is Schizo-Culture. RK: But Schizo-Culture meant something so much deeper than fashion. WM: I think we are in a moment where what that meant [1970s poststructuralists theorizing postmodernity’s deterritorialization] has gotten turned into an aesthetic. RK: Maybe that’s why the aesthetics seem schizo to me. They’re schizo as a thing—that’s the name for the look. My uncle Joel Kovel was one of the speakers at the original Schizo-Culture conference in 1975. Having previously been a psychiatrist, he turned to anti-psychiatry and was on a panel of that name chaired by Félix Guattari, who apparently declared he was abolishing the panel, as its chair, but Joel gave his paper anyhow. When Semiotext(e) had an anniversary of the Schizo-Culture conference, they did this up at Columbia, where it was originally held. My aunt DeeDee Halleck went. She’s eighty-four and a media activist. She’s not into nostalgia and instead focused on the present and the future, on what’s relevant and radical now. And she said, “This is sad. These kids should be making a new world. They should be doing the new iteration of whatever Schizo-Culture was in its moment, and instead, they’re doing this kind of moribund nostalgia thing.” WM: My friend Kembra Pfahler calls people doing that yesterbaiters. RK: That’s good. The people who want to let you know you missed their moment, their heyday, are themselves missing the point. Each era must be taken on its own terms; it’s for young people to decide what is new (even if they want to wear big pants and a trucker hat). I don’t know Kembra, but I used to be friends with somebody who was in her band—an interesting woman who unfortunately seems to have become a pagan neofascist or has sort of disappeared. WM: The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. RK: I just thought about Kembra Pfahler three nights ago because I went to see a screening of Robert Altman’s Nashville, which is such a wonderful movie and a favourite. The character who Karen Black plays made me think of Kembra Pfahler, because they really do almost look alike. It’s the high forehead and layers of irony over the performance of female glamour. WM: Some people are born with a face. RK: Truth. I once asked the great Paul Thomas Anderson why faces look so incredible in his films. He said, “By filming people from very close up. That’s how you film a face. You get right up underneath it. Faces should be huge.” WM: One of my favourite threads in a lot of your work is this meditation on charisma. How it can or can’t be commodified and also its relationship to self-destruction and to fantasy. In Creation Lake, Sadie, the cynical femme fatale narrator, has this idea that charisma isn’t really someone being special but their ability to manipulate the fact that you want to believe in the existence of special people. RK: I don’t know if I believe that myself. A lot of Sadie’s views are probably 180 degrees from my own. But I had been reading this book about Joan of Arc. There was an idea in it about charisma, not arguing that it’s invented by the outsiders’ projection of a need for such an effect but that maybe it’s augmented by such a need. Charisma can be absolutely real, but Sadie is pretending that it isn’t, because she wants to always be in the position where she’s one step ahead of these other people. I could imagine that the Pascal Balmy character, who leads the Moulinards, is charismatic. But Sadie discounts his charisma by insisting that it exists as an expression of the delusions of a set of young people who don’t know other than to submit to a social structure that’s based on a cult of personality. WM: The book is fiction, but it also echoes things that have happened and are happening with regards to activism and communes in the countryside of France. I was curious about what inspired your story and also how you handle people’s assumptions. Are you worried about how people will interpret or misinterpret what might have influenced or inspired you? RK: There were people I felt would read the book with a higher level of intimacy with some of what I wrote about, and that gave me a nice feeling instead of a worried feeling. I wanted the book to be legible, broadly, but meaningful in a different and more intimate way to an inner circle. The commune of Tarnac, which I’m guessing you refer to, was raided in late 2008 by the French police, who, disturbingly, if ridiculously, impounded their library as “evidence.” This was definitely one spark. But there was also the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and the NoTAV in the Susa Valley. Historically, there was the occupation of the Larzac, in the 1970s, when hippies and activists descended to support farmers and prevent François Mitterand’s government from building a military base there. These are important movements that are reference points for many people, but my work is fiction, an imagined world, set in a region where I spend time every summer. And when you go to the same place over and over again, you really do deepen your familiarity with the geography and the beauty and also the social world of the place and maybe some of its politics, like the life of the farmers and the outmigration. There was the phenomenon of the Gilets Jaunes more recently, which shows certain divisions between educated younger people from cities and the people they think they are supporting, who have some very legitimate claims but might have some beliefs that are uncomfortable for the more educated people, because they’re opposed to migration, and they want cheap gasoline, and they don’t like a lot of the EU rules because only the large corporate farms can submit to the new greening of the agro industry, etc. The region we go to is full of caves, which my son knows well, and which, the last two summers, he guided children into as part of his job. So many of the cave details are from him. The book is really quite personal. I don’t feel there’s anything to misinterpret. My characters are mostly invented, with the exception of Guy Debord, who is Guy Debord, and Michel Thomas, who is Houellebecq. Sadie’s world is supposed to feel real to the reader, and so it should be furnished with certain dynamics and historical context that maybe deepen it and give it the feeling of life for me, the writer, as I go in. It took me three years to figure out how to do the book. It was a long time coming and a series of failures. Once I figured it out, it was very quick, and I wrote the whole book in fourteen months. I felt like I was building a parallel universe. I love life, and I feel the world is a blessed, holy place. But I started to prefer the world that I had made, and I couldn’t wait to go there every day. Writing the book was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything. What I’m trying to say is that it was never an exercise in looking at the actual world as I have known it but in constantly inventing a new world that was appearing before my eyes. WM: It feels like a lot of research has gone into a character like Bruno. What I like about reading a lot of your novels is that I learn a lot from them. RK: Bruno is dreamed up, he is not researched. I really don’t do any research, to be honest. I acquire knowledge in a more natural and organic way: I live with smart people, I go places, watch movies, read books I want to read just to learn things and not to learn them for a project. I did read some stuff about prehistory and caves, but Bruno has a lot of fairly strange ideas that one could not find online or in a book. I looked up an author photo of Jacques Camatte and stared at it, to describe Bruno’s appearance (who otherwise doesn’t really borrow much from Camatte). The whole thing about the Cagot rebellion, that’s all made up. But I’m interested in peasant revolts, and just by being in rural areas where they are commemorated, I’ve picked up some idea of the Religious Wars. Bruno is a man who has witnessed the ecstatic heights and bitter disappointments of a century—World War II, May ’68, the ’70s experiments with rural life—and all of this dovetails with a lot of my long-time interests. WM: You know stuff. RK: Everyone knows things. I just use what I know in novels. A huge aspect of what makes them so joyous is the way they make an occasion for what I have carried with me, because what I carry I sense is there for a reason, as if there’s meaning there, something mysterious whose only home is in a novel. WM: I fought this urge to google if things like Bruno’s theories about the Cagots being descendants of Neanderthals were real. And then I was like, actually, I don’t care! What felt important was that there was this character who has this point of view. With Sadie, I love that she didn’t really have a backstory. I feel like the problem with many thrillers is they need to have a villain origin story. I was so relieved that she got to retain her blankness. RK: Sounds like you read me the way I wanted to be read. Bruno’s ideas are myths, to some degree, but I personally found his myths seductive—and his need to make them sort of heartrending. Boris Porshnev, a Soviet scholar who wrote about French peasant revolts, seems to have had the idea that there were still existent strains of Neanderthal hiding in remote areas of southwestern France. It’s kind of wonderfully crazy but also compelling. I didn’t know about that, really, when I was writing the book, but I might as well have, as the whole idea of an untouchable population suggests a strain of human barred from blending with the rest. Sadie is this malevolent outsider who shows up to harm these people. There have been people like that, some of whom were previously undercover agents for either the feds or, in the UK, for the Metropolitan Police. After they get busted, they seem to disappear into the private sector, into this weird, unregulated world where there are corporations convinced that climate activists are a threat to the energy industry. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the book to psychologize Sadie in a conventional manner. A reader might expect her to think about memories and prior situations she’s been in—the way an arch-fictional version of consciousness might have a character in line for the grocery store get some memory of something that happened in the grocery store when he was a kid. Instead of doing any of that, I only provided other scenarios when she was set upon destroying other people’s lives such as she’s set upon doing now. It became a kind of private joke, but then it also started to seem real. Like she’s with a lover and says that his armpits smell of hydroponic weed. Some guys’ armpits do have that smell. But whereas I would just notice it smells like the warehouse I used to live in where I had a boyfriend who grew pot indoors, she would be like: this reminds me of a bust I orchestrated in a grow facility in Idaho. That’s her version of nostalgia: sending people to prison. For me, it seemed like this could tell me more about how thick and deep the layers of her guises are and about how ruthless she is. It’s dissimulation and manipulation all the way down. At least for the six weeks during which we know her. WM: She is almost a worshipper of chaos, and this works in her favour. RK: She makes messes and has no need to clean them up. When a room is full of her empty beer cans and wine bottles, she shuts the door and starts throwing them into a different room, and that’s how she seems to move through life. I do think that some people thrive in chaos because it’s almost like they see the eye of the storm, they see some inner calm, and move through that. There’s an early scene where she stops at one of these roadside places on the autoroute, and she pockets a jar of terrine and says that stealing stops time. I’ve known people who feel that way about theft, that it’s a form of ontological hygiene. It just puts you very, very intensely in the moment and seems to slow time so that you’re operating at a slower tempo than everybody else, in a manner that allows you to be unseen even as you’re seen. And so it was fun for me to write that and just to think about that. I mean, I personally stopped stealing after I was arrested for it as a teenager. It was effective, the arrest. I had to go through this court-mandated re-education camp thing. WM: I was thinking about the social politics of the commune. How everyone’s self-interest intersects, how power functions—and manipulation. It’s not dissimilar to the art world or nightlife. I’m always obsessed with witnessing how different people move through a space or scene. What roles people can take on in a certain moment, what attention or admiration people can handle or can’t. RK: I do like to observe people, but Sadie observes people as though she can see their weakness that they themselves cannot see. And I don’t have that kind of savvy. I often look to other people, assuming that there’s a lot of things I can’t see, and also that they know things I probably don’t, and that they’re seeing things about me that I myself cannot see. So I have a much more self-questioning experience of a social sphere than she does. I don’t think the Moulinards are ridiculous. I think a lot of their ideas are pretty valid, and she just happens to be seeing them through this very dark lens. Maybe one of the ironies of the book is that she has descended upon a group for which I myself would naturally have a lot of sympathy. I have great sympathy for the commune and the experiment of trying to build a protected world of shared humanity. Sadie is not sympathetic. She pokes at the Moulinards’ contradictions, the way that both class and gender divisions reassert themselves—they’re racially homogenous, and maybe agist, treating the older militants as if they’re of no use. But Sadie doesn’t judge from a place of moral superiority. She has no morals at all. This itself is a kind of profound spiritual fragility, which comes to matter in the novel and catches up with her, at least partly. WM: Have you ever had a desire to live on a commune? RK: We were invited to live on one of these places. And Jason, my now husband, said, “My girlfriend’s having a baby, and it’s probably not the right time.” And they said, “All our girlfriends are having babies too!” I’ll confess at this moment, right now, that I really love the unit of my nuclear family—my son and my husband, the three of us. I feel like it’s become a bulwark against whatever is negative about contemporary life and the outside world’s disposabilities and violence and commodifications. Three people can make something that’s really insulated and beautiful. Whereas if I lived in a communal structure with a bunch of people, there’d be a lot of meetings and a lot of dealing with people’s personalities. And I’m a solitary person and doubt I could handle that, honestly. But it’s quite human that people want to find ways to leave this world and stay within it—to leave terms that they didn’t participate in setting and making and find some way to form a new kind of equality. I mean, there’s a lot to say about that, the way that we are so dispossessed of our ability to generate a self-sustaining life, and instead, everybody just has to have money and sell their labour to a job. What about a world where people grow their own food and sew their own clothes and try to live to some degree without money? Can it work? Usually, it doesn’t work, and it fails. But that doesn’t mean that the desire that propels the action to form such a place is not valid and real. Le Moulin doesn’t exist in real life. But if it did, and if it flourished, perhaps its inner workings would need to stay private, a kind of sacred space and not an atmosphere to write a book about. Sadie had to be who she is to make this novel work; she had to be a hostile force, because someone sympathetic would not go and tell the world, unless the narrative trajectory was—“I went there with hope and left with disappointment.” Better to send in a narc and to know that she’s not there with either hope or disappointment. She’s there to cause trouble. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.The post Rachel Kushner’s on a Roll first appeared on The Walrus.