Read This: Rachel Kushner Is Not Auditioning for Her Own Dream

me somewhat nervous. Her first book was a book called Telex from Cuba, and then her second book, The Flamethrowers, is one of my favorite books of recent years, is absolutely brilliant. She followed that with The Mars Room, which was also shortlisted for the Book of Prize, a terrific book about women in the correctional system in California. She just again and again writes these kind of amazing books about outsiders, about rebellion, about the nature of the individual

against the institution, and I love her. So I was a bit nervous, but CREATIONLA like pretty damn good.

She's a former spy who's lost her formal credentials in pretty murky ways, and she's this kind of sardonic observer. When she goes in, she wants to see what this community is like her in the south of France, and to understand what they're going to do. They're led by this guy called Bruno Lacombe, and he's this guy who lives in a Neanderthal cave. He's rejected civilization. He believes that primitivism is where the future lies. And he's this

charismatic cult leader. And as she tries to get to him, tries to understand his philosophy, the drama unfolds, and it's terrific.

I did it this way last time, so this time I'll do it in this other manner. There's a curious pattern where, which is when I'm finishing a novel, I make a decision rather impetuously, my next novel is going to be about X, and if there are struggles along the way to building the novel about X, I always feel that the problems are with me and not with X. If that makes sense, it could be that it is

a way of resolving the quotion of the arbitrary. Like as a viewer of art, whether it's cinema or visual art or literature, I never want to feel that decisions could have been made one way, but just happened to have been made another. I don't want to get a whiff that there's something arbitrary about the plans that were laid in how they were executed. So when I make this decision, it's very concrete and there's no turning back from it at all.

decision is indecision crystallized. So there are times when I wait so long to decide something, and I invest so much energy in trying to discern which is the right decision, that in fact I have more or less decided through my refusal to act. There's this Nino Simone song that I really love. Either way I lose. It's on the same record that has Lilac. Yeah, just a song that Jeff Buckley made famous by covering it. But either way

I lose. Is like it cuts to the heart of what is challenging about choice, which is that if I choose A, I lose B, and if I choose B, I lose A. But when it comes to artistic direction, I am not indecisive, and I'm not sure why. It's always just like the new world that you plunge into, and each one does feel really different to me. This experience was completely different than writing any of my other novels.

the mind and gets stashed someplace. And I had known since probably late two thousand and eight that someday I would want to write a novel like this one in the sense of it being a novel that takes place in France and deals with young people who want to figure out a way to live that is protected from the predations of capitalism and are set on a collision

course with the French state. And then when I finished The Mars Room, my previous novel, I started working on this book, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. And it was three and a half years of trying things out, and then I let go of everything I had done, and when I started over, I wrote what became the first two sentences of the book. Those are

the first two things I wrote. And I knew right away that I was transposing the language of somebody, this character Bruno, who's a kind of mentor who thinks that we need to look carefully at the deep past in order to assess the direction for the whole human project. And I knew that his words were being transposed by

somebody else. And I was really interested in the formal challenge of two storytellers inside of one, that this woman has a monopoly on the telling, but that somebody else has kind of invaded her telling to a degree invaded, and it would sort of be he is an unreliable narrator to some degree. She's just a moral person. Is like adopting the tone or the voice of a kind of devil still force. She doesn't have malice. Her intention is not to hurt other people for the sake of

hurting them. But she has no sympathy for other people. And that's not the way that I am at all. And so I sort of had to develop the contours of an alien sensibility at the same time that I was seeing her, to look at the writings of somebody who felt much closer to a person I could understand and know, and had depth and dimension and a more classical and to me literary biography. He has a passed. He's a man of the twentieth century. He lost his

family in World War Two. He was swept up in what for many people was significant historical passage through May of nineteen sixty eight, and then decides eventually that no revolution is coming, And in recognizing the devastation of that which isn't for him a kind of nihilism but an acknowledgment of reality, he decides, we can revolutionize consciousness instead. There's a way of renovating being rather than waiting like people sort of desperately waiting for a messianic change that

is not coming. The more I worked on it, the longer I spent each day writing, the more hours I was there, the more vivid the world I was creating became to the point where I could really see it and feel it, and I was eager to get there every day. And it was like I was building this parallel universe that really glowed for me. And I love

my life. I love this world. But during the kind of intense fourteen months I was writing the book, I started to prefer it the world of the book for the duration that I was there.

I am familiar with French politics. I'm interested in French culture partly through exposure because I'm married to somebody who

has written pretty extensively about Guidebor, particularly as films. My husband, Jason, is also a translator and translated to books by the Invisible Committee, who had a commune in the northern Correz in the village of Tarnak, and they were rated by the French police in two thousand and eight, and you know, we watched that happen and the police used against them as evidence a book, and that book, The Coming Insurrection, was translated by a group of people anonymously, but you know,

I know some of the principal people who were involved in establishing the tone of the writing, and I'm really interested in that writing. I think The Coming Insurrection is a kind of brilliant book. I couldn't reproduce a fictional version of that book I think it would be flat if I did a version of it. But in my novel there's reference Le Moulin the commune, you know, it just means the mill, very simple. The Muleinards have a book called Zones of Incivility, and it's kind of my

version of the Coming Insurrection. I did a few lines, but I was interested in that world and the way that, as you say, you know, you site May sixty eight, a lot of culture fans out from there, and like, I'm really interested in French cinema. I'm interested in French literature. I don't know, it's like it's a colorful milieu to me, and it's enriches my love of the literature to understand the political and social and cultural references that you would

find in books by people like Marguerite Duross. And I know young people in France and I'm interested in the way that when they move to the countryside to learn how to farm, people from Paris, they're following upon or looking to learn from a version of knowledge and wisdom that is part of a kind of romantic conception of what people call LaFrance profond, you know, like the deep France is the peasant class and peasants have been the site of political resistance and revolt over hundreds of years,

and the French resistance during World War Two, you know, was like famously organized in fierce in certain parts of

southwestern France, where I set my novel. It's also the case that we go to southwestern France every summer, and so I'm familiar with the landscape and I love it in a way that frees me to describe it with that labor or research because my love of it and my understanding of the people there, my conversations with people, farmers, young people who've moved, maybe let's say, from Bordeaux to a village and gotten a business going processing walnuts, and I meet them, and I'm taken on a tour of

the walnut processing facility, and they're like, these are these turn of the century machines. We've figured out how to repair them. Those are all things that are just casual happenstance in my personal life, and they start to accrue in a way that allows me to write with a measure of I wouldn't say authority, but maybe but with a free hand. I'm not looking at notes. I'm just putting into an assemblage things that I care about and that stay vivid for me because I've witnessed them firsthand.

a painting? And oh, well, I like if there's a cabin and it should be near a body of water, and I like some trees in the painting, and so then they come up with this pastiche painting that's not a pestition in terms of form, but a pestiche in terms of a set of the desires of the multitude over what a painting should be. I mean, that's maybe like a wordy way for me to say a novel has to sustain the dream of the writer and cannot really stop to pause to insecurely ask, but what will

other people think of my dream? You cannot audition for your own dream. Instead, you have to be present for it. I knew that a character like Sadie who has arrived with the intention of doing whatever she needs to to produce evidence that these people are saboteurs and she doesn't care if they really are or not, and she has experience as an agent provocateur and has arrived with the

intention of being an agent of destruction. So I knew that there was the possibility for a woman like that based on some incidences in real life that had happened, namely one in the United States when a female FBI agent had infiltrated a group of green anarchists in California, and she was getting a lot of pressure from her supervisor to produce evidence that they were planning sabotage, and

they weren't. And there was one member of the group who was quite sweet on her, and she sorted, I will give him hope that there's going to be a courtship between us, and you know, as part of the process of our courtship, he'll just have to acknowledge that I want him very badly to build a bomb or to plan to build a bomb with me. And that's what happened, and he got twenty one years in federal prison, served nine of those years, and then his lawyer was

able to prove that this woman had entrapped him. And I knew people who knew this poor guy. And my question was what kind of person would do that? Which isn't to pose it rhetorically where you know the answer, you know, a bad person, and rather to ask with curiosity, what is the mindset and what's it like to only have aliases, to go from job to job to job,

and to be fundamentally alone. And then there was a British agent who was caught infiltrating a whole bunch of different groups and then was having affairs with women in these groups. In France, Germany and the UK, and a bunch of them sued the UK police, and I was following the story partly because he had infiltrated these French people and I knew about it through them. So Sadie refers to him as a kind of object lesson. In

real life, his name is Mark Kennedy. So in the books she says, well, well, this guy makes mistakes and I don't make mistakes. But then after a while, you know, she decides to have an affair with the kind of

resident hawk guy and the commune. So maybe part of the fun was not just riding through the highs of her overconfidence and more managing it and allowing and establishing and maintaining a secret link between the author and the reader, even if that reader is me and not a group of people I'm imagining, but to let that reader know that maybe Sadie has miscalculated in terms of who's on to her and who isn't. And she was always counterbalanced for me by the voice of Bruno, so they were

different pleasures. But she know she was the one who had the more caustic and juvenile sense of humor, which probably comes from me. Ultimately, but all the characters come from me. That's the weird thing about novels. One is not more the author than the other, even as sometimes you read a review of a novel and it's like the reviewer has decided that one is a proxy for the novelist, and it's never the case, because they all are.

synthesis of the thing that they've created. I will say that one thing I've realized in the wake of writing this book is there's something about Bruno's lament and his question I'm sorry to quote myself, but early on he says, at least in Sadie's transposition, about the human project and its future, and I feel that my own character, if I may say so, takes the human project really seriously and believes in such a thing as grace, and believes in the idea that there is incredible meaning for us,

and that maybe if we have squandered some of that meaning or taken a wrong turn somewhere, that the human project itself is worth saving. So I mean, who would disagree with that? Perhaps? But still, nonetheless there's something about having a character feel it and commit himself to it as his life project. So when he says early on in the book, currently we are careening off of the cliff in a driverless car, and the question is how do we exit this car? I think Bruno asks a

fair question. And the sort of myths or half myths that he produces about the past as a manner of speculating about the future, like where did we take our wrong turn? What are we comprised of? Did prior cultures of people in prehistoric times live in a different or better way? Are there any messages hidden for us that we don't know? How to uncover, etc. I think that I've found the process of creating a character who would ask these questions and speculate into responses, if not answers.

I think I found that quite healing. So I think that Bruno's questions and his lament could be mine as well.

a correctional facility in California, in the mass room. And yet each of these are about communities built around ideas about how the system is Accounently. This might be inadequate for our purposes.

attained a form that we can apprehend. And to me, that's the best I can do in terms of the definition of art. The novel feels like a real calling and which to do that. So I respond to the reality around me and build a parallel universe that seems to put into a synthetic whole. Things that go into me and stay there because they seem important, whether to the world or to me. It almost doesn't matter which, but they have something to do with life as I know it, and it's like it's my job to put

them into a form. So I wouldn't say that I'm looking to write novels about radical politics, but maybe one draws for their fiction from the material to some degree of both their life and their interests. I sometimes have this theory that, like or as this crude manner of categorizing, that there are writers who look inward and very reflective, and they're writers who face outward. And I've just always, since I was a little girl, been someone who faces outward.

I'm interested in the world. The world includes people who are asking is the organization of society the best that it can be? Isn't functioning? Is it working?

how I personally would put it. But when I think about the English language as it expands and develops in an American milieu, you know, we're Anglophone, but our language is a bit unique in the sense of how we build out and just how supple and specific and precise it is. And then the culture here. It seems in a way ridiculous to try to summarize it, but there is some inheritance of violence and tragedy here that is

unique to us. But what it has produced as a sort of dialectrical force in terms of cultural phenomena like jazz, you know, like abstract expressionism, like hip hop, like streetwear. It is a complicated place, and like lately I've been thinking about the form of the sermon and American religion and how deeply might be tied in with our very literature, with what the American novel is as this sort of

like runaway hallucinated Bible. It's a strange place, and there are streams of pride when I think of how difficult it is for other people to comprehend the discontinuities and different forms of disruption and violence that comprise American life. At the same time, I am really interested in France, and I, you know, have friends there, writers filmmakers with whom I can speak about French history, and I live with a Francophile. My husband was a student of Jacques

gry dais a PhD in compatted Furterature. Our son went to French school, so I can't help but be exposed to these things. And maybe it originates, as I said before in my Love Cinema First, that I've come to want to learn and know things about France. So I'd say that I'm both. I spend time there, I'm interested in Europe, but I do I am myself at the same time invested in coming to understand the peculiar horizon for the American and it is a tragic horizon, and

it also is what the word is. It produces amazing art. I'm not talking about myself, but what I witness and see in terms of what this convulsive place has made, what people have made.