I don't know if you're anything like me, but there are some authors who when I hear they have a new book coming out, and get nervous more than excited. Not because I don't love their work, quite the opposite. It's because I've loved everything they've written, so a new book can almost only disappoint. And let's face it, with the world as it is right now, do we need any more bad news. Rachel Kushner was one such author. I've loved everything she's done. Her debut was fiendishly talented.
It was called Telex from Cuba, and she followed it up with one of my favorite novels of the twenty first century, The Flamethrowers. Her third novel, The Mars Room, was shortlisted for the Book A Prize, and it won France's biggest literary award, the pre Medicia Tranjeur, which is for Literature and Translation. And so with all of this weight of expectation, I couldn't help but approach her new book with a sense of trepidation. But I'm very happy
to report it was utterly unnecessary. About two pages in and you ares in the capable hands of one of the greats, and Rachel Kushner had done it again, another brilliant, funny, clever book, and once again on the book a shortlist as well. The novel's called Creation Lake, and it follows a character called Sadie Smith. She's a spy, well actually, she's probably closer to a mercenary. She's been cut loose from the FBI after a case has gone wrong, and
she's working freelance for some sketchily described corporate types. Her mission to infiltrate a commune of radical ego activists in the French countryside, led by the enigmatic Bruno lacom Bruno's rejected civilization. He lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. The whole thing is so much more than just a spy thriller.
Creation Lake is a novel of ideas, and I think it might just be her best work yet, Michael, and this is reread this to show about the books we love and the stories behind them. All the elements that have made Rachel Kushner such a respected and beloved author are here in her fourth book. But perhaps what's more remarkable is the obvious ways in which he's developed and
grown as a writer. There are thematic echoes, to be sure, but it's apparent that this is not an author inclined to repeat herself.
I don't know if I try to do something different with every book, but each book does feel to me like a singular universe that I'm not building really in conscious conversation with other novels, because it's as if each novel it feels like the only chance I get to finally figure out how to resolve and unify form with content, because each book has a different form and a different set of themes, and so it's like I have to invent the wheel all over again, and I'm never thinking, oh,
I did it this way last time, so this time I'll do it in this other manner. There's a curious pattern, 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 happen 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.
Are you certain about many things in your life?
No, I'm a really indecisive person. And in fact I still call my mother all the time if I can't decide something, and she's used to it, and she'll say, Rachel, I really can't decide for you. I can't help you with that. I could be bungling this, but for my uses it has served me. There's a line in a William Gaddison novel I really love the Recognitions where he says,
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 to 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 Wine. Yeah, 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.
And what I understand about this experience is the wood that you've applied to it a number of times. Is fin that this was one of the most purely fun writing experiences or fun experience is full stop that you've ever enjoyed.
Yeah, it was. I mean, it gave me great pleasure to write the novel. I had the idea for this book for quite a long time. Sometimes I just know right away when I sort of pick up an image, a notion, a scene, it just goes sort of inside
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, a hostile 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 II too. 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 It's 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.
There's so much I want to unpack from your answer, but I just before I get to Bruno and Sadie in particular, why French youths as a group of idealistic young people. Was it the nineteen sixty eight shadows that made it being in the French countries side particularly important? What is it about that place that makes that youthful idealism and radicalism different.
Yeah, it's a great question, and my answer is it's not that I was looking to describe a group of young people with ideals and then assigned them the nationality French. Rather, it's constructed differently from me, which is that I was looking at the French milieu. That's where I started. So it can't be generalized to say the United States or Italy, both countries I'm familiar with than have written about. 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 Tarnac, and they were rated by the French police in two thousand and eight, and we watched that happen and the police used against them as
evidence a book, and that book, the Coming Insurrection. It 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 moved 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. 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 from me because I've witnessed them firsthand.
When we return, Rachel explains why all the characters in Creation Lake are in fact her. That's coming up in just a minute. I can't help but wonder how much your pleasure and fun that you had occupying this world, your desire to return to it, how much of it's about the medieau, and how much of it's about the voices. As you say, there's an amorality to Sadie. She's something of a that must be a fun voice to inhabit.
It was for me, I mean, you know, And I think whether somebody likes the book might come down to whether they can tolerate her or not. She's not for everybody, but no novel is, and if you set out to please everyone, you know, God forbid. I think of these artists Komar and Melamed, who came up with this project for making like world's most popular painting, and they went around asking people like, what components do you like in
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 sort of decided, 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 in 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 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, and not just they all are, but the conflict between them, all, the tension between their different world views, that's actually the sweet spot where the author lives. Like it's reasonable to assume that the divide between idealism and pragmatism that plays out the different relationship to an idea of how we are in the world. Those questions I'm assuming best in body where your brain's at, rather than either side of the divide.
Yeah, maybe, I mean, I see what you're saying. I think it's complicated to testify to the psychic structure of the imaginative mind in terms of where their selfhood or their ego formation or their social identity lies in the 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 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.
I was going to say they are stealthily compelling, even through Sadie's lens and her kind of initial skepticism and growing obsession, it's hard not to be swept up in it. What draws you to radical politics in your novels? I mean, it's funny how different the underlying energy of it in Creation Lake and the French context is to the Italian context in Flamethrowers is to the experience in you know,
a correctional facility in California, in the Mars Room. And yet each of these are about communities built around ideas about how the system is. Accurrently, this might be inadequate for our purposes.
Yeah, maybe, because it feels that way to me. But you know, novels are not for me what I would think of as a political project. You know, to make art is it is different than making an analysis, making something analytical. I mean, I think CD borrows this for me. In the book she says that or Bruno says that to make art is to render the unseen scene, to take something that exists in this world but has not 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? Is it functioning? Is it working?
I'm curious about the traditions into which you place your own books. I think you have both a very American sensibility and very European sensibility, and maybe none of those things matter or mean anything at all. Do you have an idea that you're writing into a tradition.
Yeah, no, I actually love this question. It's forcing me to think on my feet. Well, First, I am deeply American, and I realize that more and more, just lately, in a kind of new way. So Sadie obviously is not me in the book, but she has some thoughts on American culture. She says something like, you know, I miss America, I miss our I can't remember what she says our pension for you know, stupidity and violence, And that's not
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 in 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 Dai as a PhD in Combatted Furinature. 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.
Rachel Kushna's latest novel, Creation Late, is available at everywhere. Now before we get out of here, you can't fail to have heard the news about the twenty twenty four book a Prize this week, and Samantha Harvey took it home with Orbital. I did give a little parted review of Orbital in an earlier read this episode. But it's an extraordinary story, said on the International Space Station. It is a tiny, little intimate novel and you're in for
a treat. You can find it and all the other books on the book a shortlist at your favorite independam bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I read this we're bringing
you my chat with journalist Rick Morton. We had it live in front of an audience at Canberra Writers' Festival this month, and we're discussing his new book Meanstreak, which is all about the robot crisis, the topic that continues to bring out the best in people.
I did a session on robodett this week and a guy came up to me at the end and he said how many people still owed money? And then he started talking to me about how he paid a lot of tax as a small business owner. Even when he bought his Mercedes, he had to pay a lot of tax on it, and I felt very sorry for him and all that he's been through. But then I woke up from my comra and I realized what an idiot. He kind of embodied and embodies that kind of theory
that these people can't be getting something for nothing. Read.
This is a Schwartz Media production made possible thanks to the generous support of the AAR group. It's produced and edited by Clara Ames and mixed by Travis Evans. Original compositions a by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.