On the road with Rachel Kushner

After we order a Coke on the terrace (“I did hear you say Zero,” Kushner whispers conspiringly, when the waitress brings us a regular one), the writer describes how it was her son, Remy, who first prompted her interrogation into the area’s geology, which is home to the famous Lascaux caves. A 20-minute drive away, the prehistoric site remains closed to visitors, with a tacky simulacrum in their place. Remy was at a local colonie de vacances run by French hippies. “It’s on a working farm, and the kids go into caves. I’m going to show you a cave that he has been into many times, if you want. You borrow the key from these people to open the gate and go in. There’s a crevice that is this wide,” she says, making the motion of ’small’ with her hands. “The kids shimmy through like a kilometre down into the earth. I mean, no thanks.”

While not willing to go into the caves physically, Kushner does explore them in writing. Deep in the subterranean structure, Bruno experiences a sort of aesthetic and spiritual nirvana: “The walls were covered in magnesium crystals. They were blanketed in sparkling white, a natural geologic phenomenon… In that moon milk floor were indentations that he believed were records of human presence, and in particular, shapes that looked, and felt, like footprints of a child.” He experiences the voices of the earth along cave frequencies, joining a temporality before language. Kushner describes how Remy, who later became a cave guide, would wade through the cold water in a wetsuit, observing skulls of extinct animals alongside resistance graffiti. “There’s just this feeling of layers. Like Bruno says, you’ve left calendar time and are more in communion with these other versions of time,” says Kushner. She explains that Bruno’s atavistic yearnings illustrate a wider trend in the region, which is filled with organic farms run by “post 68-ers” and out-of-towners from Bordeaux. “It’s about a tradition which is very real in France of people trying to find their way back to an early version of life that seems better than now,” says Kushner, a tractor passing behind her.

Creation Lake also explores how the Neanderthals—sympathetically rendered by Bruno as artistically minded, prone to depression and even addiction—succumbed to the aggressive, weapon-yielding Homo sapiens. The rivalry reflects a winner-loser dichotomy of contemporary capitalism. “I like this idea that [the Neanderthals] just couldn’t hack it,” says Kushner, adding that in Asia, gene pools can still be up to 2-4% Neanderthal. I ask whether she identifies herself more with the side of the winner or the loser. “My job is to doubt and to question and to delight and not to decide or really take a position—although I am on the side of the loser.”

Kushner has a terrible sense of direction. “I got lost running yesterday,” she says. “I walk everywhere.” To get from the village to the Étang de Tamniès, which is about a kilometre away, she turns on her navigation and a feminised American voice guides us as we pass a tiny cave opening hiding in plain sight on the side of the road. The Étang—which translates roughly as ’pond’ in English—is a large recreational lake, with hobbying fisherman on one side and an artificial beach on the other. On the day we visit, an inflated castle in primary colours floats on the water. Kushner tells us they host a Marché Gourmand here every Sunday night during the summer, filled with “beaufs” or “country guys”. It inspired a scene for an agricultural fair in the novel attended by a local deputy subminister Paul Platon, that Les Moulinards have plans to sabotage. Kushner recalls a cover band at one of the Marché Gourmands playing Guns N’ Roses Used to Love Her. The song, which is filled with “racial epithets”, was hummed over by the singer.

The vision of France in Creation Lake reflects something grittier. “I didn’t want to create anything that would read to me like what I would call tourist literature,” she explains. In one sequence Sadie drunkenly muses on the “real Europe”, which is “not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes…” but a “borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped pallets of superpasteurised milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear powerplants…a Texas-sized parcel of which is called France.”

While to some extent Kushner agrees with Sadie’s inebriated appraisal of France as a highly industrialised country, the passage was a way to explore the psychology of her protagonist. In order to go undercover, forges a fake relationship with Lucien, a film-maker on the peripheries of the group. “I was deep into answering my own question about what type of person becomes an agent provocateur, which was a real phenomenon in the mid-aughts. I kept wondering what kind of person is motivated to do that? I kind of popped into her consciousness, maybe not unlike how you would pop into a cave,” says Kushner. “She’s eager to demystify what’s meaningful to other people because she’s about to trample on their dreams.”

“It’s a foreign mentality to me because things matter a lot,” says Kushner. The writer has what she describes as an “instant, total interest in people”. As we talk, she spiels knowledge on everything from the French fighter jets that pass in the sky above us to a “cool medieval cattle scale” located in the village. For the past three years Kushner has been learning French and, at an impressive level already, tells me she can understand France Culture, but not so much the “guy at the tabac”.

Kushner does identify, however, with Bruno. “He’s the character that, for me, opened the most fully as a kind of classic literary figure,” she explains. I find there is something quietly masculine about Kushner, who describes incidents of people confusing her with Sadie as “alarming” and has cited literary influences such as Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Louis Ferdinand Céline, John Steinbeck and Fyodor Dostoevsky (women such as Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector, too, although neither are hardly averse to virility). At her home in California, Kushner’s office is decorated after Sigmund Freud’s study in Highgate. “He plundered all these artifacts from Egypt. I thought I could do this with stuff from the thrift stores in Bakersfield,” says Kushner. “I would never put anything feminine in my office. If I took off a pair of high-heeled shoes, I would immediately put them back in the bedroom. I want to feel there is no mix between my work and my personal effects. Although I sometimes like to have flowers in my office.”

Specificity of milieu is central to Kushner’s output as a writer. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba (2008), dived into the expat community during the Cuban revolution. The Flamethrowers (2013) oscillates between the art world (in particular the Land Art movement) and radical Italian politics of the 1970s. Following a 29-year-old single mother found guilty of murder, The Mars Room (2018) takes place in a woman’s prison, where inmates send things through the lavatories and brew pruno, or “prison wine”. “Like Irving Goffman says, all institutions create their own world,” says Kushner. “It starts with her leaving reality by being forced onto this prison bus, and making the drive up the grapevine to the Central Valley. I’ve done that drive so many times and I see those sheriff’s buses on the highway and just think what would it feel like to be inside? Someone being invisibilized, wrenched from one world to another.”

In creating a fake identity, Sadie herself selects a sort of non-place to be from: “Priest Valley/ Elevation: 2,200 Feet/Population: Zero”. Priest Valley is, however, a real place in California, where Kushner resides. “[It is] one of the secret places I discovered with Jason. No one lives there, and it’s on this road that’s in-between two places and no one travels that road,” says Kushner. “It sounds to me like a Robert Bresson movie… There are a lot of men in the book positioning themselves as people who could impart knowledge that comes down on high. The two words together, priest and valley, really appealed to me. But it’s just this place with one abandoned building.”

Our tour of the area continues towards Sergeac. The mysterious village was once the site of the Knights Templar, a religious military order. “They just fight and they don’t fuck,” jokes Kushner. It is located along the Lozère valley, and peasants would hide in its church when Vikings came up the river to attack. Signs on the approach point to Bergerac and Lascaux, the famous caves. Back down on the road she points out a path that goes to the next town, which was used by the mail delivery person for 200 years. “You take that path and you go underneath these limestone shelves and you feel like you are in these people’s rooms,” she says. “That’s partly where I got this idea: you could escape calendar time, and be in this realm where you are in conversation with a different era. You can feel this sense of it welling up.”

Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1968, a fateful year of student revolutions and social upheaval. Her part-hippie part-beatnik parents, who were scientists, arrived in the USA from a then working- class Kentish Town in London, where they had been living in a “cold water flat”. In the 1970s they moved to San Francisco, and Kushner lived in Haight-Ashbury in the 1980s, long after the hippie movement had faded. As Kushner describes in her essay Naked Childhood, at about the same time her family moved to Oregon with a school bus converted into a caravan, Joan Didion had visited Haight-Ashbury, reporting on the scene in her 1967 essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion encounters a five-year-old girl with blonde hair and white lipstick who is given LSD by her mother. Kushner, who is about five years older than the girl in the photo and describes the milieu from inside, dislikes Didion’s judgemental tone, the way she puts ’hippies’ in quotation marks.

I still wonder if Didion, who hailed from nearby Sacramento and also possessed a certain reverence for masculine style, was an influence on Kushner. The photo on the cover of The Hard Crowd (2021), her collection of essays, bears a similarity to Didion’s portrait by Julian Wasser used on the cover of Didion’s 1979 book The White Album. Kushner admits that it was impossible for writers of her generation not to be influenced by Didion: “Her sentences are always exciting. They’re not lazy. She is alive to beauty… I wanted my sentences to do that.” She disagrees, however, that she would ever brand herself after Didion. “The irony with her is that she’s from Sacramento, but then she’s this patrician debutante,” says Kushner. “Didion’s standing in front of a brand-new car,” she adds of Wasser’s photo. “It’s a Corvette Stingray, which looks cool and vintage now, but what would be the equivalent today? It’d be like standing in front of a Tesla.”