A Q&A with Rachel Kushner, Author of September Indie Next List Top Pick “Creation Lake”

Bookselling This Week: The relationship between Sadie and Bruno sort of is the unexpected core of this novel. Like Sadie, I found myself waiting for Bruno’s next email. Would you tell us a little more about building these two characters?

Rachel Kushner: The first two sentences of the novel were the first two sentences I wrote: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.”

I had the sense of this character who was the “he” making this assertion — Bruno, who ponders the past as a rejection of the present. But I didn’t know yet who was conveying Bruno’s thoughts to the reader. Really quickly, it occurred to me that it was someone who would pull back and say to the reader, effectively: Wait a minute, neanderthals? Smoking?

By page two of that draft, it was a woman, and she was reading the correspondence of this dreamer, Bruno, illicitly, having broken into his email account. As part of her work assignment, to surveil and spy, she is reading Bruno’s letters, looking for evidence of sabotage by the young people who consider themselves Bruno’s followers.

It was the duality of the voice, a first-person novel in which you get this repetition of “he said,” “he told them,” “he said,” that seemed strangely fun to me. I was, initially, emulating the first line of the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965.” The sense of a female voice, and a “he.” The sense that this person, the “he” has something mysterious to impart. The tone of Sans Soleil is more elegiac, if it’s also playful, as Chris Marker always is.

My narrator, unnamed, but who is calling herself Sadie, is more blunt, and edging in places into nihilism. I’ve long admired the deployment of nihilism by certain writers, from Céline to Houellebecq, and regarded that kind of black humor as foreign territory, because I believe in life so wholeheartedly, believe in grace, blessings, dignity, joy, and even equality and dare I say the future. This narrator became a vehicle for something darker: she’s looking at a milieu for which I would have a lot of natural sympathy, and she doesn’t. She has, in fact, no sympathy, and that was empowering and strange and kind of a magnetic draw.

Meanwhile, Bruno, as the heart of the book — at least that is how I think of him — could always bring me back to someone whose yearnings and laments and versions of rapture made a space that was much more familiar. His life story and his musings were just very natural and rolled along, easy to write, easy to see. It’s good to be both totally estranged from what you make, and also deeply at home. Sadie and Bruno are quite different. But she reads him so obsessively and closely that it’s almost as if she could delude herself into thinking he is addressing her directly. He isn’t. And her realization that he doesn’t even know she exists allows her to feel a new emotion — new to her — but I don’t want to give away too much…

BTW: You touched on this a little already. Our narrator, Sadie, has a unique voice — she’s blunt, disconnected, and calculated. And I get the sense that she was fun to write. Will you tell us more about developing Sadie and her voice? 

RK: One thing I could add is that she was a fun outlet for my own sense of humor. Although most of her qualities aren’t ones I possess at all. Her voice was about building someone who doesn’t show any cracks, who isn’t vulnerable, who thinks she’s manipulating everyone around her. This was quite interesting for me in terms of what it meant for the narrative structure. I never had to hope for some kind of “coincidence,” which even the finest writers succumb to as artificial device. With a spy, there is no need for coincidence because the protagonist has everything rigged. Or so she thinks. My rule for her backstory was that she only shares prior guises and dissimulations, previous scenarios in which she misrepresented herself and entrapped people and ruined their lives, as she hopes to do in Creation Lake.

BTW: Creation Lake touches on so many different subjects. Did you do any research for this title?

RK: I move toward what interests me, which is the incredible luxury of being a novelist. It also means I know a little of this and a little of that, and have no real deep expertise. I have been going to the same part of France for something like fifteen years, and am quite familiar with the look and feel of the geography. I’m familiar with the social world of these villages, of farm life, of young people decamping to live communally, and I learned about the caves through my son, who knows them well. I read some prehistory and some meta-prehistory, if you will, simply because I was interested, and not exactly as research for the book.

This book by Jo Marchant, The Human Cosmos, was critical. A very weird book called Juniper Fuse by Clayton Eshleman, Luminous Debris by Gustaf Sobin, The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (a wonderful book, absolutely stuffed with goodies), Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ book Kindred, Clive Finlayson’s quite moving and even breathtaking book The Smart Neanderthal (where I learned how they might have caught eagles). Plus a lot of other things. Céline’s biography by Frédéric Vitoux. A bizarre book of “crypto-zoology” called The Soviet Sasquatch by Boris Porshnev, whose introduction enumerates which chapters to read and which to skip, if you’re in a rush. James Rebanks’ books, about his own life as an English sheep farmer, have somehow been elemental for me even if I could not say exactly how. The crime novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette were critical.

The parts of my book about twentieth century France, Guy Debord, May 1968, and leftist radicals in the 1970s moving to the countryside, was all acquired casually over the course of many years of life, and mostly through my husband, who knows quite a lot about the French twentieth century and especially Guy Debord, who he’s written a lot about.

BTW: Any idea what you’ll be working on next?

RK: I just finished writing a 12,000-word essay for Harper’s Magazine on the past and future of hot rodding in America. I went to nostalgia drag races all over, with my son, and we interviewed lots of people and had an absolute blast.

In the immediate future, I will be working on trying to remember what day it is and where I am supposed to be, because I’m about to go on a book tour.

In terms of fiction: I have two ideas, two horses, and I’ve put a little money on each. We’ll see.

BTW: For our last question, we always like to bring it back around to books and indies. Would you tell us a little bit about the role of books and indie bookstores in your life?

RK: Oh gosh, independent bookstores have been at the very core of things for me! I worked at a bookstore after school in Eugene, Oregon. Believe it or not this was kindergarten, but that’s what the seventies were like. It was all very “free to be you and me.” The bookstore was called Book and Tea, and was a collective that specialized in witchcraft and feminism. They had a nice children’s section in the back and would assign me to alphabetize. The shelves were low and I remember kneeling and looking at books. I think my mother arranged this “gig” so that I would have somewhere to go after school because no one was at our house, my parents worked and they were also students.

Later, as a teenager in San Francisco, I would lurk in the aisles of Green Apple Books on Clement Street, as my high school was due west by the ocean and I would pass the bookstore on the days I didn’t go to my afterschool job at an ice cream chain.

In college, at Berkeley, Cody’s was my haunt. (Moe’s was almost too much for me, too many books, too much information). As a bohemian in my twenties in San Francisco, we had Adobe Books on 16^th street, and Dog Eared Books, and Modern Times. The Booksmith on Haight Street, near where I grew up. City Lights of course, if I wanted to be dreamy and sophisticated and go all the way to North Beach.

When I lived in New York, on any given weekend night, after going to some sort of gathering or bar or party, I always went to St. Mark’s — open til midnight — and browsed the front table to kind of get back into myself after socializing, and pick up a little education before retiring for the night, because the display was curated just so.

I can see that store, that front display, so vividly! Benjamin Friedman, manager, would be up at the front, that high desk. I can hear his voice, see his glasses. Gary Indiana would be in the back, between the back desk and the magazine rack, carrying on with someone. Maybe me, if I was lucky. Benjamin now does the wonderful Topos Bookstore in Ridgewood. Gary might be at Karma on East 3rd, gabbing away? If they’re lucky.

Right now, when I finish this interview, I’m walking to go meet a friend for dinner in my neighborhood, Echo Park. I will stop in at Stories, a wonderful local bookstore, sceney in a cool and vibrant and not an obnoxious way, with a very hand-picked selection of new titles by the front.

And if I can get up the courage, I’ll also stop at Des Pair, which was started by some young people in Echo Park and is the absolute center of a certain poetry scene but I’ve been too intimidated to go inside! The kids, you see, are into books and bookstores! Indie bookstores are hip! They are cool! And they are also the soul of the world I want to live in, and, luckily, do.