The writing room in Rachel Kushner’s Los Angeles home is filled with globes, maps, and tribal art, and is both a workspace and a curious art installation. Kushner modeled the room on Sigmund Freud’s London office, where the psychoanalyst displayed archival objects from Africa and the Middle East—creating what Kushner calls a strange commentary on early-20th-century comfort with colonialism and theft.
“I like my office to cite, while smirking at, male importance,” Kushner says over FaceTime. Among the objects on her bookshelves are an Aztec mask given to her by her grandfather and a model ship. “When you’re checking the boxes on a macho office,” she says, “a model ship would be one of the things you’d include.”
There are also nods to modern art and literature: ceramic emoji given to her by the artist Laura Owens and a framed letter from Don DeLillo. Then there are the small lamps she turns on at night while working. “It’s corny, but I think of them as harbor lights,” she says. “As the ideas are coming in, they need to know where to go, and I leave a little light on for them.”
Kushner, a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation fellow, is the author of inventive, idea-rich works that have been translated into 27 languages. These include the novels Telex from Cuba (2008) and The Flamethrowers (2013), both National Book Award finalists, and The Mars Room (2018), winner of the Prix Médicis and a Booker Prize finalist. She’s also published a collection of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K (2015), and a book of essays, The Hard Crowd (2021).
Kushner’s magnetic new novel, Creation Lake, out in September from Scribner, is a literary noir thriller about Sadie Smith (not her real name), a 34-year-old American secret agent who’s hired by a shadowy organization to go to rural France and infiltrate a commune of subversives who are planning to sabotage a controversial public works project. The state wants to siphon groundwater from local caves, lakes, and rivers and capture it in “megabasins” to be used by corporations for large-scale farming. Sadie must find out what the group, Le Moulin, is planning to do. As the story unfolds, Sadie, a coolly detached master of seduction who reads like an even more dysfunctional James Bond, initiates an affair with a man associated with Le Moulin and hacks into the email of the group’s elusive mentor, Bruno, a philosopher who opines about everything from Neanderthals to capitalism.
“I don’t consider Creation Lake to be a straight-ahead noir novel, but I did get really into reading the French noir novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette, and this book is kind of a secret homage to him,” says Kushner, who visits France every year. “He’s funny and outrageous, and there’s a lot of action in his books, and usually the narrative shape is such that you arrive at this big event that’s going to determine the protagonist’s destiny and instead it becomes a full-blown fiasco, and I find that wonderful and was inspired by that structure.”
Nan Graham, Kushner’s editor, admires the author for her ability to tell bold stories in original ways while playing with genre. “Rachel is a rare, brilliant writer—one of the best in this moment in our culture,” Graham says.
Kushner wrote Creation Lake for 14 months—sometimes getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. and working until 7 or 8 p.m. “I’d never had that kind of obsessive schedule,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to get up and keep going.” The book’s irresistible narrator became something of an alter ego. “Sadie started taking on qualities that I lack. She can smell fear and insecurity and isn’t concerned with other people except insofar as she can manipulate them. I look to see what effect I’m having on others because I want them to like me. She’s not like that.”
Susan Golomb, Kushner’s agent, thinks the writer’s skill at creating complicated characters makes her a standout. “Rachel is able to put a reader under a character’s spell,” Golomb says. “Each time she writes a new book it’s leaps and bounds beyond the last one. With Rachel, everything’s always guns blazing.”
Born in 1968 in Eugene, Ore., Kushner was raised by brainy hippie parents—both hold PhDs in science—who drove a converted school bus and gave Kushner the autonomy to forge her own path. “I was a pensive kid but also really up for life,” says Kushner, who had her first job in kindergarten reshelving books at a feminist bookstore. “The treacherous world of people enthralled me. I was always drawn to study people, even more so than books.”
Kushner moved with her parents to San Francisco in 1979 and, at 16, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in political economy, graduating in 1990. She moved to New York City in 1996, earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia in 2001, and worked as an editor at Grand Street and Bomb. While in N.Y.C., she also started Telex from Cuba—a book partly inspired by a postgraduation trip she took to Cuba with her mom.
In 2003, seeking more time to work on Telex, Kushner quit her Bomb job and moved to Los Angeles, where she met her husband, Jason. They married at city hall in 2007—the bride wore jeans—when she was five months pregnant with their son, Remy, now 16.
These days, Kushner gives Remy the same leeway that her parents gave her. “I encourage a lot of independence,” she says. Both she and Remy are classic car enthusiasts—she drives a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500, he a 1969 Dodge Dart—and Remy has become a skilled mechanic. “A while back, when he was rebuilding his front end, he was in the garage using torches. I didn’t go back there once asking if he was safe. I just gave him a fire extinguisher.”
Being a parent has brought boundless joy to Kushner’s world, something that writing does, too—even when it’s difficult. “I just show up every morning and try,” she says of her writing practice. “You have to be prepared for when inspiration hits.” And that means being at the desk, and switching on those twinkling harbor lights to help guide the good ideas home. “It’s not like I can go to the beach and wait until I get an idea. I have to be there searching—facing the void.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
Corrections: An earlier version of this article stated that Kushner had lights string lights; they are small lamps. Also: Kushner drives a Galaxie 500 not a Galaxy 500. Additionally, Kushner comments about her writing routine have been edited for clarity.
