For the last 14 years, Rachel Kushner has spent her summers in France’s Vézère Valley. The region, located deep in the country’s southwestern centre, is a UNESCO World Heritage site: an ancient landscape of looming, limestone cliffs and undulating forests. But its secrets lie in the labyrinthine caverns beneath its surface. Many of these still hold traces of prehistoric human life, with sculptures, engravings and paintings that date back to 400,000 years.
Kushner’s new novel Creation Lake takes us – at least partly – inside these spaces. Although based on the Vézère Valley, the book is officially set in the fictional French region of Guyenne, where a charismatic philosopher called Bruno Lacombe has sequestered himself in an underground cave. Lacombe, we are told, was a former leftist revolutionary, an active participant in the 1968 protests and an ally of Marxist intellectual Guy Debord. After a series of political disappointments, he exiled himself, shunning modern society to get back in touch with humanity’s more primitive roots. His main preoccupations now are Neanderthals, and the mythical whispers he can hear in the cave’s walls. “Currently, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car,” he writes at one point, to a group of eco-activists he mentors over email. “The question is: how do we exit the car?”
But Lacombe and his devotees are under threat. The main character of Kushner’s book is ‘Sadie Smith’ – a 34-year-old American spy with a good boob job and a bad drinking habit, who is working undercover for an unspecified private company. Her job is to infiltrate Lacombe and his leftist commune, to incriminate or sabotage them from within. Smith is a mesmerisingly cold character: detached, morally bankrupt and delusionally self-assured (“a kind of devil” in Kushner’s own words). But is she really as impervious to Lacombe as she’d like to think?
We spoke to Rachel Kushner over the phone, the morning after Creation Lake’s shortlisting for the Booker Prize. Below, she tells us more about how the book came to be: from forming its characters, to her own personal history with ‘radical’ living.
Dominique Sisley: The book is set in 2013 in the fictional French region of Guyenne. Can you talk a bit about your history with the country, and why you wanted to write about it?
Rachel Kushner: I go to France every summer. My son is bilingual, he went to a French school. My husband was trained in comparative literature and has a PhD, and his dissertation advisor was Jacques Derrida. He’s not a deconstructionist, but he comes out of that tradition and he lived in Paris. And you know, I’m not an intellectual, I write novels. It’s a very different thing because I can take ideas and deploy them in a way that doesn’t leave me beholden to the rigour of a specific analytical line. But I live in proximity to somebody who is an intellectual and cares deeply about French philosophy, French ideas and French literature.
There’s another aspect, too: in the 00s, we watched some people that we know, who were experimenting with having formed their own communal living structure in France, be raided by the French police and be tried by the French state. That trial took several years, and eventually all the charges were dropped. But it was a very notable case, and my husband was sort of peripherally involved, because he had translated two books by the people that formed that commune.
DS: In the past, you’ve alluded to being amongst these kinds of radical, leftist groups. I was going to ask whether it was something you’d directly experienced or just researched.
RK: I don’t ever research anything. I just wouldn’t, because I only write about things that I feel I have an authority to weigh in on and that interest me deeply. That would never come from peering into something. Maybe I shouldn’t say never, maybe I would research something. But this book happened much more organically, and perhaps that’s why it was so fun to write.
DS: So these are things you’ve lived rather than just read about?
RK: Yeah. I don’t even know how you would read about [them], because you would have to have a feel for how people talk and how they think. It’s just familiarity. I lived through the Occupy movement, as everyone did, and I have, through my husband, lots of friends who have ties to people who would be like some of the characters in my book. Like the young man in the book who is entrapped by Sadie early on, and she blames him for getting her fired, when in fact, she manipulated this boy and tried to send him to prison by entrapping him. That was loosely based on something that happened to a young man who was entrapped by a woman working for the FBI. I watched things like that happen, and I would ask myself, ‘What kind of person would do that?’ I thought about it for years and years, and Sadie is my answer.
“I love other people. I’m very interested in them, and I’m always trying to figure out what they think, and even what they think about me” – Rachel Kushner
DS: How long did it take to form Sadie? What kind of character-building work did you do?
RK: I knew I would want to write a book set in rural France, among a group of people who had decamped from Paris to form a commune. I knew that they would have a mentor who would be like Bruno, somebody who has decided that capitalism is here to stay and that the only alternative left is to reject civilisation entirely and live in a primitivist manner. But I didn’t know who would be the teller. It wasn’t going to be a French person, because I needed to have my range and my cultural references. And there is something about an American eye – it’s going to be a little bit more coarse and vulgar, you know? But I just couldn’t figure it out for a long time. Then, after three years of fumbling, I soon realised that she was a hostile narrator, almost a kind of devil who had been sent in to destroy these people’s lives.
DS: Sadie, and particularly Bruno, could both be described as charismatic. I know Sadie has her view on this: “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic’. It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” What is your own view on this, as someone who creates these characters?
RK: Sadie’s thing about charisma, I don’t personally believe that. But I was reading something Marina Warner wrote about the phenomenon of Joan of Arc, and the way that aspects of charisma are augmented by projection. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems like it would be very advantageous for someone like Sadie to tell herself this, because it means that it’s up to her to incinerate the effect of other people’s charisma. It can work on others, but not on her. She thinks she can walk into a room and see how other people are led and misled, so she can manipulate them. That’s the opposite of how I operate because I love other people. I’m very interested in them, and I’m always trying to figure out what they think, and even what they think about me. I would be constantly modulating my behaviour based on the feedback that I’m getting, just because that’s how I am. I want to be liked. But she’s not concerned with that at all.
“People who have that kind of fundamental gentleness can inspire other people. A gentle person can make other people gentle. A good person can make other people good” – Rachel Kushner
DS: There’s also Sadie’s belief that there are “no politics inside of people”, and that political principles are not really part of their “4am reality of being”. You’ve previously said this is similar to your own way of thinking. Could you expand on this idea?
RK: I think everybody knows what the 4am reality of being feels like. It’s a vulnerable state of mind, because the daytime chatter and illusions that allow the person to believe they occupy a place of moral rightness is sheared away. In the middle of the night, darker thoughts enter the mind. And I think that people are more naked in a metaphorical sense. Sadie is saying your sense of politics and your declaration about what kind of person you are and how you define yourself politically is, in fact, evidence mostly of your fragile ego and your need to have a social, psychological identity. If a lot of what defines people politically is about how they position themselves socially in a group, and how they want to experience themselves as a formed individual, then what is underneath that? She refers to it as the ‘salt’: a harder, more neutral substance that would be what that person believes about right and wrong and how society should be organised. It’s probably less specific and less formed by other people’s ideas, and something down at the root of instinct, understanding and wisdom.
DS: Your books often seem to explore feelings of political disenchantment. Here, Bruno ends up isolating himself in a cave after the failings of the 1968 uprisings. Is this disenchantment something you feel yourself?
RK: I don’t actually agree with that. I think that fiction is not really political. I think it’s art, and art, to me, is not political. If I wanted to write about politics, I would write non-fiction, and I have done that. I feel like art is never a sphere for political ideas or political messages. My definition of art is that it renders the unseen seen: you create something that you feel a recognition for, and maybe other people will feel that too. I feel that way about visual art too; it’s never a space for polemics and ideas about how life should actually be lived. I write from a space of doubt and curiosity, which is not where people make political formulations and declarations, but I also happen to write about life as we live it.
We live through history, and history can never be separated from political formations. In May of 1968, [there were people who] hoped for a revolutionary transformation and then were later disappointed. Pretty much everyone eventually was disenchanted, because, as Sadie points out, there was not a single successful revolutionary transformation in all of Europe for the second half of the 20th century. Bruno, like many others in real life, gives up and decides that capitalism is here to stay. That doesn’t really seem like disenchantment and more like fact.
But Bruno, to me, seems like a person of such a deep and incontrovertible positivity, because he believes in the human spirit. He is a gentle man, and his gentleness I find very appealing. His biographical history just came to me very easily, all there in my mind, coming down faster than I could even write it down. It seemed to me that he was somebody who believed in some fundamental innocence. He decides that you must treat people with love and respect, and he seemed to me like a type of person that I have encountered in my life. People who have that kind of fundamental gentleness can inspire other people. A gentle person can make other people gentle. A good person can make other people good. To me, Bruno is that, and his passages in the book were like sermons. I needed to write them so that somebody could have a sort of moral centre.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is published by Jonathan Cape, and is out now.