Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's books podcast. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by the editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, and
Speaker 1: it features conversations with some of the best and most
Speaker 1: beloved writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from Rachel Kushner. Her latest novel,
Speaker 1: Creation Lake, was shortlisted for this year's Booker Price. Before
Speaker 1: we do, Michael is here to share a bit about
Speaker 1: their conversation.
Speaker 2: Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
Speaker 3: So Michael, I know that.
Speaker 1: You are a big fan of Rachel Kushner's work, and
Speaker 1: I'm just wondering how excited you were about her book
Speaker 1: before you dove in.
Speaker 2: Look, I was excited, but I don't know. You might
Speaker 2: be like me. There's a thing with a particular kind
Speaker 2: of author where if you really love their work, a
Speaker 2: new book is a cause for trepidation as much as excitement.
Speaker 2: What if it disappoints? What if the streak of wonderful
Speaker 2: books I've done before is broken by this new one?
Speaker 2: And it's a turkey And Kushner is a writer via
Speaker 2: enough that the announcement of a new one did have
Speaker 2: me somewhat nervous. Her first book was a book called
Speaker 2: Telex from Cuba, and then her second book, The Flamethrowers,
Speaker 2: is one of my favorite books of recent years, is
Speaker 2: absolutely brilliant. She followed that with The Mars Room, which
Speaker 2: was also shortlisted for the Book of Prize, a terrific
Speaker 2: book about women in the correctional system in California. She
Speaker 2: just again and again writes these kind of amazing books
Speaker 2: about outsiders, about rebellion, about the nature of the individual
Speaker 2: against the institution, and I love her. So I was
Speaker 2: a bit nervous, but CREATIONLA like pretty damn good.
Speaker 1: It's been described as a cerebral spy thriller, which does
Speaker 1: feel like a bit of a departure compared to her
Speaker 1: previous work. So tell me a bit about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, the book that sprang to mind immediately when
Speaker 2: starting it was another book that we've discussed on and
Speaker 2: read this episode, Eleanor Catton's burnham Wood. It's an ego thriller.
Speaker 2: It follows a group of activists and kind of outsider
Speaker 2: trying to understand what they're doing and trying to kind
Speaker 2: of work their way into it. But in this one.
Speaker 2: The outsider in question is a mercenary. Her name Sadie Smith.
Speaker 2: She's a former spy who's lost her formal credentials in
Speaker 2: pretty murky ways, and she's this kind of sardonic observer.
Speaker 2: When she goes in, she wants to see what this
Speaker 2: community is like her in the south of France, and
Speaker 2: to understand what they're going to do. They're led by
Speaker 2: this guy called Bruno Lacombe, and he's this guy who
Speaker 2: lives in a Neanderthal cave. He's rejected civilization. He believes
Speaker 2: that primitivism is where the future lies. And he's this
Speaker 2: charismatic cult leader. And as she tries to get to him,
Speaker 2: tries to understand his philosophy, the drama unfolds, and it's terrific.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Rachel Kushner is not
Speaker 1: auditioning for her own dream.
Speaker 2: All the elements that have made Rachel Kushner such a
Speaker 2: respected and beloved author are here in her fourth book,
Speaker 2: But perhaps what's more remarkable is the obvious ways in
Speaker 2: which he's developed and grown as a writer. There are
Speaker 2: thematic echoes, to be sure, but it's apparent that this
Speaker 2: is not an author inclined to repeat herself.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I try to do something different
Speaker 3: with every book, but each book does feel to me
Speaker 3: like a singular universe that I'm not building really in
Speaker 3: conscious conversation with other novels, because it's as if each
Speaker 3: novel it feels like the only chance I get to
Speaker 3: finally figure out how to resolve and unify form with content,
Speaker 3: because each book has a different form and a different
Speaker 3: set of themes, and so it's like I have to
Speaker 3: invent the wheel all over again, and I'm never thinking, oh,
Speaker 3: I did it this way last time, so this time
Speaker 3: I'll do it in this other manner. There's a curious
Speaker 3: pattern where, which is when I'm finishing a novel, I
Speaker 3: make a decision rather impetuously, my next novel is going
Speaker 3: to be about X, and if there are struggles along
Speaker 3: the way to building the novel about X, I always
Speaker 3: feel that the problems are with me and not with X.
Speaker 3: If that makes sense, it could be that it is
Speaker 3: a way of resolving the quotion of the arbitrary. Like
Speaker 3: as a viewer of art, whether it's cinema or visual
Speaker 3: art or literature, I never want to feel that decisions
Speaker 3: could have been made one way, but just happened to
Speaker 3: have been made another. I don't want to get a
Speaker 3: whiff that there's something arbitrary about the plans that were
Speaker 3: laid in how they were executed. So when I make
Speaker 3: this decision, it's very concrete and there's no turning back
Speaker 3: from it at all.
Speaker 2: Are you certain about many things in your life?
Speaker 3: No? I'm a really indecisive person. And in fact I
Speaker 3: still call my mother all the time if I can't
Speaker 3: decide something, and she's used to it, and she'll say, Rachel,
Speaker 3: I really can't decide for you. I can't help you
Speaker 3: with that. I could be bungling this, but for my
Speaker 3: uses it has served me. There's a line in a
Speaker 3: William Gaddis novel I really love the Recognitions, where he says,
Speaker 3: decision is indecision crystallized. So there are times when I
Speaker 3: wait so long to decide something, and I invest so
Speaker 3: much energy in trying to discern which is the right decision,
Speaker 3: that in fact I have more or less decided through
Speaker 3: my refusal to act. There's this Nino Simone song that
Speaker 3: I really love. Either way I lose. It's on the
Speaker 3: same record that has Lilac. Yeah, just a song that
Speaker 3: Jeff Buckley made famous by covering it. But either way
Speaker 3: I lose. Is like it cuts to the heart of
Speaker 3: what is challenging about choice, which is that if I
Speaker 3: choose A, I lose B, and if I choose B,
Speaker 3: I lose A. But when it comes to artistic direction,
Speaker 3: I am not indecisive, and I'm not sure why. It's
Speaker 3: always just like the new world that you plunge into,
Speaker 3: and each one does feel really different to me. This
Speaker 3: experience was completely different than writing any of my other novels.
Speaker 2: And what I understand about this experience is the wood
Speaker 2: that you've applied to it a number of times is
Speaker 2: fun That this was one of the most purely fun
Speaker 2: writing experiences or fun experience is full stop that you've
Speaker 2: ever enjoyed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was. I mean it gave me great pleasure
Speaker 3: to write the novel. I had the idea for this
Speaker 3: book for quite a long time. Sometimes I just know
Speaker 3: right away when I sort of pick up an image,
Speaker 3: a notion, a scene, it just goes sort of inside
Speaker 3: the mind and gets stashed someplace. And I had known
Speaker 3: since probably late two thousand and eight that someday I
Speaker 3: would want to write a novel like this one in
Speaker 3: the sense of it being a novel that takes place
Speaker 3: in France and deals with young people who want to
Speaker 3: figure out a way to live that is protected from
Speaker 3: the predations of capitalism and are set on a collision
Speaker 3: course with the French state. And then when I finished
Speaker 3: The Mars Room, my previous novel, I started working on
Speaker 3: this book, and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 3: And it was three and a half years of trying
Speaker 3: things out, and then I let go of everything I
Speaker 3: had done, and when I started over, I wrote what
Speaker 3: became the first two sentences of the book. Those are
Speaker 3: the first two things I wrote. And I knew right
Speaker 3: away that I was transposing the language of somebody, this
Speaker 3: character Bruno, who's a kind of mentor who thinks that
Speaker 3: we need to look carefully at the deep past in
Speaker 3: order to assess the direction for the whole human project.
Speaker 3: And I knew that his words were being transposed by
Speaker 3: somebody else. And I was really interested in the formal
Speaker 3: challenge of two storytellers inside of one, that this woman
Speaker 3: has a monopoly on the telling, but that somebody else
Speaker 3: has kind of invaded her telling to a degree invaded,
Speaker 3: and it would sort of be he is an unreliable
Speaker 3: narrator to some degree. She's just a moral person. Is
Speaker 3: like adopting the tone or the voice of a kind
Speaker 3: of devil still force. She doesn't have malice. Her intention
Speaker 3: is not to hurt other people for the sake of
Speaker 3: hurting them. But she has no sympathy for other people.
Speaker 3: And that's not the way that I am at all.
Speaker 3: And so I sort of had to develop the contours
Speaker 3: of an alien sensibility at the same time that I
Speaker 3: was seeing her, to look at the writings of somebody
Speaker 3: who felt much closer to a person I could understand
Speaker 3: and know, and had depth and dimension and a more
Speaker 3: classical and to me literary biography. He has a passed.
Speaker 3: He's a man of the twentieth century. He lost his
Speaker 3: family in World War Two. He was swept up in
Speaker 3: what for many people was significant historical passage through May
Speaker 3: of nineteen sixty eight, and then decides eventually that no
Speaker 3: revolution is coming, And in recognizing the devastation of that
Speaker 3: which isn't for him a kind of nihilism but an
Speaker 3: acknowledgment of reality, he decides, we can revolutionize consciousness instead.
Speaker 3: There's a way of renovating being rather than waiting like
Speaker 3: people sort of desperately waiting for a messianic change that
Speaker 3: is not coming. The more I worked on it, the
Speaker 3: longer I spent each day writing, the more hours I
Speaker 3: was there, the more vivid the world I was creating
Speaker 3: became to the point where I could really see it
Speaker 3: and feel it, and I was eager to get there
Speaker 3: every day. And it was like I was building this
Speaker 3: parallel universe that really glowed for me. And I love
Speaker 3: my life. I love this world. But during the kind
Speaker 3: of intense fourteen months I was writing the book, I
Speaker 3: started to prefer it the world of the book for
Speaker 3: the duration that I was there.
Speaker 2: There's so much I want to unpack from your answer,
Speaker 2: but I just before I get to Bruno and Sadie
Speaker 2: in particular, why French youth as a group of idealistic
Speaker 2: young people. Was it the nineteen sixty eight shadows that
Speaker 2: made it being in the French countries side particularly important?
Speaker 2: What is it about that place that makes that youthful
Speaker 2: idealism and radicalism different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a great question, and my answer is it's
Speaker 3: not that I was looking to describe a group of
Speaker 3: young people with ideals and then assigned them the nationality French. Rather,
Speaker 3: it's constructed differently from me, which is that I was
Speaker 3: looking at the French milieu. That's where I started. So
Speaker 3: it can't be generalized to say the United States, or
Speaker 3: it'll both countries I'm familiar with than have written about.
Speaker 3: I am familiar with French politics. I'm interested in French
Speaker 3: culture partly through exposure because I'm married to somebody who
Speaker 3: has written pretty extensively about Guidebor, particularly as films. My husband, Jason,
Speaker 3: is also a translator and translated to books by the
Speaker 3: Invisible Committee, who had a commune in the northern Correz
Speaker 3: in the village of Tarnak, and they were rated by
Speaker 3: the French police in two thousand and eight, and you know,
Speaker 3: we watched that happen and the police used against them
Speaker 3: as evidence a book, and that book, The Coming Insurrection,
Speaker 3: was translated by a group of people anonymously, but you know,
Speaker 3: I know some of the principal people who were involved
Speaker 3: in establishing the tone of the writing, and I'm really
Speaker 3: interested in that writing. I think The Coming Insurrection is
Speaker 3: a kind of brilliant book. I couldn't reproduce a fictional
Speaker 3: version of that book I think it would be flat
Speaker 3: if I did a version of it. But in my
Speaker 3: novel there's reference Le Moulin the commune, you know, it
Speaker 3: just means the mill, very simple. The Muleinards have a
Speaker 3: book called Zones of Incivility, and it's kind of my
Speaker 3: version of the Coming Insurrection. I did a few lines,
Speaker 3: but I was interested in that world and the way that,
Speaker 3: as you say, you know, you site May sixty eight,
Speaker 3: a lot of culture fans out from there, and like,
Speaker 3: I'm really interested in French cinema. I'm interested in French literature.
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's like it's a colorful milieu to me,
Speaker 3: and it's enriches my love of the literature to understand
Speaker 3: the political and social and cultural references that you would
Speaker 3: find in books by people like Marguerite Duross. And I
Speaker 3: know young people in France and I'm interested in the
Speaker 3: way that when they move to the countryside to learn
Speaker 3: how to farm, people from Paris, they're following upon or
Speaker 3: looking to learn from a version of knowledge and wisdom
Speaker 3: that is part of a kind of romantic conception of
Speaker 3: what people call LaFrance profond, you know, like the deep
Speaker 3: France is the peasant class and peasants have been the
Speaker 3: site of political resistance and revolt over hundreds of years,
Speaker 3: and the French resistance during World War Two, you know,
Speaker 3: was like famously organized in fierce in certain parts of
Speaker 3: southwestern France, where I set my novel. It's also the
Speaker 3: case that we go to southwestern France every summer, and
Speaker 3: so I'm familiar with the landscape and I love it
Speaker 3: in a way that frees me to describe it with
Speaker 3: that labor or research because my love of it and
Speaker 3: my understanding of the people there, my conversations with people, farmers,
Speaker 3: young people who've moved, maybe let's say, from Bordeaux to
Speaker 3: a village and gotten a business going processing walnuts, and
Speaker 3: I meet them, and I'm taken on a tour of
Speaker 3: the walnut processing facility, and they're like, these are these
Speaker 3: turn of the century machines. We've figured out how to
Speaker 3: repair them. Those are all things that are just casual
Speaker 3: happenstance in my personal life, and they start to accrue
Speaker 3: in a way that allows me to write with a
Speaker 3: measure of I wouldn't say authority, but maybe but with
Speaker 3: a free hand. I'm not looking at notes. I'm just
Speaker 3: putting into an assemblage things that I care about and
Speaker 3: that stay vivid for me because I've witnessed them firsthand.
Speaker 2: When we return, Rachel explains why all the characters in
Speaker 2: Creation Lake are in fact her. That's coming up in
Speaker 2: just a minute. I can't help but wonder how much
Speaker 2: your pleasure and fun that you had occupying this world,
Speaker 2: your desire to return to it, how much of it's
Speaker 2: about the milieu, and how much of it's about the voices?
Speaker 2: As you say, there's an amorality to Sadie. She's something
Speaker 2: of a devil that must be a fun voice to inhabit.
Speaker 3: It was for me, I mean, you know, And I
Speaker 3: think whether somebody likes the book might come down to
Speaker 3: whether they can tolerate her or not. She's not for everybody,
Speaker 3: but no novel is. And if you set out to
Speaker 3: please everyone, you know, God forbid. I think of these
Speaker 3: artists Comar and Melamed, who came up with this project
Speaker 3: for making like world's most popular painting, And they went
Speaker 3: around asking people, like what components do you like in
Speaker 3: a painting? And oh, well, I like if there's a
Speaker 3: cabin and it should be near a body of water,
Speaker 3: and I like some trees in the painting, and so
Speaker 3: then they come up with this pastiche painting that's not
Speaker 3: a pestition in terms of form, but a pestiche in
Speaker 3: terms of a set of the desires of the multitude
Speaker 3: over what a painting should be. I mean, that's maybe
Speaker 3: like a wordy way for me to say a novel
Speaker 3: has to sustain the dream of the writer and cannot
Speaker 3: really stop to pause to insecurely ask, but what will
Speaker 3: other people think of my dream? You cannot audition for
Speaker 3: your own dream. Instead, you have to be present for it.
Speaker 3: I knew that a character like Sadie who has arrived
Speaker 3: with the intention of doing whatever she needs to to
Speaker 3: produce evidence that these people are saboteurs and she doesn't
Speaker 3: care if they really are or not, and she has
Speaker 3: experience as an agent provocateur and has arrived with the
Speaker 3: intention of being an agent of destruction. So I knew
Speaker 3: that there was the possibility for a woman like that
Speaker 3: based on some incidences in real life that had happened,
Speaker 3: namely one in the United States when a female FBI
Speaker 3: agent had infiltrated a group of green anarchists in California,
Speaker 3: and she was getting a lot of pressure from her
Speaker 3: supervisor to produce evidence that they were planning sabotage, and
Speaker 3: they weren't. And there was one member of the group
Speaker 3: who was quite sweet on her, and she sorted, I
Speaker 3: will give him hope that there's going to be a
Speaker 3: courtship between us, and you know, as part of the
Speaker 3: process of our courtship, he'll just have to acknowledge that
Speaker 3: I want him very badly to build a bomb or
Speaker 3: to plan to build a bomb with me. And that's
Speaker 3: what happened, and he got twenty one years in federal prison,
Speaker 3: served nine of those years, and then his lawyer was
Speaker 3: able to prove that this woman had entrapped him. And
Speaker 3: I knew people who knew this poor guy. And my
Speaker 3: question was what kind of person would do that? Which
Speaker 3: isn't to pose it rhetorically where you know the answer,
Speaker 3: you know, a bad person, and rather to ask with curiosity,
Speaker 3: what is the mindset and what's it like to only
Speaker 3: have aliases, to go from job to job to job,
Speaker 3: and to be fundamentally alone. And then there was a
Speaker 3: British agent who was caught infiltrating a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: different groups and then was having affairs with women in
Speaker 3: these groups. In France, Germany and the UK, and a
Speaker 3: bunch of them sued the UK police, and I was
Speaker 3: following the story partly because he had infiltrated these French
Speaker 3: people and I knew about it through them. So Sadie
Speaker 3: refers to him as a kind of object lesson. In
Speaker 3: real life, his name is Mark Kennedy. So in the
Speaker 3: books she says, well, well, this guy makes mistakes and
Speaker 3: I don't make mistakes. But then after a while, you know,
Speaker 3: she decides to have an affair with the kind of
Speaker 3: resident hawk guy and the commune. So maybe part of
Speaker 3: the fun was not just riding through the highs of
Speaker 3: her overconfidence and more managing it and allowing and establishing
Speaker 3: and maintaining a secret link between the author and the reader,
Speaker 3: even if that reader is me and not a group
Speaker 3: of people I'm imagining, but to let that reader know
Speaker 3: that maybe Sadie has miscalculated in terms of who's on
Speaker 3: to her and who isn't. And she was always counterbalanced
Speaker 3: for me by the voice of Bruno, so they were
Speaker 3: different pleasures. But she know she was the one who
Speaker 3: had the more caustic and juvenile sense of humor, which
Speaker 3: probably comes from me. Ultimately, but all the characters come
Speaker 3: from me. That's the weird thing about novels. One is
Speaker 3: not more the author than the other, even as sometimes
Speaker 3: you read a review of a novel and it's like
Speaker 3: the reviewer has decided that one is a proxy for
Speaker 3: the novelist, and it's never the case, because they all are.
Speaker 2: And not just they Oleah. But the conflict between them all,
Speaker 2: the tension between the different worldviews, that's actually the sweet
Speaker 2: spot where the author lives. Like it's reasonable to assume
Speaker 2: that the divide between idealism and pragmatism that plays out
Speaker 2: the different relationship to an idea of how we are
Speaker 2: in the world. Those questions I'm assuming best embody where
Speaker 2: your brain's at, rather than either side of the divide.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe, I mean, I see what you're saying. I
Speaker 3: think it's complicated to testify to the psychic structure of
Speaker 3: the imaginative mind in terms of where their selfhood or
Speaker 3: their ego formation or their social identity lies in the
Speaker 3: synthesis of the thing that they've created. I will say
Speaker 3: that one thing I've realized in the wake of writing
Speaker 3: this book is there's something about Bruno's lament and his
Speaker 3: question I'm sorry to quote myself, but early on he says,
Speaker 3: at least in Sadie's transposition, about the human project and
Speaker 3: its future, and I feel that my own character, if
Speaker 3: I may say so, takes the human project really seriously
Speaker 3: and believes in such a thing as grace, and believes
Speaker 3: in the idea that there is incredible meaning for us,
Speaker 3: and that maybe if we have squandered some of that
Speaker 3: meaning or taken a wrong turn somewhere, that the human
Speaker 3: project itself is worth saving. So I mean, who would
Speaker 3: disagree with that? Perhaps? But still, nonetheless there's something about
Speaker 3: having a character feel it and commit himself to it
Speaker 3: as his life project. So when he says early on
Speaker 3: in the book, currently we are careening off of the
Speaker 3: cliff in a driverless car, and the question is how
Speaker 3: do we exit this car? I think Bruno asks a
Speaker 3: fair question. And the sort of myths or half myths
Speaker 3: that he produces about the past as a manner of
Speaker 3: speculating about the future, like where did we take our
Speaker 3: wrong turn? What are we comprised of? Did prior cultures
Speaker 3: of people in prehistoric times live in a different or
Speaker 3: better way? Are there any messages hidden for us that
Speaker 3: we don't know? How to uncover, etc. I think that
Speaker 3: I've found the process of creating a character who would
Speaker 3: ask these questions and speculate into responses, if not answers.
Speaker 3: I think I found that quite healing. So I think
Speaker 3: that Bruno's questions and his lament could be mine as well.
Speaker 2: I was going to say they are stealthily compelling, even
Speaker 2: through Sadie's lens and her kind of initial skepticism and
Speaker 2: growing obsession. It's hard not to be swept up in it.
Speaker 2: What draws you to radical politics in your novels? I mean,
Speaker 2: it's funny how different the underlying energy of it in
Speaker 2: Creation like and the French context is to the Italian
Speaker 2: context in Flame Throws is to the experience in you know,
Speaker 2: a correctional facility in California, in the mass room. And
Speaker 2: yet each of these are about communities built around ideas
Speaker 2: about how the system is Accounently. This might be inadequate
Speaker 2: for our purposes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe, because it feels that way to me. But
Speaker 3: you know, novels are not for me what I would
Speaker 3: think of as a political project. You know, to make
Speaker 3: art is it is different than making an analysis. Making
Speaker 3: something analytical. I mean, I think Sadie borrows this from me.
Speaker 3: In the book, she says that or Bruneo says that
Speaker 3: to make art is to render the unseen scene, to
Speaker 3: take something that exists in this world but has not
Speaker 3: attained a form that we can apprehend. And to me,
Speaker 3: that's the best I can do in terms of the
Speaker 3: definition of art. The novel feels like a real calling
Speaker 3: and which to do that. So I respond to the
Speaker 3: reality around me and build a parallel universe that seems
Speaker 3: to put into a synthetic whole. Things that go into
Speaker 3: me and stay there because they seem important, whether to
Speaker 3: the world or to me. It almost doesn't matter which,
Speaker 3: but they have something to do with life as I
Speaker 3: know it, and it's like it's my job to put
Speaker 3: them into a form. So I wouldn't say that I'm
Speaker 3: looking to write novels about radical politics, but maybe one
Speaker 3: draws for their fiction from the material to some degree
Speaker 3: of both their life and their interests. I sometimes have
Speaker 3: this theory that, like or as this crude manner of categorizing,
Speaker 3: that there are writers who look inward and very reflective,
Speaker 3: and they're writers who face outward. And I've just always,
Speaker 3: since I was a little girl, been someone who faces outward.
Speaker 3: I'm interested in the world. The world includes people who
Speaker 3: are asking is the organization of society the best that
Speaker 3: it can be? Isn't functioning? Is it working?
Speaker 2: I'm curious about the traditions into which you place your
Speaker 2: own books. I think you have both a very American
Speaker 2: sensibility and very European sensibility, and maybe none of those
Speaker 2: things matter or mean anything at all. Do you have
Speaker 2: an idea that you're writing into a tradition?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I actually love this question. It's forcing me
Speaker 3: to think on my feet. Well, first, I am deeply American,
Speaker 3: and I realize that more and more, just lately, in
Speaker 3: a kind of new way. So Sadie obviously is not
Speaker 3: me in the book, but she has some thoughts on
Speaker 3: American culture. She says something like, you know, I miss America,
Speaker 3: I miss our I can't remember what she says our
Speaker 3: pension for you know, stupidity and violence, And that's not
Speaker 3: how I personally would put it. But when I think
Speaker 3: about the English language as it expands and develops in
Speaker 3: an American milieu, you know, we're Anglophone, but our language
Speaker 3: is a bit unique in the sense of how we
Speaker 3: build out and just how supple and specific and precise
Speaker 3: it is. And then the culture here. It seems in
Speaker 3: a way ridiculous to try to summarize it, but there
Speaker 3: is some inheritance of violence and tragedy here that is
Speaker 3: unique to us. But what it has produced as a
Speaker 3: sort of dialectrical force in terms of cultural phenomena like jazz,
Speaker 3: you know, like abstract expressionism, like hip hop, like streetwear.
Speaker 3: It is a complicated place, and like lately I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about the form of the sermon and American religion
Speaker 3: and how deeply might be tied in with our very literature,
Speaker 3: with what the American novel is as this sort of
Speaker 3: like runaway hallucinated Bible. It's a strange place, and there
Speaker 3: are streams of pride when I think of how difficult
Speaker 3: it is for other people to comprehend the discontinuities and
Speaker 3: different forms of disruption and violence that comprise American life.
Speaker 3: At the same time, I am really interested in France,
Speaker 3: and I, you know, have friends there, writers filmmakers with
Speaker 3: whom I can speak about French history, and I live
Speaker 3: with a Francophile. My husband was a student of Jacques
Speaker 3: gry dais a PhD in compatted Furterature. Our son went
Speaker 3: to French school, so I can't help but be exposed
Speaker 3: to these things. And maybe it originates, as I said
Speaker 3: before in my Love Cinema First, that I've come to
Speaker 3: want to learn and know things about France. So I'd
Speaker 3: say that I'm both. I spend time there, I'm interested
Speaker 3: in Europe, but I do I am myself at the
Speaker 3: same time invested in coming to understand the peculiar horizon
Speaker 3: for the American and it is a tragic horizon, and
Speaker 3: it also is what the word is. It produces amazing art.
Speaker 3: I'm not talking about myself, but what I witness and
Speaker 3: see in terms of what this convulsive place has made,
Speaker 3: what people have made.
Speaker 2: Rachel Kushna's latest novel, Creation Link, is available everywhere now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: John Saffran, Claire Wright, and our very own Rick Morton.
Speaker 1: And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday
Speaker 1: to dive in to Read This, you can search for
Speaker 1: it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than
Speaker 1: sixty episodes in the archive for you to enjoy.