The US author, whose new novel Creation Lake is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, on US politics, the war in Gaza and her love of Ireland
The last time I interviewed Rachel Kushner, for a live online event for International Literature Festival Dublin during the pandemic, a tech malfunction caused her interface to shrink to a tiny rectangle that framed only her nose and mouth, behind which was a very large rectangle of my own panicked head.
“Suddenly there is this established set of markers by which geneticists can look at DNA and see a whole long written history inside one person’s DNA of every ancestor that came before them in this lineage. It seemed, not like the mystery was solved, but that the mystery was loud, that each person has inside of them this encoding of a long and unknown story.”, she felt it would be too difficult. “ novel is kind of interesting and smartly done but the limitations are beyond his talents.
Though she only started learning the language three years ago, Kushner’s love of French culture, philosophy and literature runs through Creation Lake, most memorably in this funny, merciless summary of one of their most cherished writers: “Céline was a leg man, obsessed with chorus girls. He once attended a dawn execution. He denounced, in addition to Jews, sloth, overeating, and ‘low IQ-ism’. He did not drink and preferred watching sex to having it.
Kushner spent years trying to come up with a narrator for her story before deciding that an American woman would give her “quicker, easier access to humour and a little bit of devilishness”. “It was like having an avatar that’s totally different from me, but a kind of reversal. She could have this sense of humour that was totally unapologetic and not dissimilar to mine,” Kushner says.
Her novels involve years of thinking, researching and writing before she usually begins again at page one. The last time she visited Ireland was to promote her 2018 novel The Mars Room, and she is looking forward to returning later this month for the literary festival Write by the Sea in Kilmore Quay,
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