Several years ago, the novelist Rachel Kushner followed an inmate at
New Folsom Prison, in Sacramento, into his cell. A former Los Angeles
police officer, he was serving a life sentence without the possibility
of parole for working as a contract killer. Kushner, seeking to learn
about the prison system, had come with a criminology professor and his
students, but, as the group continued down the hall, she stayed behind,
and the prisoner told her about his crimes—the ones he was in for and
those which had never been found out. His complexion was ghoulishly
youthful, undamaged by the sun: dirty cops don’t dare go on the yard. On
the cell walls Kushner glimpsed pictures of Harley-Davidsons, relics of
a former life. In the five minutes she was alone with him, she told me,
“I just felt his person, like he went into my skin. You get a
whiff of somebody’s essence, whether you wanted it or not, and that’s
enough to write a whole character.”
The whiff she got was of a
cleaning solution called Cell Block 64, mingled with cop cologne. From
this, she wrote the character Doc, in a single entranced session of
literary ventriloquism: “Doc had money on his books and used actual
cologne and not Old Fucking Spice, either. Good cologne by an Italian
name-brand designer he can never remember. But then he remembers: Cesare
Paciotti. It always takes him a minute to retrieve that name.” Doc
appears, a major-minor character, in Kushner’s third novel, “The Mars Room,” which comes out in May.
Kushner,
who is forty-nine and lives in Los Angeles, thinks of herself as a
“girl citizen,” asking questions, at large in the world. She uses the
novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive
stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking. In her work,
Kushner draws on decades of American social life and European
intellectual history, while remaining open to slinky
aberrations—poemlike passages, monologues, lists, a slip into
unadulterated fact. “The Mars Room,” for instance, contains excerpts
from the Unabomber’s diaries. This takes swagger. Don DeLillo, a friend,
is a tutelary figure. Like him, she is good at conjuring mayhem: a
riot, a blackout, a bomb going off at the country club. Her reading
taste runs to Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector—women who are
brainy, sexy, complex, unmanageable. “These are proxies for her,”
Kushner’s husband, Jason Smith, the chair of the M.F.A. program at
ArtCenter College of Design, says. “That’s what Rachel’s into—Spinoza
with lipstick.”
Butter keeps her slender, along with five-mile
runs in Elysian Park, near her house. She says she used to consider it a
great injustice that she was not born more beautiful, had to work
angles. She is being greedy. “Her whole hookup is badass,” Theresa
Martinez, a friend of hers who was paroled from prison in 2009, told me.
“But you can’t nickname a person Badass.” (She calls her Stormy: a
force blowing in.) Kushner has owned several motorcycles; she skis like a
racer, attacking the fall line, and rides around town, wearing Rouge
Coco lipstick, in a black-cherry 1964 Ford Galaxie. She wonders, Can one
feel cathexis for a muscle car? For longer trips, she takes a beat-up
2000 Honda Accord, with a copy of Steinbeck’s journals and Duras’s “The Lover” tossed on the back seat.
When
Kushner started visiting prisons, in 2014, she had written two
well-regarded novels, one about Cuba in the fifties and the other about
New York in the seventies. ... [mehr] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/rachel-kushners-immersive-fiction
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