Rachel Kushner interview: ‘Reading Alice in Wonderland felt like a secret being deposited’

The author of Creation Lake, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, discusses her fascination with prehistory, and the writer who established a new set of language rules

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book

I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state. At the same time, I became interested in prehistory, both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read. Why now? Every day is a better time than the day before to ask where we are going and where we have been.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

I recall receiving Alice in Wonderland as a present from my grandmother. It came in the mail, to our house in Eugene, Oregon, and I went into my room and started to read and sat until I finished it. I was young, maybe six or seven. I can still summon the intense feeling I had, of transmission, of images and world and mood, from the pages into me. A secret being deposited. This was reading.

The book that made me want to become a writer

Blood Meridian impressed me greatly, when I read it in my late teens. I wanted to be writer already, but that novel took the brutality of life and the refinement of language and poured them into a hallucinated form. I understood in a new way what the novel could do with the tougher truths of people and history. I am still an admirer of Cormac McCarthy, but I prefer his early work, and in particular, Child of God, which I studied before composing Creation Lake. The opening is so vivid, and his short chapters move with spring-loaded force.

The book I return to time and time again

I recently reread Madame Bovary and was impressed by how weird the beginning is. That the voice is a ‘we’ looking at Charles, recording his bumblings, already failing at life, as a schoolboy. The seduction of Emma by Rodolphe at the agricultural show is the whole history of human rapacity in one scene, and rendered with the blackest and lightest humour.

The book I can’t get out of my head

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, in which a female assassin avenges the world and with no feeling, almost like a vacuum cleaner set on automatic control.

And Agostino by Alberto Moravia, which is a striking portrait of a boy’s transition from childhood to adolescence. Moravia makes perfectly succinct, if touchingly, terribly funny, why a child would choose to move toward cruel world of adults and away from the safety of his mother’s bosom, which suddenly stifles him.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo was revelatory in the way it made life suddenly sing as an aggregation of its absurdities. To do this, DeLillo invented something like a new set of social and language rules, and I understood that I was reading the work of a real artist, someone doing something entirely unique.

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

Practicalities by Marguerite Duras, which was ‘told’ to a friend of her son, then revised and edited by her, into a book like no other. Also Decreation, by Anne Carson, an undoing of form that is also a doing, and which I strangely consider a novel in a way I can’t really justify, if only to remind myself that the logic of the novel isn’t determined by anything other than what it, itself, instructs.

Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo was revelatory in the way it made life suddenly sing as an aggregation of its absurdities

The book that impressed me the most

All seven volumes of Proust. His ability to conjure what life actually feels like is on a level all its own. He refreshes my determination to say what I mean, to carry a thought, inside a sentence, to its thorough end. I recently reread the last volume and cannot believe the genius of the structure of that book, that the entire book recounts, as you realise toward the end, the apprenticeship of an artist, and at its close, he will begin to write. It’s insanely clever.

The book I’m reading at the moment

I’m reading a new book of essays, Inventions of a Present, by Frederic Jameson, a giant of American literary criticism. In the first essay, he explains with incredible insight the phenomenon of ‘machismo’ in our literatures, and in the second, the ‘limits of the Gringo novel’ in which he speculates on what it is that writers such as Robert Stone, who made many of his characters expats, find in foreign settings, that they cannot access ‘back home, in their own language’. This is a question whose answer might personally concern me as well.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

I recently read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for the first time, as it was on my son’s high school English syllabus, and beyond my admiration for it – it’s a very different kind of literature than what I try myself to do, it’s so smooth you barely realise you are reading a book – I felt it was incredibly important to read this sad and mysterious book, because it’s so embedded in people’s formative experiences, as it is assigned to almost every high school student in America, and shapes some overall lesson they absorb about life, agency, kindness, cruelty, and destiny.