Rachel Kushner

RK

I barely know where Fogo Island is, but a wonderful artist I knew here in Los Angeles, Silke Otto-Knapp, who recently died of cancer while still utterly in the prime of her life, and is dearly missed, had a house there, and I saw photos from her memorial. It looked stark and beautiful. What time is it there? I have no concept of the time zone.

ZH

It’s funny. Fogo is four and a half hours ahead of West Coast time. It’s 3:09 p.m. here. I can’t wrap my head around the half hour piece.

RK

I didn’t even know that that existed. Or maybe I once knew about a half-hour time-zone, but forgot, so I could learn it again right now.

ZH

I don’t trust myself to do the time change in my head. All day long I’m typing into the computer like an idiot: “What time is it in California when it is 3 p.m. in Newfoundland.”

RK

That’s even harder than military time, which I struggle to incorporate into my time-based persona. They want us to add twelve. I can add twelve, but against my instinct that this step is a little ridiculous in the context of civilian life.

ZH

So, in the interest of our time-based personas, let’s get into it. I want to start with a very naive, almost mechanical question. How do you write these novels? When I’m reading your novels and I encounter one of your descriptions, I’m just like, “Where did this come from?” You’re such a master of description. Are you constantly collecting an arsenal of descriptions as you go about life? When you sit down to write is it just a matter of figuring out which words to deploy?

RK

That’s nice of you to say. “Am I collecting an arsenal of descriptions?” Yes, but also no. Sometimes I write things down. Sometimes I’m aware I’m not writing them down, and I have a vague sense of guilt that I should, but also that I am resistant to writing them down, with some sense it’s important to occupy the present tense, and also: to have faith that there is a casual riches of good description and that this here isn’t my one good idea. I’ve experienced a lifelong oscillation between retreating to name reality, and experiencing it, savoring it. Now that I’ve been thrust into this very social public-facing existence of promoting a novel and pretending I’m an extrovert in order to survive, I am more aware than usual of how so many of our best observations are just things we say, or someone else says, inspired moments that are just pissing in the river. So to speak. But they are not wasted.

I appreciate transient little measures of poetic truth. It’s good to enjoy description as thought, or as speech, and not write it down. The descriptions I love best from my own work, that feel closest to how reality looks and feels, are seldom from any note I took and was waiting to deploy. When I was trying to figure out how to write my first novel, I would write all these things down and think, “Oh, this is a good one, this one smacks of truth, has a whiff of the real, and also a poetic swerve to it,” or something. But then, when I sat down to actually write the novel, after many years of thinking about it, I was not pouring over my notebooks to insert little cool things I’d written down. Because that would be like sedimented weight, rather than something that has liftoff. It’s such an unsexy word, but I think it’s more about engagement. Once I’ve clicked into the world, I don’t need to rely on anything I came up with previously that seemed neat or clever. It’s more like I have gained access to an interior world, have set up the conditions of possibility to encounter myself, my own unconscious. Orders start coming down, orders that allow me to see and to render the world on the page. In that kind of productive trance my technical problems fall away, I can see everything vividly, and there is no need to look at a notebook.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, is a totally different story. I write everything down and pore over my notes. Because when it’s objective reality I’m trying to reproduce, I need a record of my observations as I was making them.

ZH

For your new novel, Creation Lake, what was the portal that first brought you into that encounter with your unconscious? Was it that you were thinking about this particular region in France or the ideas that ended up forming the basis of Bruno’s emails? Did you live on a commune or something?

RK

All of the above. Well, I didn’t ever live on a commune, but I have had up-close experiences with the milieu that I invoke and try to render in the novel, and specifically with a commune that was both infiltrated by an undercover cop, and later, raided by the French police. I had long wanted to write a novel about that world, a group of young people from Paris who decamp to a rural southwestern outpost and are set on a collision course with the French state. And I’d wondered about betrayal, the undercover agent as a type, and about the inner life of someone so outwardly fraudulent, but who manages to make it into a hermetic community where people are paranoid—and for good reason. But also, somewhere along the way, when I was finishing my last novel, The Mars Room, I got interested in prehistory. It just seemed like this great underutilized world of imagination and speculation. I started reading a bunch of stuff on prehistory, taking notes. Making little dossiers and talking back to things that I read. I had a conception for a mentor to the commune who is focused on the very deep past as a direction for our future, and lives in a cave, and has rejected civilization. He wasn’t based on anyone in particular, but is inspired by some specific real people as a kind of spark.

For a brief time I thought, “What if I wrote a novel that was like the original Valentine, the first encounter between two different species of human?” Could be violent, could be consensual. Who knows? It’s a love story, I mean depending on who’s telling it. But then, I looked at William Golding’s novel, The Inheritors, which is about Neanderthals and homo sapiens. It’s solid—it’s not a bad book. But it never veers into the wilds of art. It stays within the slightly romantic and fundamentally staid formula of what might have happened between ‘Thal and Sapien. Reading it, I thought, I don’t think I can pull off this original Valentine idea. You want to go where you didn’t know you were headed. The exercise of writing has to feel like the appointment you were meant to keep. A psychoanalytic appointment with yourself, where something unforeseen will take place.

There’s only one American writer I can think of who would have been able to pull that off, and that’s Cormac McCarthy. He’s such an extreme behaviorist. He knows how to describe men, like, making a tool out of a rock, building a fire. It’s all doing, seen from outside. My force as a writer doesn’t really derive from descriptions of doing to the same degree: it’s always from someone’s perspective. So, I had all this material on prehistory, and I had this setting in contemporary France with natural, social and cultural attributes that are familiar to me. I had the elder who lives in a cave. I go to a few different places in the southwestern region of France quite regularly. I was able to see the deliberately fictionalized region which I call the Guyenne, an Occitan name that’s no longer used for southwestern France. And yet I didn’t know who was telling this story, and why. These are rudimentary questions that a novelist can’t get around.

After three years of playing with images and different approaches, and trying to find an entrance, it all suddenly came to me with what became the first line of the book. I was thinking about the first line of Chris Marker’s film San Soleil: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness.” Weirdly it still gives me chills just to recall that first line. I discarded everything, and I started over. Do you know that film?

ZH

I haven’t seen it since college.

RK

I love it so much. I just chose it for this feature I’m doing for Criterion, for their series Adventures in Moviegoing. The first line of the movie is spoken by a woman. She has a slight accent, English, and she is describing letters that she has received from a fictional alter ego of Chris Marker named Sandor Krasna. There’s something about the intermediated delay that really struck me: “The first image he told me about” —“he said”—“he wrote to me.” I love that her voice becomes the instrument of the subject. Who is he? He has some kind of knowledge, and he’s describing this world to her. The demanding but exquisite pleasure of the film is that then you see footage of the children on the road in Iceland. You have to develop techniques as a viewer to read the film without missing anything crucial, because what he’s describing to her in the letters and what she’s narrating in her soft mediating tone are different—each has a value that exists in different registers.

ZH

So you were thinking of Chris Marker, and the effect of intermediation when the first lines of Creation Lake came to you: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.”

RK

Yes—what really hit me and formed a point of entry for Creation Lake was the idea of a woman, Sadie, reproducing the letters of this man, Bruno Lacombe. I knew, when that first line came to me, it isn’t just about Bruno making these declarations, but also about Sadie’s mediation. As the teller, for me, it had this semi-hypnotic effect, like being rocked by this series of reporting clauses—he said, he said, Bruno told them, he said, he said. It was a fun, formal challenge for myself to see how long I could go with the reader into Bruno’s world before pulling back to remind them that Sadie is there telling, translating and editorializing. Sometimes I just needed to let Bruno hold forth.

ZH

In some ways, the structure of the book mirrors that rocking. The short sections focused on Sadie’s experiences are punctuated by sections of Bruno’s theorizing—there are sections of “he saids.” It did have a hypnotic effect on me. I found it kind of comforting, especially as the tension and action of the novel picks up. It became a real comfort to go back to Bruno and be like, “Okay, we’re safe, we’re in the cave, theorizing.”

RK

I become impatient while reading a novel that is structured in such a way that the interceding sections—whether they are actually in italics or feel like they’re in spiritual italics—put you in a kind of holding pattern. Like, when the novelist needs to take us back to some backstory before returning to the present action, or uses letters to advance the story. I always want to rush through those parts. I really didn’t want the Bruno parts to feel like that at all—I wanted Bruno to be the beating heart of the book, the main story, in fact. He’s the soul of the book, while the ”present action” of Sadie and her cynicism and bluntness are meant to be experienced in brief and measured doses, before the reader is back to Bruno and can take a break from her.

ZH

Your other novels also jump around between perspectives and time periods. How was the execution of Creation Lake different?

RK

It’s a pure first-person novel. I’ve never done that before, though I’ve wanted to do that. In the past, a strong instinct prevented me from allowing one person to have a monopoly on the narrative. Other people were banging at the door to speak. With The Mars Room, I thought about having just Romy narrate the whole book, but then I would think of these images that I needed to be in the book in order for me to deliver on the promise to myself to say something about California. It’s a state of 40 million that has a large role to play in the reality and brutality of the near future. As a resident, I wanted to write a contemporary novel. I needed to do California.

ZH

We’ll have to come back to the issue of California. But first—what’s one of those images that you needed to bring in via another perspective?

RK

The lights of the prison from Highway 99 in the middle of the night, way out there in the dark of industrial agriculture. I would see those lights and think to myself, these trucks, these different cars, these different people on the highway choosing to travel in the middle of the night, they don’t know what those lights are. A friend of mine told me a story about one night when there was a power failure at the prison. The women had to be led from one building to another, where there was a generator. This friend of mine looked up at the sky and she saw stars for the first time in like 30 years. Because normally the prison is lit up and blazing at night, for security, supposedly, but perhaps more importantly, to control the reality zone of the prison. That story really brought home to me what it means to have your life, your entire sensory existence, dictated and determined by the logic of the governing state. So when I thought about images like that, and the stories they could evoke, I was like, “I need someone in the book to recount this.” So that naturally led me to this other character of Hauser who gets to witness those lights from the highway.

Also, I felt like the person who Romy blames for her predicament, Kurt Kennedy, should get to have his say, which he does. He talks about what it means to be obsessed with someone. It’s not a malicious mission to harm. Instead it’s more like trying to get the vitamin nutrients you think you need to survive, to get through the day, which is to see this person. The Kurt Kennedy section was the most fun thing I got to write in the whole book. I would always read that section at readings. When I read at Powell’s, this woman in the back goes, “But what you just read doesn’t represent the book at all! That’s not the book!” I should have been nicer, but I said, “It’s in the book.” That novel needed other voices to achieve the proper amplitude of mood and world.

In the case of Creation Lake, it was different. It starts with Sadie transposing Bruno’s letters, and interpolating him, but even though her voice has a structural porousness to it—because Bruno gets to come through and be expressed through her—she keeps reestablishing herself as dominant. Creation Lake was also different because the whole novel takes place over a chronologically compressed time period—roughly six weeks. Right from the beginning I had an ambition to tell a story in chapters that would be as short as possible. Ideally a page and a half. I was copying (in structure, not in language) an early Cormac McCarthy novel, Child of God. It’s one of my favorite books—about a hillbilly necrophiliac named Lester Ballard. It’s not for everybody. The short chapters have this spring-loaded feel. There’s white space there, but not fragile or performative white space, not a space like the moment at the poetry reading when people are like, “Mhm.” It’s a more aggressive use of white space—like, I’m going to leap. Get out of the way.

ZH

Did this combination of white space and first-person narration have any surprising affordances for you?

RK

Yes. Maybe it was the short chapters that encouraged me to develop her voice as blunt and rude, come to think of it. Maybe it was the episodic feel of short chapters that led to the idea this person was on her way to the commune to destroy it, and therefore answering my long-held question of, “Who becomes an undercover cop, and why?” Also, Sadie is this first-person narrator who is a doer and has “agency,” which was pretty different from, for example, Reno in The Flamethrowers. About Reno, people would say “Your narrator is so passive.” And I’d think, well sure, but life is not lived like a cartoon, the characters can’t always be moving through space punching and pushing and doing and deciding. That’s especially true for Reno, a young woman who’s arriving to a milieu that she doesn’t know that much about, for whom a lot of life is absorbing, listening and reacting in a private way. Similarly, Romy in The Mars Room just structurally can’t be very active, because she’s fulfilling her commitment to the state, which is to serve a life sentence and then another nonconcurrent life sentence in state prison.

But in the case of Creation Lake, I had a bunch of crime novels on my mind, with narrators who are spies or assassins or kidnappers. I was particularly influenced by Jean-Patrick Manchette—he’s seen every noir film, read every policier and crime novel, and so when he goes to write one, it has a kind of meta-expertise in it. Like Quentin Tarantino, but way better and less absurd, even as it’s far funnier. He’s not at all fettered when it comes to making narrators do things. That’s a really different way of writing fiction; it’s genre fiction, and I had never really allowed myself to try that. I was so focused on wanting to reproduce an ontological reality that felt real to me. Like, I’m not somebody who goes out as an agent of destruction and means harm by people and puts guns in their hands and plans in their heads and thinks that she’s the ultimate dissimulator who’s controlling reality. But by doing some of that, in homage to Manchette, suddenly I had this narrator who was super active. It was very different for me. It was a lot of fun.

It also gave me a new insight: the novelist—inevitably, even the most literary of novelists—will come to rely upon the cheap conceit of coincidence at some point. If you’re mucking around in narrative, you get to a certain point where you’re like, “Oh and by the way it turns out that so and so is actually their cousin.” Do you know the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis? He has the best line about coincidence: “Chance is always suspect, and much that is fraudulent imitates it.” Every writer relies on it at some point, because you’re trying to make a world that feels as big as the world itself, and yet you’re making a kid-gloved version of the world, where things can cohere in some way. Even if you don't try to pull off that crass, ultimate weave where the ending ties up every loose end, you’re relying on coincidence. But, when you have a narrator who sees themselves as a master manipulator, like Sadie does, there is no need for coincidence. The whole narrative is in her hands, or so she thinks.

ZH

There is a meditation on coincidence in Creation Lake. Sadie has to make it seem like a total coincidence that she has a particular piece of intel—

RK

[Laughs.] Yes, I forgot about that!

ZH

She has to explain that she knows something the others don’t know because she coincidentally worked as the sub minister’s mistress’s dog walker, of course this was no coincidence. [Laughs.] One of the characters listening to her is immediately credulous, and in part because the novel makes clear that everyone in a certain stratum of Paris life runs into everyone else, even when they oppose each other politically or ideologically.

I love that moment because it shows how the idea of a social coincidence is kind of paradoxical. I was once attempting to socialize with some colleagues and someone asked the group, “What’s the most coincidental thing that’s ever happened to you?” Everyone came up with things like “I crossed paths with so-and-so in the wilderness of Patagonia.” Of course such a run-in sounds crazy and improbable. But, at the same time, any kind of social coincidence can be explained away by some basic sociological observations about how awfully predictable we all are—we are not agents of entropy.

RK

I like that you have categories of coincidence—that the social coincidence is one category of coincidence, like running into somebody in Patagonia, which might have to do, sorry, with being educated and of a certain social class, among people who wear Patagonia, planting some seed to visit the actual place that inspired this clothing and lifestyle of being outdoorsy, the “core” in gorpcore (which itself is for fashion people and not those who trek). Did that actually happen?

ZH

Yeah. I was hiking completely alone in the true wilderness at the southern tip of Patagonia for two weeks and met this person. We both forgot about meeting there. Ten years later, we were dating and put the pieces together that we had met before in the backcountry.

RK

Is that who you are with now?

ZH

No, it was overdetermined! [Laughs.]

RK

[Laughs.] There’s the social coincidence but there’s also the cosmic coincidence. Once Martin Amis and I both taught in this program in Toronto for a week. He would just—I haven’t used this word in a long time—expound every night at the bar on the roof of the hotel. I remember him talking about the fact that the moon sits exactly inside the sun, allowing for the miraculous phenomenon of the solar eclipse. He kept saying,  “Nobody is willing to deal with the fact that this one circle fits exactly inside this other circle!” You have to imagine all this with Martin’s English accent and enormous charisma—each one of his bits felt like Richard Pryor doing his best. He could really just say things in this amazing way, that I cannot reproduce. The point is, it is an insane coincidence that the moon sits exactly inside the sun, and no one so far has come forward to explain why.

ZH

I’m now thinking about Sadie’s degree of control in Creation Lake, the very control that obviates the need for coincidence. I’m thinking about how terrifying it was for me, as a reader, when her grip on the situation loosened and the uncertainty and genuine danger rushed in. I was waiting for her to crack, but then when she did crack, it was terrifying. I’m not a great reader of fiction because I don’t keep track of chronology very well, but, for me, the moment she cracked was when she didn’t want to jump off the rock at the lake. I was like, “No Sadie, come on, just do it, keep your cool, don’t show them who you are, don’t loosen your grip…” I’m realizing through our conversation that part of my anxiety in that moment, as a reader, was that I didn’t want her to crack because I didn’t want to let the narrative open up to the unknown.

RK

I love that she became your instrument through the book to that degree. You know that part in Bruno’s writings about Prometheus and Epimetheus? How Prometheus had to give humans fire because Epimetheus, in charge of giving qualities to all living things, forgot to give any to humans? It’s something I borrowed from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. And maybe the fiction writer is like Epimetheus­—she’s distributing qualities from her quality sack. There are a lot of private mysteries, for me, around which qualities I chose to give to Sadie. Why did I make this particular outsider? Why is she so cynical, such a severe unbeliever, such a harmful actor?

Writing through Sadie was almost like getting into a tank and driving it. I was moving through the landscape of the novel and asking myself, “How long can I stay in this tank?” Then, when she was on that rock, I just decided to give her a quality from my quality sack that I understand quite intimately—I loathe jumping off rocks into water. I do not understand how it's possible to willfully go forward with a decision that is utterly and completely irreversible.

I’ve jumped twice off rocks, once in Marseille and once into the Tarn River in the Lozère. And both times, when I hit the water, I think I tweaked every muscle in my neck and upper back because I was so tense about it. So I gave that to Sadie. In contrast, I did see an older man with a huge beer-gut swan-dive off a super high rock, just like Burdmoore does in the novel—it was unbelievable, mythic, terrifying, and all the swaggering teenage boys with their gold chains and somersaults were agog. These are fabulous rural pageants that take place in quarries and rivers and on the Mediterranean seafront. They involve skill and phenomenal courage. Burdmoore’s jump had to go into a book so that other people who were not there for the real version could witness it.

ZH

There’s a striking contrast: the way you described different voices banging on the door to speak in The Mars Room is very different from how you described Sadie in Creation Lake as a tank that you strapped into and drove until the wheels started coming off. I wonder if there’s something here—perhaps these are two different ways of arriving at your hallmark of restless moral complexity, where there’s no didactic sense of right or wrong? Let all the voices into a big messy room, or just get in a tank and let all the complexity spin out of this one vessel.

RK

I love what you’re saying. It’s making me think in a way that I feel like I haven’t had the chance to recently, and I’m so grateful. Writing is produced by profound doubt. Doubt is the real engine of it. At the same time, as you move through the world, there are little glimpses and insights—you see things that only you are seeing, you know things that only you know. A work of art produced through language is an accretion of those moments, a context for them.

At least for me, but maybe generally, these glimpses are never moral resolutions. They are never statements like, “This is how life should be organized, or this is who is right.” To create a context for moral resolutions would be totally deadening to me. It’s not what art sets out to do. I feel free in fiction to get into the loam of true complexity where I do not know.

In the case of Creation Lake, there are young people who have understandably retreated from bourgeois values and the destruction of nature but are brittle because they’re trying to affirm and stabilize their social identity in a group. Even if I myself have a lot of sympathy for these people, Sadie is free to see that their politics is a very thin application of the concept of politics. Perhaps the reader is given space to see what she’s seeing, but not always from her perspective. Other perspectives are meant to come through even as she adds her own arch commentary to them to stay in control of the situation. There are multiple rhythms. You can hear the tempos of other peoples’ realities—and those tempos are not always going to be determined by the tempo that Sadie thinks she’s creating for the reader. Her idea, for instance, that she can declare what the real Europe is and what it isn’t. You’d have to be basic to buy that, that France is “actually” nuclear power plants. They exist. But other things do as well. The reader is meant to see her as someone who thinks she’s smarter than she is, and who is defensive and wants to pretend nothing is sacred on account that she’s chosen a life of harming other people.

ZH

I wonder how this need for other voices and tempos, as a way of navigating moral complexity in your work, connects to Sadie’s statement in Creation Lake that “There are no politics inside of people.” Is that something you believe?

RK

It felt true to me as I wrote it. But then again, the entire novel is a sort of political theology, braided together by Bruno, and it’s filled with references to 20th century leftist politics, which are kind of big obvious clues that I myself do have politics. But in terms of what’s in people, in their 4 a.m. self as Sadie says—a place where you’re naked before God, before yourself. A lot of illusions are pulled away, and what’s there in my opinion is more stark and rudimentary, in terms of what ideas a person might have about social organization and how life should be lived, in what sort of community, and what they owe to other people, and it is this deeper thing that drives us, and gives commonality to the divergent choices people make. In waking life, there is a constant—and I don’t want to hammer this at all—reestablishment of bonafides that people don’t realize is taking up a lot of space in terms of what they think of as their political selves. There is a part of a person’s politics that is there as a component of ego formation, as in, “I’m the kind of person who wants to see herself as believing in X or Y.” And I’m interested in what is stable and dare I say good, what is selfless and inspired and beautiful, underneath that. What’s in the person’s salt? When they aren’t performing for themselves or anyone else.

ZH

When I read that passage, I thought about a phrase that’s been troubling me lately—“good politics.” As in “So-and-so has good politics,” as if “good politics” is an attribute that you can have or not have. There’s something both troubling and confused about that phrase. In my understanding, to be “good” in some sort of political sense is to be constantly questioning and revising and deliberating. While potentially not landing on any one thing that could be described as “good.” Your novels underscore that for me.

RK

I’ve probably participated in this good/bad politics thing by thinking that someone had bad politics. For instance when liberals talk about terrorism or even, god forbid, “eco-terrorism,” I probably think on some level, this person has “twerp” politics. But I know what you mean. It’s a checklist mentality, maybe, and suggests there is an in-group who decides what’s good. Even when I’m on the same side this can give me hives. Recently someone thanked me for speaking up about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza, and they went on, and said, in addition, that they’d been combing over various writers’ public personas and had been disappointed to see how many had said nothing. And while that might be the case, I was unnerved. This approach feels ominous for more reasons than simply that it’s negative. It misses the point. I’m not speaking up about Palestine to look good, to receive praise. Goodness is something more like a private standard that hovers over one’s daily internal inquiry into how to be. The everyday repeated question of, “What am I doing?” and, “How do I want to live?” I get as much out of the world as I give to it. So, the question, every day, is, “What am I giving?” This is a lifelong project. It doesn’t leave time to go house to house, judging whether others are holding true to their own standards of virtue. Nor would I place myself in a position of deciding what those standards should be.

ZH

Right. And part of what literature can do is help us not to judge but to see—to see things that we may not have an opportunity to see for ourselves, to offer an experience to the reader that is valuable in itself, but also valuable to the reader’s moral investigations. I’m reminded of your earlier comment about your desire to render California because it has such a massive role to play in determining the future. I wanted to tell you—I was re-reading The Mars Room last month right after moving to San Francisco. I was renting a shitty apartment right by Market Street—

RK

What part of Market Street?

ZH

Right where Market Street meets Octavia.

RK

Lower Haight!

ZH

Yeah! The Mars Room helped me locate myself in the physical and social matrix of the city and of California. I read one of your descriptions of the machined landscape of the Central Valley just a few days after I had driven through it for the first time. When I drove through it, I was very moved—but I couldn’t situate the feeling or understand its connections to various ongoing personal inquiries. Then this passage in your book came along and connected a set of images and my real-life experience of them to my ongoing investigations about technology, scale and the unseen artifacts that do our bidding.

RK

Gosh, thanks for telling me all this, Zoë. The Central Valley is certainly an acquired taste. You do have to learn how to see what’s beautiful there. It was never family farms—never farmers, only ever growers. Even at its birth, its scale was post-human. Learning to see the beauty there was a huge part of writing The Mars Room. I’m still very interested in the Central Valley. I go there all the time—I was just there for an essay I wrote for Harper's, for the December issue. It explores drag racing and hot rodding culture.

ZH

What made you want to write about hot rodding culture?

RK

I have a long-time interest. But also, my son is a tinkerer. He loves working on classic American cars from the 1960s and early 1970s. He built a high-performance engine this summer, for his 1969 Dodge Dart, and is obsessed with modifying the car to make it go faster. He got that car when he was 15, and had to basically rebuild it just to get it road-worthy. If you download the shop manual—not the owner’s manual—the car itself becomes a textbook. You can take the car apart, denature it, and then renature it on your own. Hot rodding is all about sensing the power within something and figuring out how to access it. I love the idea that the object isn’t a static iteration of its potential—any person can get in there and unlock new potential for themselves. I’m not trying to romanticize the petroleum century, but I do wonder what we have lost in this new world where it’s impossible, for instance, to tinker with an iPhone. Anyhow. I wrote eleven thousand words about it and had a blast with my teenage son being out there in America talking to hot rodders at events and being totally in love with this country and with the folk ingenuity practiced by people who build hot rods and by their warmth and friendliness and also by their wealth of knowledge and their ability to have agency in a world of disposable and passive gadgetry. A lot of actual rich folk—the people of the propertied classes, which hot rodders generally are not—totally lack that kind of agency.

ZH

Technology was supposed to be about possibility and making something possible that wasn’t possible for humans before. It’s fundamentally uncertain and stochastic. But instead, technology has become this highly deterministic, highly controlled exercise of power. A small group of people decide what the future looks like and expect everyone to go along with it.

RK

That reminds me of a line I love from the movie Non-Fiction by Olivier Assayas. The movie is about the publishing world transitioning to our new digital reality—electronic books and all that. It came out in 2018, but it still feels relevant. There’s a character in the film who’s resistant to the digital shift who says something like, “No one asks us, and then it’s too late.” No one asked us for these changes. Why are we carrying around devices that are an amalgamation of shopping, news, weather, correspondence, and advertising? Nobody asked for that. And now it’s too late not to have it.

ZH

California has a remote yet powerful presence in Creation Lake, even though the novel is set entirely in France. Sadie tells people she’s from Priest Valley, California, a town without any residents.

RK

At a certain point, Priest Valley was in the running for the role of title. Have you ever passed through there?

ZH

Not yet. We’ll see how long my California time lasts. At some point I'll try to pass through Priest Valley.

RK

Highway 198. Very beautiful. Population zero, last time I checked.