Rachel Kushner: Flaubert is hilarious, cynical and cruel

Times

01-07-2025

Rachel Kushner, 56, grew up in Oregon, then San Francisco. After completing a master's in creative writing at Columbia University, she worked as an editor on arts magazines in New York. After she moved to Los Angeles, she started writing fiction. Her debut, Telex from Cuba, was published in 2008. This was followed by The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018), which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Hard Crowd (2021), a collection of essays. Her latest novel, Creation Lake, an ambitious and entertaining tale about French eco-activists, a Neanderthal-admiring reclusive thinker and a macho, semi-alcoholic female spy-for-hire with expensive fake breasts, was shortlisted for last year's Booker prize. 'Creation Lake is a smart, funny novel that dares to contemplate the void of uncertainty where we all stand,' was our critic's verdict. Kushner rides motorbikes and is a fan of drag racing.
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On any given day I might answer this differently because I don't, of course, have just one. That would be so narrow. But today my answer is Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. While that's quite guessable and unimaginative as a favourite, given it's considered the most successful novel of all time and the one that cemented the form of this peculiar and incredible genre of art, it's also strong, a strong choice. Do you recall that the first chapter is written in the first-person plural, that there is a 'we' ridiculing young Charles for his bizarre rabbit-fur hat and his rube's demeanour at school, a voice that is presumably a collection of Charles's classmates? We don't meet this 'we' — they are not characters with their own desires and ideas — and instead are mere witnesses to Charles's early failures at sophistication. Although technically the point of view is omniscient, we are mostly thereafter in the thoughts of Emma, a woman who is not satisfied by the life she has acquired and whose desire for worldliness, and her consequent debt, bring her to the bleakest of ends. Flaubert is hilarious, cynical and cruel and also passionate, romantic and ravished. That contradiction perhaps is the heart of this novel's chimerical power.
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I am too undecided to choose a single favourite living author but if we narrow it to recent novels by younger writers, I'd like to talk about Emma Cline and The Guest and why I admire that novel about a young woman lying, stealing and grifting among wealthy New Yorkers. The Guest is deliberately structured to pull off the unlikely feat of maintaining the propulsion of a short story for the length of a novel, at which it succeeds. Also, there's a quality to the sentences, as in all of Cline's work, of sensitivity, agility and control. I read her and go: 'Yes, that's exactly right but I never knew that thing could be put into language.' What's odd is I am not the least bit interested in the world of extreme wealth, and part of why The Guest was such a hit was its setting in the Hamptons, where Alex, the narrator, is set loose as a grifter. It's Alex who interests me and whose misconception — that if she can only conform herself to other people's fantasies her problems will be solved — I find so moving.
I'm not sure if I'd call this book underrated as much as simply less well known. Its author certainly has the critical reputation he deserves, but Alberto Moravia's Agostino (1944), a novella, really, is the best book I've read about a boy on the cusp of puberty. Agostino is with his mother on summer vacation at the beach and suddenly he can't tolerate being close to her. The world is changing to him because he is changing, and the way that Moravia renders his attitude and the choices he makes perfectly encapsulates what feels so treacherous in adolescence. It's a time in life when a person rejects safety, comfort and guidance, and subjects themselves to the world unchaperoned, to other people who don't care about them, who might humiliate or hurt them. And yet this is what a young person wants — to go out and get banged up by life, instead of stay home and be smothered by safety.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Vintage £9.99 pp416). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.