Rachel Kushner Might Be Spying On You

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Rachel Kushner Might Be Spying On You

‘Authoring the World’

A few weeks later, at her home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Jason E. Smith, and their son, Remy, now 17, Ms. Kushner showed me her art collection. Some of the pieces are sentimental because they hung in her grandfather’s house when she was a child; others she has written about, like the Laura Owens bicycle wheel painting she received as a trade for an essay, or a Matthew Porter print of a muscle car flying over the San Fernando Valley.

Her Los Angeles isn’t Hollywood; she says she tries to keep a distance from the film industry. (An exception is an adaptation of her third novel, “The Mars Room,” by her friend Ottessa Moshfegh.) Instead, she says, she pays more attention to “the textures and grit of real life, against a contradictory backdrop of urban brutality and incredible geographical glamour.” Here, she can work from home and still feel like part of the world.

When she’s not writing in her upstairs study, which has views of downtown Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium, she goes running in Elysian Park or hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The day I visited, Remy, a self-taught mechanic, had been salvaging parts at a junkyard for the Dodge 360 Magnum engine he rebuilt this summer. When he was first learning about cars, “he was in the garage with torches applying an open flame to stuck bolts and ball joints,” she said. “But he’s sensible, so that’s how you learn — by figuring things out on your own.”

Though he said he had never read one of his mother’s novels, Remy has helped out with Ms. Kushner’s writing. Like his mother, he has spent most of his summers in France, but for him it has been at a summer camp whose program includes exploring prehistoric caves. When Ms. Kushner shared with him a passage from “Creation Lake” set in the caves, he had one note: Bruno, the philosopher character, “‘gives the impression he gets into the underground world a bit quickly, whereas in my experience, it is much more arduous,’” Ms. Kushner said, quoting her son.

Her husband, who was upstairs getting ready for dinner at an old French restaurant on Sunset, is the first reader of anything Ms. Kushner writes and, she said, “is key to the entire thing.” Through his knowledge of 20th-century France and leftist history, Ms. Kushner said, “I’m able to access an entire vast world through him,” and elaborate on certain details in her fiction.

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