Rachel Kushner: Books must say something significant to be worth reading
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What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
“Twelve Years a Slave,” by Solomon Northup. An incredible document, amazingly told and structured. Tough, but riveting. The movie of it might be the most successful adaptation of a book ever undertaken; text and film complement each other wildly. I also recently read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and can’t quit promoting it. That and “Golden Gulag,” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, are important books that assess with deep and careful thought how we came to be a society of mass incarceration of people of color.
What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
I am a re-reader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Céline, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. “Ingrid Caven,” by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read “Morvern Callar,” by Alan Warner, every year. This past fall I reread the first two volumes of Proust (new Penguin translations). It was my third reread. I was teaching a Proust seminar at Syracuse, to MFA students of writing. To read for the purpose of leading a class called for a different way of looking at the volumes, more systematic.
What I felt every week was that the system, the structure of metaphysical themes and concerns, was right there in the text, so natural to locate. In preparation I read, among other things, Edmund White’s sweet and short biography of Proust and was so impressed by it. Edmund White might be a rare person of letters in an old-fashioned sense.
Who is your favorite novelist of all time?
For all time, two: Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear of?
I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as “sweeping,” “tender” or “universal.” But to the real question of what’s inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don’t read for plot, a story “about” this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth, something happening. I am often drawn to works that are significant to either the modernist project or to France in the 19th century or 20th century and contemporary Latin America, and lately I read about race in America, because it’s an enormous unanswered question. But I’ll read about any world if it’s rendered with originality, free of sentimentality and predictability. And if a book is humorless, I want it to be as good as José Saramago.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Supposedly I went into my room with “Alice in Wonderland,” which was given to me when I was five, and didn’t come out until I was done. I was an early reader but I don’t think that says much. Having a child, it’s apparent to me that there’s some kind of clock that goes off at different times for different kids. My mother let me stay up as late as I wanted looking at books, and she says I stayed up all night doing that at three.
Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer?
I studied the novels of Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, who seemed deft and worldly in a way I hoped to someday be. More recently, I have grown deeply impressed by the verve and erudition of “The Recognitions,” by William Gaddis. It is a work that, to me, fulfills the ambition to apprehend the writer’s own moment as history — that is the goal, to my mind. I don’t care to read about present-day America unless the writer truly has something to say — uses the contemporary, rather than gets used by it. The whole idea of “offering up a mirror” is not enough. I want more.
Is there a particular book that made you want to write?
Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
There are various major works I have not read — “Anna Karenina,” “The Red and the Black,” “The Betrothed.” But nothing I am embarrassed not to have yet read.
Reading widely and deeply is crucial, I constantly read, but knowing every important work of literature, if you want to be a novelist, is not required and could even hinder things.
A writer is someone who can ask questions and follow bold instincts of assimilation. A vast intellectual, someone incredibly erudite about the entire canon, might have more difficulty doing so.
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