Novelist Rachel Kushner Reads Tonight

With her first two novels, Telex From Cuba and The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner achieved a distinction no other author had before—she became the only writer whose debut and second novels were both nominated for a National Book Award. The two books cemented her reputation as one of America’s most imaginative literary voices.

Telex and The Flamethrowers demonstrate Kushner’s considerable talent for re-creating specific moments in time: the first is set in Cuba just before Fidel Castro’s revolution and examines the roles of Americans living there in the ensuing political turmoil; the second depicts the art world in 1970s New York. In a 2013 New York Times interview, Kushner said she is “drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don’t understand, where there are things you can’t access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.” While Telex was inspired in part by her mother’s life growing up an American in Cuba and The Flamethrowers is based largely on her own observations of the art world gleaned while writing for Artforum in the late ’90s, both are deeply imagined works, peopled with indelible characters.

When The Flamethrowers was published in 2013, it received enthusiastic praise from critics and landed Kushner on dozens of 10-best lists. In a Washington Post review, Ron Charles found it “a high-wire performance worthy of Phillipe Petit.” The New Yorker called the author a “sharp comic writer” and said the book was “scintillatingly alive…it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present.”

Chosen as this year’s Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, Kushner will read from The Flamethrowers tonight at the Photonics Center at 6 p.m. She may also read from some of her early stories, she says, which have just been published in the collection The Strange Case of Rachel Z (New Directions, 2015). The reading, free and open to the public, will be followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing.

“We invited Rachel Kushner because we all greatly admire her fiction,” says Jin (GRS’94), a College of Arts & Sciences professor of creative writing and a National Book Award– and PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novelist. “She writes with vision and ambition. Her novels engage big, serious issues with passion and energy. Above all, her prose is sparkling and iridescent, full of life and marvelous details. She is an artist of the first order.”

The Flamethrowers so perfectly captures the rarified art world of New York in the ’70s and the sometimes violent Autonomia movement that swept parts of Italy at the same time that it seems Kushner must have done exhaustive research. Wrong. “I didn’t really do any research for Flamethrowers,” she says. “I just wrote about things that interest me and about which I’d picked up a fair amount of knowledge.”

Two years later, she is still at a loss to explain why the book has resonated so deeply with readers. “If it has, I’m glad and lucky,” says Kushner, who attributes a possible reason for its success to younger readers, “who see it as being also about our time, in terms of art and politics.”

Because both her books are set in a time-specific milieu, it would be easy to describe them as historical fiction, a label she eschews. “I don’t write by genre, so the genre of historical fiction is not something I relate to,” she says. “I am interested in fiction that takes place in a broader scope, and deals with life, politics, society to some degree. And whether you set it yesterday or 40 years ago, I admire writers who have some theory or set of ideas about history, time, the movement of people through structures, and the world…setting for me is always a manner of interpreting the present and importing it into a narrative frame, into writing.”

Kushner is working on her next novel, a departure from her first two in that it takes place in the present. She’s finding that writing a contemporary novel poses challenges she hadn’t encountered before. “Naturally, it is far more challenging to have a read on a contemporary situation,” she says, “because the situation is in a state of flux and the future cannot be predicted.” One thing remains the same, however: “Whether one is writing about past events or contemporary times, all of life goes into the novel as a form, the life of the person writing it and the world she lives in, the immersion she knows as a witness, observer, participant.”

Although she has said little about this work in progress, she recently told an interviewer that she wanted to write about race in her next book. She says she’s drawn to the subject because it remains “a huge unresolved issue and question in the United States of America—just look at the rates of mass incarceration and who is in prison.”

Kushner said she’s often inspired by visual artists and filmmakers as well as writers, admiring Proust, Jean Genet, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Anne Carson, even Euripides, although she can’t say which of them has had more impact on her work. “One is not totally in control of that, nor should she be. Impact, for me at least, is synthetic, over a lifetime of reading,” she says, and that “living in the world” is what most influences her.

Ideas come, she says, “from witnessing or observing or having a thought that I know is mine alone. Then, I write it down. And later, much later, I start to imagine scenes.”

Rachel Kushner, this year’s Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer, will read from The Flamethrowers tonight, Tuesday, April 14, at 6 p.m. at the Photonics Auditorium, 8 St. Mary’s St. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing. Guests should arrive early to be sure of a seat. 

The Ha Jin Visiting Lecture series, made possible by a gift from BU trustee Robert J. Hildreth, brings internationally renowned fiction writers to BU to teach master classes and give public lectures. The series is named for award-winning novelist Ha Jin (GRS’94), a CAS professor of creative writing and a Creative Writing Program alum.