Rachel Kushner’s Advice to Writers

The novelist Rachel Kushner recently taught a class at Stanford that concerned, as the course catalogue advertised it, “the sacred art of stealing from the world.” All four of Kushner’s novels—including her latest, “Creation Lake,” which is out in paperback this summer—draw voraciously on a wide range of inspirations. Her aim for the class was to share with her students something of her own methods, showing them how to use “the cultural products that float by, the debris” in their own fiction. Not long ago, she joined us to talk about some of the books on her syllabus. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Miss Lonelyhearts

by Nathanael West

I started my syllabus with this book, which was published in 1933 and takes place in New York City, during the Depression. Miss Lonelyhearts—who is actually a man—is an advice columnist receiving letters from people who are impoverished, in despair, and surrounded by an atmosphere of moral depravity and incipient fascism.

It’s one of my favorite novels. I find it ferociously funny—everything in it is just acid-tinged in irony, including its brilliant mockery of hardboiled writing. I also thought that it might be interesting for my students to read a novel that approaches a very grave historical period with black comedy. And it was ultimately a lot of fun to discuss the book’s context with them. In the novel, you can see the social change that had just taken place. Women were wearing pants and bobbing their hair short. And the place of men in our society was suddenly very precarious, because the economy’s devastation meant that they were no longer able to perform their normal roles.

The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

My class is just ten weeks long, and “The Recognitions” is almost a thousand pages, so I could assign only a few chapters of it. But I absolutely love this novel. Gaddis takes on a wide range of themes—Christianity and belief and authenticity and fraudulence—and places them in a huge frieze, with characters rendered so particularly that it’s almost like they’re painted in with a sable brush.

The book, which is about an art forger, takes place in New York City and was published in 1955. Gaddis is not afraid of braiding in highfalutin references, and his humor is both very patrician and cultured as well as loose and street.

I advised my students to be unafraid of the length of his sentences, and the references that they might not know, and instead to read it like you would read philosophy. Or how I read philosophy, which is by not proceeding to the next sentence until you feel some sense that you’ve captured what comes before. And, more important, to find the humor, because there is something in practically every line of Gaddis that’s hilarious.

Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

Again, I could assign only about a hundred pages of this book. Though assigning all of “Invisible Man” in a class is certainly warranted, I wanted to give my students samples of things and put those into a specific context that I hoped would unlock new associations for them. Ellison, like Gaddis, was a man of high culture and high and piercing humor. Putting these two books in conversation was a long-held dream.

The excerpt I chose, Chapters 7 to 11, starts with the narrator just expelled from a Black college in Alabama, and having conversations on a bus north. The bus ride is a genius tapestry of different registers of voice, which Ellison is an absolute master at managing.

When the narrator arrives in New York City, the city folk look like automatons to him. Ellison describes people on the streets as wound up and released, like components of a clock. When my students read the book, I showed them a famous scene from “Modern Times,” by Charlie Chaplin, who I really do think Ellison was influenced by. Chaplin is sort of the only sentient human in the film, a straight man being moved through systems, such as the factory, that are bigger than he is. There’s an earnestness with which Chaplin’s character keeps subjecting himself to the logic of those systems that parallels the earnestness with which Ellison’s protagonist has to subject himself to other people’s crude and narrow ideas of how a Black man should be.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

by Carson McCullers

This was published in 1941, and, as far as I know, it’s one of the first queer American novels. It takes place on an Army base and follows a series of characters who all have inner lives that are unfulfilled, including an Army captain who is secretly gay. Another character dreams of running away to operate a shrimp boat with her Filipino servant, an aesthete who paints watercolors and practices his French.

McCullers has a real virtuosity for depicting alienation and giving people secret yearnings and personal histories. For example, there’s a young private in the novel who has committed several indiscretions—one was purchasing a cow impulsively. Another, it turns out, was murdering a man. It was really fun to talk with my students about how McCullers builds character, because she really shows how specificity can make a character come alive. There’s a quote of hers that I shared, where she writes about reading the New York Daily News every day and relishing in details: “It is interesting to know the doctor and his wife, when they were stabbed, were wearing Mormon nightgowns three quarter length . . . Always details provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish. When Christ was pierced on his left side, it is more moving and evocative than if he were just pierced.”