The trouble with being cool is that you have to make it look natural, effortless, almost accidental, and maybe inevitable. It isn’t a simple matter of the interests you’ve cultivated, the freewheeling eccentrics you’ve assembled as a tribe, the life you’ve lived, and the stories you can tell about it. Just as the Renaissance courtier had his sprezzatura, the modern badass must maintain an air of grace and nonchalance, never letting show the glue and cardboard and twine holding together the sturdy leatherbound edifice. And so, writing about being cool is often the riskiest enterprise of all. Reading the result can be like stumbling upon James Gatz’s self-improvement action plan (“Practice elocution, poise, and how to obtain it 5.00-6.00”) and realizing how much awfully self-conscious effort goes into the process of self-invention.
One solution to this challenge is to keep yourself off the page, to write not about yourself but about subjects only a very curious, fearless, fascinating person would be conversant in. Rachel Kushner has done just this in three successful novels to date. Telex from Cuba (2008), which follows the fortunes of expatriates in Cuba during the revolution, was followed by The Flamethrowers (2013), a National Book Award-nominated epic about motorcycles, art, and radicalism in New York City and Italy. The Mars Room (2018) went both of these novels one better for sheer badassery: It’s set in a California women’s prison, where a stripper has been sent for murdering her stalker.
Now, to this unblemished track record, we must add an asterisk: the past two decades of Kushner’s nonfiction, collected under the oof-making title The Hard Crowd. Kushner is on the cover, posing in front of a Ford Galaxie 500 with California plates. Inside, in an essay about Marguerite Duras (the modified foreword to an Everyman’s Library edition), Kushner writes, “In the 1950s, male critics called her talent ‘masculine,’ ‘hardball,’ and ‘virile’ — and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.)” As is generally the case with these essays, she is really, and not very obliquely, talking about herself.
And we are, for that matter, still squarely in “gendered literary territory” because a book like this, however true and however thrilling, would be a laughingstock if a man had written it. At the sentence level, as well-educated writers (Kushner attended University of California, Berkeley and Columbia) are taught to say, these essays are frequently a pleasure. As a collection, The Hard Crowd reads like a bale of Beat Generation novels, Tijuana bibles, revolutionary manifestos, Rat Fink cartoons, Tom Waits liner notes, and exploded-view engine diagrams were fed into a wood chipper and blasted back out in book form. “Self-conscious” doesn’t do it justice. Each essay is like a Wall Drug billboard, leading the reader closer and closer to the main attraction, which is a giant fiberglass Kushner astride America’s biggest motorcycle.
Kushner’s fiction has been called some combination of masculine, hardball, and virile by critics who look about as macho as the Tootsie Roll owl. But they aren’t wrong. It is, and she is, by any reasonable standard. She is a genuine daredevil. “Five hundred miles down the Baja Peninsula, just before Guerrero Negro,” she writes, in “Girl on a Motorcycle,” “is the longest uninterrupted straight on the Transpeninsular Highway. I went into it going 120, tucked down into my fairing, and rolled the throttle to its pegged position. I hit 142 miles an hour, the fastest I’d ever gone.” Kushner is forced off the road by another rider, flies through the air, and lands on her head, leaving a “massive crater” in her helmet. Very cool.
The essay’s title is taken from a 1968 Alain Delon film, in which Delon gives a Harley to his mistress, played by Marianne Faithfull. Kushner informs us, as the essay is winding up, that Faithfull had a stunt double and that, of course, her character dies on the bike. No explication of these facts is necessary. In essay after essay, Kushner keeps on doing things herself and not getting killed. She goes to a dangerous Palestinian refugee camp. She has a car break down driving cross-country on I-80 and is helped out by some truckers. (The car is a 1963 Chevrolet Impala; there’s enough classic car talk in here to power an Elks lodge for a year.) She works for legendary concert promoter Bill Graham’s company and spills the tea about various celebrities. Carlos Santana never tipped. Rod Stewart played private concerts for corporate stooges, who stand in stark contrast with Kushner’s people, such as “Tiny, an enormous teenager who, we all knew, lifted locked, parked motorcycles singlehandedly into his flatbed truck, high on crystal meth and PCP.”
Everyone we encounter is right out of a Denis Johnson novel. And there’s an essay about Johnson, the patron saint (rightfully so) of the Kushner type. There’s another about Cormac McCarthy. “For a long time I didn’t like Western films as a genre,” Kushner writes, “because they were boring to me without any women.” This comes as a surprise, given how constrained most of this writing seems by its project of conquering stereotypically male domains. There are essays about ship captains, Italian leftist revolutionaries, and prison reform. The freedom of the sea or the open road seems to end up in the prison of talking about it a little too much.
Kushner’s parents make appearances, not to be gently mocked but to cement further her bona fides. Her father owned a 1955 Vincent Black Shadow. Her parents lived in a “cold-water flat in Kentish Town,” and when they moved to the United States, they did it on a Greek freighter. They were beatniks, more or less, with a murderer’s row of intriguing, marginal friends, including a guy who leaves a half-smoked joint on the hood of his car while shopping in a Goodwill. Here and there, Kushner unwittingly reveals that they were, despite being very cool on paper, probably just as gratingly mannered and self-satisfied as she is: “I had been told by my parents that White Castle was racist and that we didn’t eat their burgers on account of it. But there I was in a house full of black people enjoying them.” Imagine that.
Every detail is marshaled in support of mystique. If a character eats, it is “pilfered orchard fruit.” If a character is married, it’s to a “common-law wife.” If the emergency door of a concert venue is being kicked in to avoid paying for a ticket, it’s with “steel-toed boots.” Alcohol is “rotgut,” a term nobody in the 21st century would use unless she’d first been pickled in Jack Kerouac. “Spent my after-school days huffing nitrous for kicks,” Kushner writes, “while earning $1.85 an hour.” I’m sorry, but kicks?
We get it. We get it. Does Kushner? She relates a life lived in studious defiance of social norms, personal safety, and snobbery, but her essay about criminal justice reform, the outing in which she gets most fully beyond her painstakingly curated persona, doesn’t seem to have integrated any lessons about hedonism, thrill-seeking, or persona curation. “Is Prison Necessary?” its title asks, and in it, a prison abolitionist tells Kushner that “in the unusual event that someone in Spain thinks he is going to solve a problem by killing another person, the response is that the person loses seven years of his life, to think about what he has done.” This is held up in opposition to America’s barbaric carceral culture of life and even death sentences. The problem of crime and punishment in America is always a lack of resources, a failure of the state to ensure the kind of safety and security that Kushner has spent her entire life, and nearly 200 pages of self-congratulatory memoir, trying to escape.
Some people do things for irrational reasons — for kicks, you might say. The “problem” being solved by a criminal might be free-floating anger or boredom or a desire to reinvent oneself as a mythic figure beyond bourgeois inhibitions. The men who tell us this in literature have been relegated to the pages of men’s magazines, dismissed as puffed-up imitators of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Kushner is telling us the same stuff, but it only applies to people like her, people who think in terms of disrupting gendered literary spaces and bourgeois limitations. Everyone else who acts out of impulse, wild abandon, or a lust for life can easily be explained by a dearth of resources, guidance, and early intervention. Being the exception must be nice, even if you have to land on your skull once in a while.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
