Neanderthal aesthetics

I

Is there a cooler writer than Rachel Kushner? A Los Angeleno raised by hippies in Eugene and San Francisco, Kushner races — and repairs — motorcycles and muscle cars, volunteers at a women’s prison, and enlists rock star Kim Gordon for a book launch. Kushner hangs out with artists like Richard Prince and gives her novels titles like The Flamethrowers. She’s a fan of Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector. She even keeps up with critical theory; witness her interest in Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh’s recent indictment of contemporary capitalism. Yet for all her coolness, Kushner doesn’t express herself through avant-garde poetry or experimental memoir; on the contrary, her usual literary form is that most staid, if venerable, of modes: the realist novel.

Or, more precisely, Kushner retains the architecture of the realist novel while troubling some of its main features. Committed to the realist novel’s aesthetic power and social relevance, she does not disavow its traditional strengths. Plot, character, setting and social commentary matter to her, if in a self-conscious manner that challenges the veracity often ascribed to this literary form. Dedicated to the idea that literature has a rich relationship to the political, broadly defined, Kushner treats the novel as a means of imagining and engaging a material world that exceeds the self.