‘Writing this book was like a drug high’: Rachel Kushner on her Booker-listed novel

The author on her party years in San Francisco, why she loves getting older and her most ambitious novel yet

Writing her latest novel, Creation Lake, “was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life”, Rachel Kushner says when we meet in her London hotel. “It was almost like a drug high or a kind of madness. I felt like I was digging a hole to the centre of the Earth and I was not going to stop until I got there.” This from a novelist who used to ride motorbikes at 142mph for kicks. After reading the first line to her friend and mentor Don DeLillo over the phone, she was delighted when he burst out laughing. “Neanderthals were prone to depression,” it begins. “They were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.”

A novel about prehistory, “the ultimate love story of the coming together of the Homo sapiens and the Neanderthal”, as Kushner puts it, might not sound like everyone’s idea of fun. But she couples her countercultural history of civilisation with a noirish contemporary plot about a former government operative who infiltrates a group of suspected eco-terrorists in south-west France. Written in short, propulsive chapters, the novel intersperses the musings of Bruno Lacombe, the group’s leader, an original soixante-huitard and “anti-civver” who has lived in a cave in the Dordogne for 12 years, with the first-person narrative of spy-for-hire Sadie Smith (not her real name), who, armed with a pair of “notable breasts” and US-military-grade binoculars, is tasked with shaking things up a bit.

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