In 2013, a firestorm raged briefly around Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers.” Kushner wrote about motorcycles and war and ’70s New York in prose The New Yorker’s James Wood described as “scintillatingly alive.” Frederick Seidel of The New York Review of Books disagreed, complaining, in a cloud of casual sexism, “She brilliantly tries. She writes like mad.”
Meanwhile, on Salon, the sharp-eyed Laura Miller called out male critics for being alternately titillated and terrified by Kushner’s authoritative voice, which she said scared men perceived as a kind of “literary transvestism.”
Strong words, but when Seidel claimed Kushner’s prose had “heat with no warmth,” I had to confess I could see what he meant. Her writing bristles and bulges in a way that often lacks grace, or a place to rest your weary head. Moreover, there is a certain quality of numbness at its center, underscored in “The Flamethrowers” by a female protagonist whose passivity verges, at times, on the catatonic. But where Seidel diagnosed Kushner’s writing as “hysterical,” symptomatic of a quintessentially feminine vacuity, I saw the numbness at the heart of rage.
Rage is a motorcycle that goes very fast. It looks like an easy ride, but you have to exert a form of constant and invisible control over it that uses every muscle in your body and every synapse in your brain, or you wipe out. That’s the kind of calm that narrator Reno maintains, and occasionally fails to maintain, in “The Flamethrowers”; and it’s the feeling I get from Kushner’s genuinely uncomfortable prose, which seems to say, Passivity is more work than it looks like.
“The Strange Case of Rachel K,” a chapbook-size collection of three early short stories, gives as precise a snapshot of this vision as one could hope for. Those already sold on Kushner will be eager to read the raw materials of her debut novel, “Telex From Cuba”; those still hung up on figuring out the precise nature of Kushner’s talent will find a compelling case for her prose as precisely the kind of fire only a fool would try to warm his hands by.
The first story in the triptych, “The Great Exception,” is an inchoate postcolonial farce, full of Rabelaisian set-pieces that delight with their crudeness but don’t quite stick the landing. The “discovery” of Cuba is portrayed as a filthy act of displaced adultery, the explorer exciting his queen with tales of a breast-shaped globe while she imagines thrusting his face into her lap. Eventually, the progress of syphilis from New World to Old tracks the whore-ification of an entire land mass.
Big, bold ideas, but it doesn’t quite feel like a story, its submerged anger jibing awkwardly with its cleverness. For example, Kushner’s comparison of the Spanish colonizers’ parrot-eating with parricide mistakes wordplay for a point: “Parricide is murdering someone to whom you owe reverence. This was not parricide. The birds, to whom the Spanish owed nothing, spoke profanely and deserved to be punished, and their death elevated the vulgar ceremony of eating to the noble proceedings of justice.”
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The title story, an absorbing mini-tragedy, fares better. A fictionalized account of the meeting of a nightclub dancer with a French Nazi in a Cuban nightclub just before the revolution, this is the story that would eventually become “Telex From Cuba.” Zazou dancer Rachel K, “(a) tropical wraith with chemical blonde hair,” writhes suggestively on stage, her dance, originally a symbol of French resistance to Nazi occupations, stripped of its political connotations and transformed to a come-on for potential johns. In one scene, the ex-Vichy collaborator Christian de la Maziere, tortured by self-loathing beneath a blithely slimy exterior, runs his finger over Rachel K’s fishnets and finds that they are painted on with liquid eyeliner. Such well-controlled metaphors lend a novelistic depth to the characters’ interactions.
But it’s “Debouchment,” little more than a sketch, that burns the brightest. Over cocktail chatter in the ritzy Pan-American club, two women breezily disagree over whether life in Cuba is “violent”; moments later, a bomb blast converts the chandeliers into smithereens, settling the argument. In brief flashes, Kushner illuminates both the barely repressed rage of the colonized nation and the self-soothing rhythms of the upper class, as when a woman fuzzily recalls a plantation boss: “A very decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he had done it, she remembered, that was the connection.” That second sentence is a delicate bit of butchery, pulling back the skin of a woman too anesthetized to understand her own inner monologue, poking at what’s underneath.
In her preface, Kushner says of “Debouchment”: “(I)t was written under some kind of spell. … If I could have written an entire book with the same density and pauses as that one short piece, I would have.” She has, instead, written two extremely impressive novels as prickly as chevaux-de-frise. “Debouchment” suggests she’s hiding a set of brass knuckles as well.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate degree in English and writes a weekly style column called The Good Eye.
“The Strange Case of Rachel K”
By Rachel Kushner, New Directions, 96 pages, $19.95