San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: Rachel Kushner looks back on youth in 1980s S.F.
Rachel Kushner, primarily known for her fiction, proves she’s also a master essayist in “The Hard Crowd: Essays 20002020”: 19 pieces of memoir and criticism that display her omnivorous tastes in literature, art and history. She takes us on a breathstealing motorcycle ride through Baja, to a refugee camp in East Jerusalem, and through the work of writers like Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector.
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner aptly likened her fiction’s prose to a “muscle car oozing down the side roads of your mind.” It’s true even of her nonfiction; her writing is tough and skulky, snaking through the past, nearly emotionally impenetrable at times. Kushner involves herself only when necessary and prefers, like most fiction writers, to look outward.
In looking outward, she renders the world coolly, encapsulating an entire mood in a single stroke, like when she notices kids in East Jerusalem “who looked like cool kids the world over, tuned in to that teenage frequency, a dog whistle with global reach.”
Throughout these essays, Kushner steals back subjects normally hopelessly tied to masculinity, like classic cars, dive bars, Marxism and motorcycles. Despite these essays spanning two decades, there’s something essentially Kushneresque threaded throughout, a sense of cool girl remove, which is tempered by her engaged activist interests in prison abolition and workers rights. While this collection is best for fans (essays like “Made to Burn” illuminate the origins of her novel “The Flamethrowers”), it’s also a good introduction for the uninitiated, as long as they don’t mind passing brainy references to Lacan and Cixous.
Despite Kushner’s reluctance to take center stage, the personal essays shine. For San Franciscans, the book’s titular essay “The Hard Crowd” is worth the price of admission alone. It looks back at her teen years in 1980s San Francisco and then the ’90s, when she tended bar at the Blue Lamp in the Tenderloin, cataloging the roughness of the time; one of her regulars disappears and his head is later found in a dumpster.
References to sinceshuttered establishments vividly evoke an era when motorcycle mechanics and bike messengers could afford to live in the city, and Kushner ultimately delivers a heavy hit of nostalgia that will make any San Franciscan’s heart lurch.
In one particularly compelling scene Kushner watches PJ Harvey play a secret set at the Hotel Utah after she’d just performed for thousands. As Harvey taps into a bottomless well of talent and energy, Kushner realizes that “to be truly good at something is the very highest joy.” Shortly after, she quits her job and makes writing the center of her life.
Throughout these essays Kushner literally stays out late, but metaphorically notes that “to become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.”
In the closing essays she writes, “I’m talking about my own life. Which not only can’t matter to you, it might bore you.” Bore us? Hardly. Sounds exactly like something the coolest, smartest girl in the room might say, knowing full well we’re under her spell.