Review: Anthony Domestico on Rachel Kushner

A spy runs up against the limits of time

Rachel Kushner’s first three novels varied dramatically in manner. The Mars Room (2018) was restrained and The Flamethrowers (2013) brilliantly stylized, with Telex from Cuba (2008) somewhere in between. They also occupied different generic territories, The Flamethrowers a group portrait of artists in (mostly) 1970s New York City, The Mars Room a prison novel set in California, Telex from Cuba historical fiction involving expats with the United Fruit Company in 1950s Cuba. In each, characters were caught up in systems beyond their control—a fact that created an air of worldliness, with Kushner’s artists and prisoners and Americans abroad pretending or achieving a kind of pure passivity. “It seemed a form of intelligence to claim not to care what happened to oneself,” she writes in Telex from Cuba.

Fitting for works so immersed in history, Kushner’s novels propose alternative views of time. “There are two planes of time,” declares the narrator of The Mars Room, “the time of waiting for the bus, and the time when the bus finally pops into view.” In The Flamethrowers, after a young female artist is advised not to rush into her career, she thinks, “You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Be a conduit.” In Telex from Cuba, we read that “impatience [is] a kind of hope—making the effort to fill time with something.” How we experience time, how we narrate and endure it: these are some of the central concerns of Kushner’s fiction.