Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: Rachel Kushner talks about the informant and provacateur who infiltrates an anarchist eco-commune in rural France – the central character in her new novel, “Creation Lake.”  But first: the campaign for the abortion rights referendum in Florida. Amy Littlefield has our report – in a minute.

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Donald Trump announced Friday that he would be voting against the abortion rights ballot measure in his home state of Florida in November. For the latest on the politics of abortion in the coming election, we turn to Amy Littlefield. She’s The Nation’s abortion access correspondent and a journalist who focuses on reproductive rights, healthcare, and religion. She’s the author of the forthcoming book, American Crusaders: A History of the Anti-Abortion Movement Over the Last 50 Years, to be published in 2026. Amy Littlefield, welcome back.

Amy Littlefield: It’s great to be back with you, Jon.

JW: The Florida Amendment to the state constitution was put on the ballot in response to their new six-week ban pushed by Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republicans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Florida’s one of 10 states this November to have a ballot measure where people can vote to establish a right to abortion in their state constitutions. The other states voting on abortion rights this November are Arizona, very important, because it’s a swing state in the presidential count, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana – where the Democrats are most vulnerable to losing control of the Senate – Nebraska, Nevada, New York and South Dakota.
The pro-choice position won in every one of the seven states where voters were given a choice, including some deep red states, but the ballot measure in Florida poses the biggest challenge of all, a test no other abortion proposal has faced. Tell us about what it will take to pass this one in Florida.

AL: Amendment four will need to clear the second-highest threshold in the country winning 60% of voters. So this is higher than the 57%, for example, who voted to codify abortion rights into Ohio’s Constitution last year. Of course, we saw an attempt by abortion rights opponents in Ohio to actually raise the threshold as a way of defeating this measure, and so there’s a huge hurdle to cross there with having to get such a large percentage of such a diverse population in Florida on board in order for this to pass.

JW: Governor Ron DeSantis has warned that if the Florida abortion rights amendment is adopted, that would be, “the end of the pro-life movement.” That seems pretty unlikely, but do you think there might be a germ of truth there?

AL: Certainly, it would be a huge resounding defeat for them, but no, I certainly don’t think it would be the end of the pro-life movement or the anti-abortion movement. I mean, we’ve seen many defeats for them, including as you point out, seven defeats on these ballot initiatives, and the resounding message that’s sent seemingly every election these days, that abortion rights are popular more so than ever before, so I certainly don’t think it’s going to be the end of the anti-abortion movement. Perhaps he was just grasping for a new hyperbolic message that he hasn’t used before, but I do think it probably speaks to the fact that the struggle to restore abortion rights in Florida is not going to end after November, right? Potentially there’s going to be another fight to bring this right to abortion, once it’s restored by voters, to bring that into reality in the state.

JW: So Florida has a new law, a six-week ban that went into effect on May 1st. Recently you visited a Planned Parenthood health center in Sarasota. What was that like?

AL: I describe it in the piece as an average day in hell. I mean, I think you could probably make the argument that hell is a medical waiting room under the best of circumstances, but the specific circumstances of being in an abortion clinic waiting room under the regime of the six-week ban. I had this incredible experience where I sat in the waiting room for the entire day and just watched people coming and going, and none of the patients who came in that day elected to talk to me, right? They were given the option, which is totally understandable, because for many of them it was already the worst day of their life, especially if they were getting turned away.
So I was just sort of a fly on the wall observing what was happening, and I often found I could tell by people’s facial expressions, by their body language whether they had cleared this very cruel threshold that the state of Florida has established. People only made it into that waiting room to begin with if they were determined to be close enough to the six-week ban stipulations, right?

If people were further along than that, they had probably already been told that they needed to somehow get to North Carolina, which might be the closest state, but there’s a three-day waiting period, or to Maryland, or maybe they have family in Colorado or New York, and so they’re going there, or maybe they’re getting on a plane to Puerto Rico. These are the sort of options that a lot of folks in Florida were already having to consider, right? So I was only seeing the smaller percentage of folks who had cleared the first hurdle, made it into the waiting room, and were going to get an ultrasound to determine whether they could still get an abortion in the state of Florida.

I watched one woman go in, come back into the waiting room, she gave her boyfriend this little barely perceptible nod, and then the two of them, their body language kind of relaxed, he put his arm around her and I thought, “Okay, they’ve probably made it.” There was another woman who came out wearing purple Crocs, and she came out and she was crying and texting frantically on a phone, well, she probably didn’t make it.

So there’s this sort of sorting process that happens with this diverse cross-section of the population. I mean, anyone who’s listening to this, there was someone who walked into that waiting room who looked like you or someone you love. I mean, this is every person in America or every person in Sarasota, Florida at that moment who came into this waiting room, and so I really had a front seat to this cruel sorting process that happens.

JW: Tell us about the woman in the red blouse.

AL: The woman in the red blouse was the one that I couldn’t get out of my mind after this visit. She was in this impossible position of being right on the borderline where her right to abortion was about to disappear in the state of Florida, but it wasn’t gone yet, and she had basically no time to make up her mind about what she was going to do. She just found out she was pregnant. I think she was five weeks, five days, and I was listening to her venting about this to people on the phone. Because Florida has a 24-hour waiting period, she would have to make a decision, get counseling, and then return 24 hours later for the abortion, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do, and so she was fixated on the fact that she had so little time to make this decision.

According to the folks that I talked to in Florida, this is an incredibly common experience now. The doctor, Robert Slackman, told me he’s watching people rush to get an abortion, because they’re so terrified of running out of time that that’s the only thing they’re thinking about, and then they don’t get to do the processing and decision-making until afterwards.

I thought, wow, to be told you’ve got to make this decision now or it’s gone, which is functionally the case. I mean, you can travel out of state, there’s other options. People go online to plancpills.org and websites like that, and there are options available, but I think when you’re in that moment where being in your home state, traveling out of your home state can be so hard as to be impossible, that I was really feeling for her as I was watching her process the news in this moment.

JW: Another one that really got to me in your report was the woman who had high blood pressure.

AL: Dr. Robert Slackman told me about a patient he had seen that day who had been off her blood pressure medication for a month because she’d had a problem getting access to it. Whether it was financial or otherwise, I’m not sure. Her blood pressure that day was so elevated that he said she was in danger of having a stroke at any moment. He told me it was actually a higher pressure than he thinks he’d ever seen. The problem is that he couldn’t do an abortion safely, because he felt like there was a risk that the abortion itself could provoke her to have a stroke because her blood pressure was so high. So, he told her to go to the emergency room to try to get medication and stabilize her blood pressure so that it would be safe for her to have an abortion. But of course, then she’s racing the clock, because she needs to get that done and come back and see him for the abortion before she crosses the threshold that Florida has arbitrarily established.

I really wonder too about what happened to that person, right? These are ways that people’s lives are being put at risk because pregnancy can sometimes be a dangerous condition.

JW: You’re right that Florida used to be the South’s last refuge for abortion access. This wasn’t just an issue of what happens to women in Florida. Tell us about that.

AL: I like to describe Florida as this funnel into which a lot of the South’s patients were already going to Florida as the last bastion of abortion access in the region. Last year more than 84,000 abortions were recorded in Florida, which is the fourth highest in the country, and so this is a huge endeavor to move northward.  Not only all of the Floridians, and this is a very populous state of course, but to move all of the folks from states like Georgia and Mississippi and places where folks were traveling to Florida, to move all of them north and to create the appointment slots and the travel routes, and to move that infrastructure all the way northward. It’s a huge regional shift that we’re seeing that’s being managed largely by abortion clinics and by abortion funds.

JW: Let’s talk about the campaign to pass the abortion rights amendment in Florida. Floridians Protecting Freedom, what is their strategy?

AL: A large part of their strategy is win over Republicans, win over people in the middle. As we’ve seen in Kansas and other places with these ballot initiatives, they adopt language that basically sounds like it could have been crafted by a Libertarian think tank, right? I mean, they’re talking about getting the government out of our healthcare and they’re talking about protecting freedom, such that you read the slogan and think, which side is that?

When I was shadowing canvassers in Kansas who had similar messaging, I think it was Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, it was like, what do you mean by’ constitutional freedom,’ right? Once people found out, oh, you’re for abortion rights, okay, cool, cool, we’re good. So, this strategy – and it makes sense, right? I mean, obviously Republican voters outnumber Democratic registered voters in Florida by a healthy margin, and there are voters who are not affiliated officially with either political party, and so it’s trying to find a message that resonates with everybody.

I had an interesting conversation with Natasha Sutherland, a spokesperson for the campaign, and she’s telling me about the challenges of, “Look, Florida,” she was like, “I don’t know if you followed anything that happened with COVID in Florida.” I was like, “Yeah, it was a little hard to miss,” right? I mean, it sort of became a case study in what happens when elected leaders do their best to make light of the pandemic, right?

Of course lives were lost as a result, but there’s this line that they’re treading between sort of saying, ‘Look, this is a population that seems to agree with a message of get the government out of our healthcare.’ Then not wanting to endorse anti-masking sentiment, even while cleverly perhaps, or were carefully capitalizing on it, honestly.

So, I think the official messaging has been tricky. I mean, the huge caveat, and again, we saw this in Kansas as well when I was on the ground there, there’s a huge amount of messaging that isn’t coming from the official campaign, right? There’re people talking about this, sharing their personal stories, people thinking about things like IVF. There’s a huge amount of person-to-person communication, including from groups like Florida Rising that I followed that are talking more explicitly about reproductive justice, that are talking about people of color and how they’re impacted by abortion bans that are talking about it within a wider context of voting rights. So there’s a lot of different messages that people are hearing, but that message about getting the government out of healthcare seems to be what’s coming from the official campaign, and that’s certainly not new or unique to Florida.

JW: You say that partly as a result of the abortion rights referendum campaign, Florida’s Democrats have reached what you call a thrilling benchmark, something they haven’t achieved for a long time. Tell us about that.

AL: Jon, this is my favorite detail maybe in the story. It seems like Democrats and progressives are catching onto the importance of local politics, like, yay, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. After so many years of watching groups like Moms for Liberty that are taking over school boards, seeing how the right-wing has really dominated a lot of local politics, it is so thrilling to me that Florida Democrats are running a full slate of candidates for the State House and Senate and Legislature. It’s the first time the party has done so in over 30 years, right?

JW: Contesting every seat.

AL: Contesting every seat, fighting for seats. Even the ones that maybe they know they’re not going to win, they’re fighting for it anyway, and that is a huge sign of energy and growing recognition of the importance of these local races. I mean, there’re new fresh candidates in the race. I talked to one named Sarah Henry who’s a former clinic escort. She’s in a really tightly contested race, and she said the number one issue she’s hearing about used to be property insurance, which is very expensive in Florida, in a state that’s slowly falling into the ocean, but she says now it’s always some variation on abortion rights, on reproductive freedom, that people are really energized by that issue, and that might be enough to put her into the state legislature and to begin chipping away.

Of course there’s a Republican supermajority there, this is a long game, but I think a really important question that’s often missed with these ballot initiatives is what the long-term impact on state politics will be, and whether it could be part of turning Florida blue for years to come.

JW: Great. And there was something you found even more gratifying than that. You call it the inspiring activism in the belly of the beast.

AL: Yes, I mean, Jon, would you have expected this? I mean, I think probably most people wouldn’t, that Florida is home to one of the largest underground community support networks for abortion pill access. So, I got to visit with someone who is doing that work. I got to visit with Adoula who spends all of her time texting with people who are self-managing their abortions. She gets a real kick out of doing it in Ron DeSantis’ backyard.

There are such sophisticated, committed people who are really taking risks to circulate abortion pills. They’re doing it very cheaply; they’re doing it very efficiently. They have folks who mail the medications, they have folks who provide emotional support to people who are taking the medications. This is happening of course in every corner of the United States, but I think it’s significant even as there is this hugely expensive and unconcerned effort to restore the legal right to abortion in Florida, and with all of the different political ramifications that that entails, that in the meantime there’s this effort to make sure that people get access to the abortions they need while this process is ongoing.

That’s happening both within clinics with abortion funds that are working on getting people out of state, and then with community support networks that are working on getting pills to people who aren’t able or choose not to travel out of the state.

JW: Back to the national picture: of course, it’s no secret that Kamala has made abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign. The latest news is that she’s planning a 50-stop reproductive freedom bus tour that kicked off Tuesday in Trump’s hometown, Palm Beach, Florida. She is emphasizing her promise to sign a bill codifying Roe that would make it for a federal law guaranteeing abortion rights nationwide. What effect is this going to have in the state of Florida?

AL: Oh, you love to see someone who can actually say the word abortion without wincing. I mean, we love to see the actual word spoken from the presidential candidate. But yeah, I mean, I think Kamala Harris has been talking about – and she uses the language of the movement, she uses the language of reproductive freedom, which activists have noticed, that she is using that language.
It’s unfortunate that she’s still using the language of restore Roe. The Democratic Party platform uses that same language of restoring Roe, because we know Roe had so many limitations, including for folks later in pregnancy. Yet, I think when I watched her speech at the Democratic National Convention, holy moly. I had time to go online to write a post on social media about how much she was talking about abortion, and “Wow, this is so different from previous years. Look at this, the Democratic candidate talking so much about abortion.” She was still talking about abortion while I was typing that. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is a real departure.”
I wrote a piece where I sort of went through what Democrats have said over the years, and the answer is not much, right? Often, especially in the 1990s, very carefully it’s this private issue, it’s this relative that we’re kind of ashamed of who sort of stands in the corner and no one talks about her, and so I felt like there was a real change. The big question – I mean, there’s no question that there’s a huge amount of voters, especially women and especially young people who are energized, who are outraged over the overturn of Roe v. Wade and are coming out to vote for.

There was a huge question mark I think because of the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel and its war on Gaza, I think there was a lot of hesitation, especially among young people who now hopefully believe – they’re feeling like hopefully Kamala Harris is going to be different, at least marginally on that war, and so I think these factors combined, I mean, there’s this shift.
I talked to one 19-year-old activist in Florida who is saying, “A lot of my cohorts are out there protesting the Democratic Party instead of ginning up support. These are the folks they need to phone bank and canvas.” He felt like that had started to shift after Kamala Harris became the candidate. So I think all of these factors combined, I mean, there’s a lot of momentum behind it.

I mean, what I would love to see if we’re hoping and dreaming in this moment, which I think we are given that we might be about to elect the first Black woman president, is to see an explicit tie between the economic issues that we heard so much about from the DNC, universal healthcare access, the difficulty of paying for prescription drugs, the difficulty of paying for child care.  Tying all of that in explicitly with reproductive freedom, because often people do think about their finances, they do think about pocketbook issues when they’re making decisions about the size of their family. So I would love to see this be the wedge in a different sense, a wedge issue that cracks the wedge open to a more progressive economic policy from Democrats, and I think we’re starting to see that happen. I certainly think Kamala Harris is doing a better job talking about this issue and talking about it in relation with the rest of the platform, and it’s exciting.

JW: One of my favorite things in your report for The Nation is what you found at Planned Parenthood of Southwest in Central Florida, that’s in Sarasota. It was a display of letters of support from voters for the abortion rights amendment, Amendment four. You have a photo that you took posted at thenation.com of this display. Tell us about it.

AL: Oh my gosh, this is so amazing. Danielle Singleton, who was overseeing the volunteers who were opening up and going through all of the different signature petitions that were flooding in when they were putting this measure on the ballot, she had a system where if any volunteers got discouraged, she would just send them over to the wall, and they had posted the most beautiful letters that had come in from supporters.

I mean, there was one that said, “I’m a choose life proponent who believes all life is sacred. However, I know not all women feel the same way I do. Neither pregnant women nor their doctors should fear government interference. Therefore, I’m submitting my signed petition.” You had someone who said, “I got my friends to sign this petition, I think it’s a very important issue. Is it possible for you to send me 50 petitions?” That came from a woman in Fort Lauderdale.

Then Danielle Singleton told me her favorite came from a 90-year-old man in Fort Myers who had written that he was ‘a long-time registered voter without any electronic services in my home other than a TV remote I can talk to,’ and he had sent a self-addressed stamped envelope for them to send him a petition for his signature. So there is no doubt that this campaign is resonating with a broad array of Floridians, and that Florida really has a chance to prove that a huge majority, in a state with a very red reputation, cares about this issue and wants to restore abortion rights.

JW: Amy Littlefield – you can read her report, “The Toughest Fight to Win Back Abortion Rights Is On in Florida” – and you can see her wonderful photos, at thenation.com. Amy, thanks for all your work on this, and thanks for talking with us today.

AL: Thank you so much, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Everybody who’s worked in social movements or in helping organize political demonstrations knows how activists are often concerned about undercover agents, informants, and provocateurs. Now, Rachel Kushner has written a novel where the protagonist is the informant and provocateur. Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels, The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, both nominated for the National Book Award, and The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her books have been translated into 27 languages. We’ve talked about each of them here. Her new novel is Creation Lake, it’s been long listed for the Booker Prize. We reached her today at home in LA. Rachel, welcome back.

Rachel Kushner: Thank you. Nice to be here.

JW: In this book, the first thing you highlight about being the provocateur is that it’s a job. It can be a government job, working for the FBI or the DEA, but there’s also a huge private sector workforce that spies on critics and opponents of big corporations and tries to undermine their organizations and disrupt their actions. And in all these jobs, if you don’t get the results your boss wants, you are fired. In your new book, our protagonist — she calls herself Sadie Smith — has not been very successful in her career. In fact, she’s been sort of a failure as a provocateur. There was a time, she tells us, when she felt invincible. Not anymore. What happened? Why has she ended up infiltrating a commune in rural southwestern France, instead of working in Berkeley or LA or New York City?

RK: Sadie tells herself that she is ahead of the game, that things have worked out as they should, and that maybe she’s better off in the private sector where you can make more money, it’s a more shadowy world where there are no rules, where an agent can, a priori, be somewhat rogue in her methods and her choices. She is basically kicked out of the world of the Feds, being an undercover agent, because somebody that she was surveilling had his conviction overturned by a lawyer who claims entrapment, and she was the entrapper. And I’ve read about a few of these cases. I don’t know if there’s a large workforce doing that, but there are certainly a few. And it whets the imagination, if you will, of what that world is like, and that these corporations think that there are leftist groups agitating in such a way that could cause trouble for power and profit, and that these kinds of green anarchists need government surveillance.

It could be both comical and also somewhat serious, because we have seen cases of it in real life. But maybe the larger point for me was to write a narrator who would automatically, in most cases, take a view that would be like 180 degrees from my own view. She would report on people with a kind of cruel amusement in a way that I never would. She would not have a natural sympathy for the people she’s surveilling, whereas I sort of would. And the question became in the novel and the tension of the narrative, whether she is vulnerable to the laments of this figure, Bruno Lacombe, whose correspondence she’s illicitly reading.

JW: You imagine Sadie the provocateur so thoroughly, and you have so much fun doing it. She’s a wonderful protagonist and a terrific narrator, even though what she’s doing is – so wrong!

RK: Yeah. Again, it was like — to get into her and move through a landscape was almost to get behind the wheel of a tank where I’m already occupying a space that is very insulated from my own actual feelings about the world. And she did turn out to be, in other ways, a kind of generative conduit for my own vulgar and immature sense of humor.

JW: [Laughter] I would never say that.

RK: And I was able to bestow her with characteristics that I don’t myself possess, and that just – it was very fun for me.
Another part of it was the way that she seems to sort of contribute to, comment on, or occupy a certain literary genre that was new to me. I do not claim that Creation Lake is a roman noir. It’s not a spy novel per se, because it wants to reserve for itself spaces to speculate on the human condition in a way that’s a little more like lavish than the tight control and set of rules that one should learn, incorporate, and submit to when writing a genre novel. That said, when you have a spy as you’re a narrator, it’s kind of wonderfully freeing — because suddenly you have this very active protagonist who can put guns in other people’s hands and plans in their head.
And the kind of fragile, lifelike semblance of reality that is created through the voice of a narrator who’s more like real people is much more self-doubting and passive in a lot of situations. You’re listening and intuiting, and she is constantly manipulating and projecting and overplaying her own idea that she is the one who knows more than everyone else in the room.

JW: I wanted to ask you to read one of the passages I really like. This is where she’s thinking about the people in the group that she’s infiltrated.

RK: “These people were different from the West Coast eco warriors, with their piercings and their food coloring, hair dye, t-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro split in movement ideology. Nor did these boys resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized, among people who wore all black. Then again, Pascal didn’t look like that either.

“But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics or they cultivate instead a straightlaced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are, who they consider themselves to be. People tell themselves strenuously that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old growth logging or protest nuclear power or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics to its knees.

“But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric, the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present is to shore up their own identity. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities, they present to the world as themselves. Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego and what forms that ego is strong. People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the 4 a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.

What is it people encounter in their stark and voluntary 4 a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth underneath the noise of opinions and beliefs is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard white salt. This salt is the core, the 4 a.m. reality of being.”

JW: When Sadie says, ‘there are no politics inside of people,’ she’s talking here about herself, first of all. Sadie is not a political person.

RK: Well, I would push back a tiny bit and say that she may, at the end of the day, whether deliberate or not, be speaking also of herself.  But I think that she believes that she has something like an accounting leisure. And she has been surveilling leftist groups for many years, and she has seen people be very strident in ways that may have had more to do with their identity and position in the group than had to do with what they truly want to uphold in some naked space standing before their God, if you will, which is what I think of as that four a.m. self. It’s a kind of anhedonic doubter who no longer has the veils of confidence that are produced by the repressions of questions of one’s own contradictions.

And in a certain way, I might even agree with her that politics, perhaps in the thinnest application of its meaning: this week’s political situation, the most topical version of politics or politics within something as vulgar as a two-party system, does not adhere in the spiritual texture of the person alone. There may be something there that could form a moral view of how life should be lived, but it is seldom the same thing as how people present themselves to be socially among peers and otherwise.

JW: But the book doesn’t open with Sadie. It begins with Neanderthals, who, we are told in the first sentence, were “prone to depression.”  My first thought was, what the heck?  But of course, in your hands, what we learned about Neanderthal life turns out to be pretty darn interesting. So this is a book of ideas, big ideas about how things went wrong and when. And the big ideas come from the mentor of these environmental activists. You call him Bruno Lacombe. He’s not exactly a Bill McKibben type.

RK: Yeah. Yeah, so the first line of the book about Neanderthals and depression: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction too, and especially smoking.” I became interested in the question of life before the written down, shall we say? But also, the place of yearning for those who speculate upon the question or even try to provide something like an answer to what life was like before the written down. Both the thing itself and what it says about our own longings became interesting to me. That is the ultimate mystery to me, what these people were like, what they knew, how they lived, what they felt.

And a lot has been discovered in the last couple of decades with the mapping of the Neanderthal genome among molecular biologists. And I got interested in that, so I started reading a lot about it. And I was aware, while I was reading, that – and you can correct me. You know more about movement politics certainly than I ever could, and you’ve just been in it longer, but I feel like there’s this idea that agriculture was the big wrong turn.

JW: Yes.

RK: About 10,000 years ago.

JW: Yes. It gave rise to the possibility of organized exploitation and oppression.

RK: Yeah. And cities themselves were not this inevitable human development, etcetera. And Bruno kind of goes back to the propensity to even want to be in a crowd could perhaps be attributed to the propagation habits or numbers only among this one subspecies called Homo sapiens. And he develops a kind of romantic vision of the Neanderthal as sort of like his beautiful loser, which they did not stick around. They could not hack it.

And so for decades, this term, ‘Neanderthal,’ was used in a derogatory way to mean somebody who was too stupid to win at the game of life. Lately, there’s been some weirder reclamations of the Neanderthal to do with some new iteration of something like race science, but I’m not interested in that at all. And I think I see Bruno more looking at speculation on the life of the Neanderthal, like the way that scientists now and anthropologists are speculating on the Denisovans and also other populations deemed so far to be ghost populations whose evidence is in our DNA, but we have not found any archaeological evidence of them — which as Bruno says, basically means we have not yet found their trash.

And his idea is, what messages might have been left for us by these people? If we could tune in to a secret spiritual shortwave radio frequency where their life as a sound was continuous with ours, what would we hear? What would they tell us? So he moves the standard story, as people call it, of agricultural being the wrong turn – he moves that back 30,000 years. He does encounter, over the course of the novel – the novel has to be an occasion for such, generally speaking. He encounters a kind of crisis of confidence in his own idea of what might’ve been the case, but he’s looking for a potentiality in people that may still be something that is available to us, that could be attained — or at least dreamed of.

JW: I want to go back to your decision to write this novel in the first person about somebody who we would say is on the other side. Your books up to now have had a protagonist that have a lot in common with you, riding motorcycles fast, working on women’s prisons. How did you decide to make the “I” of this book the ruthless agent provocateur? Did you know somebody who worked for the FBI and then changed sides?

RK: No. No. No. It’s a good question. I find, so far in my brief writing life, fourth novel, I find the first person to be the hardest. It’s the biggest challenge, and for a few reasons. You have to be able to instill in yourself, and have it be there when you return to work each day, a sense of deep believability that the person is not you and has enough whiff of personhood that you can step back in. Because “I” does suggest me, so it takes a lot of creative juice on my part to build an “I” that is definitely not me. And none of the “I’s” have been, although the first-person voice in The Flamethrowers was much closer to my sense of experience in that she’s a young woman who moves to New York and is surrounded by older people who know more and take up more space, and she feels like the only way that she can really acclimate is to recede and listen to them. And that was how I felt once upon a time.

With Sadie, I don’t really rely on my own ideas, but I always can take what I would see, and then see what she would see — because her persona and her style feel very real to me. In this case, it also seemed like it would be a challenge because I decided to try to achieve a novel that would only be told in her voice, so that she has a total monopoly on the reality of the novel. And in all of my prior works, even if I at one point set out to do that, I ultimately changed my mind because I was going for a kind of amplitude that could not be filled up by one character alone. Other people were banging at the door to tell their version of things, to speak.

And in this case, I was not going to allow for that. I also didn’t think that the novel needed it. But it starts out with her interpolating Bruno. So she’s reading this correspondence and saying, “This is what Bruno says.” And I had been working on the book for three years and trying to figure out how to do it. And then finally one day, I wrote that first line; the whole first few pages of the book is the thing that I wrote first, and it was her describing a letter from him describing some things to a set of recipients that are decidedly not her.

And I had this tone in my head from the first line of the movie by Chris Marker, ‘Sans Soleil,’ where it’s a British woman speaking, and she’s recounting the letters of this fictional person named Sandor Krasna, which is really an alter ego for Chris Marker. And it goes something like, ‘The first thing he told me about was three children on the road in Iceland in 1965.’ And I love the mystery of that. You don’t know who she is. You don’t know who he is. The magic of cinema is that then you see the footage of the children on the road in Iceland.

The magic of the novel is that only I see what she’s describing. I loved the challenge of trying to get Bruno’s lonely yearning and his earned sagacity into the hands, into the voice of this much more sardonic and brittle woman. And the tension would be, how long can she keep pulling back to criticize Bruno’s assertion? And at what point will the tables flip, if they do? And will she be the one who’s kind of being tickled or seduced by him, rather than her being the one who was the master seductress who’s manipulating everybody around her?

JW: Rachel Kushner — her amazing new novel is Creation Lake. Rachel, thanks for talking with us today.

RK: Thanks so much, Jon. Always a pleasure.