The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner
A review of Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd
“I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us. ”
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (2021). Published by Scribner.
I honestly had no idea who Rachel Kushner was until I saw The New York Times review about this series of essays, and, upon staring at the cover for approximately five minutes, I decided she gave off the aura that I wanted to channel in my own life. Upon stalking her and her many interviews out in the world, this notion of wanting to be her was set in stone. I want to be her y’all.
Rachel Kushner was born to two very beatnik scientists in 1968 in Eugene, Oregon (the same place where the lovely Michelle Zauner, author of Crying in H Mart, was born).
She originally entered college at sixteen years old, and would get her MFA from Columbia University in 2000, much later than when she received her original degree. Kushner is well-known for her fiction works, as she has three acclaimed novels out in the stratosphere. So, evidently, she has an impressive literary resume already.
The Hard Crowd is her first forays into the world of memoir and essays, and boy were they quite interesting to read. I thought her perspective and experiences were extremely unique, especially considering she has a background writing about art and artists. I would not have pegged her to be a woman that grew up on a motorcycle.
I feel that I’m rambling, as one tends to do when they find a person they greatly admire, so let’s jump straight into this book review and flesh out the gritty stuff about this memoir-in-essays that Kushner dropped in April of 2021.
Book Blurb
Rachel Kushner has established herself as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.
In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras.
Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.
Content / Plot / Writing
I find this collection of essays interesting right from the get-go because Kushner starts off with the very first essay she ever published, in which she describes riding motorcycles down California and the people she met during the process of doing so. She interweaves this film in the middle of the narrative, Girl on a Motorcycle, and the scenes flow vividly, as if we’re watching them blur by on top of the motorcycle itself.
Essays are my jam when it comes to memoir and contemplative thinking about one’s life, because I hate how memoirs, especially when written by the author themselves, flow too neatly. It’s like “this happened in life! and this is a direct cause! oh, here I met my life partner!” I find that a bit boring overall, and so Kushner comes to my rescue immediately with the form, jumping from topic to topic to switch it up, but also touching upon the main themes at the same time.
Kushner started off as an arts writer before transitioning into novels, and this becomes really apparent with the essays as I’m reading them.
She references art, film, music with an eye of someone you can tell is familiar with writing about these topics from the way she handles them. She gives such time and devotion to these topics, which, for someone like me, I really appreciate this characteristic contained with the essays. However, if you’re not like me and don’t care as much about that, you’re probably not going to be as fond about the collection as I am.
Personally, I thought the political essays, such as the one about Jerusalem and the refugee camp, did not seem to belong as much stylistically as they should’ve.
This is all down to personal preference at the end of the day, and I can see why the editors would want to include them (politics are money, especially in writing. This is why we see so many political memoirs). But, while they’re still strong essays, they just aren’t as strong in comparison to the overall cohesion of the collection.
My qualm about the collection is that we don’t get much of Kushner’s personal life. I was going into this thinking maybe, just maybe, this would be more of a memoir-in-essay style, especially after the first essay, but I found myself disappointed in that regard. We get more about the art forms than we do her personal life at times, and I wanted to know more about say, her eccentric parents or her childhood.
The writing was very good; part cultural criticism, part journalistic, part memoir-y. I enjoyed her tone and voice, they were very prominent throughout the reading. She very clearly knows how to write and this is seen throughout the collection.
Overall Thoughts
This essay collection got me curious about Kushner’s novels, so I probably will check those out soon as well. Kushner herself is quite a character, and I enjoyed her writing style very much.
I’d say give this memoir-in-essays a shot, I think it’s worth the money overall. I wouldn’t read it in one sitting, though, because I think that it was a bit dense to get through.
Perhaps I wasn’t as into it as I was with Crying in H Mart (which, honestly, has become one of my favorite books), but I couldn’t get through it as quickly as I could with other books. It’s okay overall. I wouldn’t pay to own a copy of it unless you’re a diehard Kushner fan.
