Several years ago, the novelist Rachel Kushner followed an inmate at New Folsom Prison, in Sacramento, into his cell. A former Los Angeles police officer, he was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for working as a contract killer. Kushner, seeking to learn about the prison system, had come with a criminology professor and his students, but, as the group continued down the hall, she stayed behind, and the prisoner told her about his crimes—the ones he was in for and those which had never been found out. His complexion was ghoulishly youthful, undamaged by the sun: dirty cops don’t dare go on the yard. On the cell walls Kushner glimpsed pictures of Harley-Davidsons, relics of a former life. In the five minutes she was alone with him, she told me, “I just felt his person, like he went into my skin. You get a whiff of somebody’s essence, whether you wanted it or not, and that’s enough to write a whole character.”

The whiff she got was of a cleaning solution called Cell Block 64, mingled with cop cologne. From this, she wrote the character Doc, in a single entranced session of literary ventriloquism: “Doc had money on his books and used actual cologne and not Old Fucking Spice, either. Good cologne by an Italian name-brand designer he can never remember. But then he remembers: Cesare Paciotti. It always takes him a minute to retrieve that name.” Doc appears, a major-minor character, in Kushner’s third novel, “The Mars Room,” which comes out in May.

Kushner, who is forty-nine and lives in Los Angeles, thinks of herself as a “girl citizen,” asking questions, at large in the world. She uses the novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking. In her work, Kushner draws on decades of American social life and European intellectual history, while remaining open to slinky aberrations—poemlike passages, monologues, lists, a slip into unadulterated fact. “The Mars Room,” for instance, contains excerpts from the Unabomber’s diaries. This takes swagger. Don DeLillo, a friend, is a tutelary figure. Like him, she is good at conjuring mayhem: a riot, a blackout, a bomb going off at the country club. Her reading taste runs to Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector—women who are brainy, sexy, complex, unmanageable. “These are proxies for her,” Kushner’s husband, Jason Smith, the chair of the M.F.A. program at ArtCenter College of Design, says. “That’s what Rachel’s into—Spinoza with lipstick.”

Butter keeps her slender, along with five-mile runs in Elysian Park, near her house. She says she used to consider it a great injustice that she was not born more beautiful, had to work angles. She is being greedy. “Her whole hookup is badass,” Theresa Martinez, a friend of hers who was paroled from prison in 2009, told me. “But you can’t nickname a person Badass.” (She calls her Stormy: a force blowing in.) Kushner has owned several motorcycles; she skis like a racer, attacking the fall line, and rides around town, wearing Rouge Coco lipstick, in a black-cherry 1964 Ford Galaxie. She wonders, Can one feel cathexis for a muscle car? For longer trips, she takes a beat-up 2000 Honda Accord, with a copy of Steinbeck’s journals and Duras’s “The Lover” tossed on the back seat.

When Kushner started visiting prisons, in 2014, she had written two well-regarded novels, one about Cuba in the fifties and the other about New York in the seventies. Studying incarceration was a way to address the contemporary, and to understand an obscure realm that outsiders rarely enter. “I wanted to have a life that would include people that the State of California has rendered invisible to others,” Kushner told me, the first time we met, at the Taix, a venerable French restaurant where she eats several times a week. (She doesn’t cook.) “The theatrical component of due process is over,” she said. “Where do they go?” Most of “The Mars Room” takes place inside a prison loosely based on the Central California Women’s Facility—also called Chowchilla, after a nearby almond-growing and -processing town. Chowchilla, which Kushner has visited dozens of times, is the largest women’s prison in the world.

Several weeks after our first meeting, Kushner drove the Honda to Chowchilla. It was raining heavily; new wiper blades slapped against the glass. Kushner, in sunglasses, peered ahead, a scarf tied at her neck. As the rain subsided, she started looking for the halo of orange light that marked the presence of the prison in dim fields. “For me, things sometimes circle around imagery,” she said. “It’s not necessarily visual, could be more poetic, but in this case it was visual.” The light was just a puff, an emanation you might fail to register, unless you knew that some three thousand women were locked up there.

“That’s it!” she cried, pointing at the sodium glow. A friend inside had told her that one night there was a power outage, and as she was being hustled from her work-exchange job to her cell block, for the lockdown procedure that accompanies any anomaly—brawling, fog, or suicide—she glimpsed the Milky Way. It was breathtaking. Stars: she had not seen them since she got caught, and, as she was serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole, she might not again.

Romy Hall, the central voice of “The Mars Room,” is a former dancer at a strip club on Market Street in San Francisco. She is serving two life sentences, plus an additional six years, for attacking and killing a regular who began shadowing her on his Harley, turning up at her local market and, when she moved to Los Angeles to get away from him, on her front porch. The night she encountered him there, her young son, Jackson, was asleep in her arms; the extra six years on her sentence were for endangering a minor.

For years, Kushner wrote around Romy, unable to connect. “I came up against hardpan, where you can’t dig down,” she told me. “I would never go to prison for life, because I have these resources to protect me.” Then, as she began to write passages about her own adolescence and give them to Romy, a fusion started to occur. Kushner went on, “Romy’s from my neighborhood. Her friends are my friends. And a lot of her experiences I’m intimately familiar with.” The voice she found—pragmatic, syncopated, pained—is tempered by what her friend Bret Easton Ellis described to me as “thrilling neutrality.” “The ghost of my childhood lives in the back of buses,” Romy says, in “The Mars Room.” “It says, What’s up, juts its chin.”

Kushner’s parents—Pinky, a Southern redhead with a ski-jump nose, and Peter, the son of New York Communists—were scientists, integration activists, Beats. Pinky said she wanted her daughter to be a poet and her son to be a painter. (Kushner’s brother, dismayingly, chose medicine.) When Rachel was little, and her parents were graduate students at the University of Oregon, they lived on and off in a school bus heated by a wood-burning stove, and survived on six hundred dollars a month, augmented by food stamps. In the winter, the bus was sometimes parked at ski mountains: one year in Bend, Oregon, and another in British Columbia. The family hiked up and skied above the lift line, the sandwiches in their pockets fogging the cellophane.

Beatnik poverty, in Kushner’s telling, was a kind of gift, helping her develop taste and politics and irony, and leaving her with an open admiration for her parents that you rarely find in adult artists. She read Steinbeck and Nelson Algren and listened to the wacky stories told by her parents’ Prankster-adjacent friends. “I thought, Literature—you really have to know hobo livin’,” she says. “It was reproduced in the social environment I was in.” Interpreting the world, she understood, meant remaining alert to moments when someone does something poetic. “The more in the world you are, the higher your chances are of witnessing that,” she says. “It wasn’t so much about studying literature—it was about being.”

When Kushner’s parents got postdoctoral jobs at the University of California, San Francisco, they moved the family there, to a neighborhood called the Sunset. Kushner, ten and still in bell-bottoms, was released into a harsh, delinquent youth culture. On the first day of sixth grade in her new school, a girl she had just met asked, “Do you want to come downtown with me? I haven’t seen my sister for a while.” Rachel went. The sister was working as a prostitute on Market Street.

One night, at the Pyrenees, a Basque shepherd bar in the warehouse district of Bakersfield, where Kushner likes to stop on trips to Chowchilla, she drew me a map of the Sunset: forty-eight avenues, south of Golden Gate Park, leading down to Ocean Beach. Many lifelong San Franciscans, she said, have never even been there. “It was decidedly unchic,” she told me. “It’s very wet and foggy out there, all built on sand dunes, no street trees, a bleakness. The housing stock was generic. It was full of girls with big feathered hair who wanted to party and were going to get pregnant by eighteen. Their parents were Irish, from Ireland, and the dads were cops.”

As the novel opens, Romy is on her way to prison, on a bus with blacked-out windows. Thinking about the past she is relinquishing, full of omens she failed to recognize, she tells stories to an unspecified “you,” anyone who might be out there listening: “The Sunset was San Francisco, proudly, and yet an alternate one to what you might know: it was not about rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets but fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway, where a sea of broken glass glittered along the endless parking strip of Ocean Beach. It was us girls in the back of someone’s primered Charger or Challenger riding those short, but long, forty-eight blocks to the beach, one boy shotgun with a stolen fire extinguisher, flocking people on street corners, randoms blasted white.”

Kushner was younger than her classmates—she had started school early and skipped seventh grade. Among her peers, she says, “intelligence was a form of ugliness,” so she did her best to hide it. She fell in with a group of hard-partying, unlooked-after kids, who went by the name White Punks on Dope, though they weren’t all white. As long as she had her act together in school, which she always did, her parents extended almost limitless freedom. Emily Goldman, a friend from that period, who is now a juvenile defender and sometimes represents Sunset kids, told me, “Coddling was against Rachel’s parents’ beliefs of child-raising. They had enough respect for their children to think that they would know how to prioritize and make good decisions, and they thought that their kids should take their lumps. But I don’t think they were fully aware. I know they weren’t seeing what we were seeing. Other parents did see it, and participated. There were houses where the parents would snort cocaine with us.”

Kushner was always a risk-taker, game for adventure. Goldman said, “She would go along on those dark nights, in those sketchy situations—fourteen-year-old girls standing on street corners or in the park to see what would happen.” What happened: fires, thefts, assaults, arrests, adults betraying young people in sinister ways. Kushner’s friend Cynthia Mitchell, who grew up nearby, said, “My sense is she had two lives, an interior life and then this life as—not a ringleader but an observer. She’d be friends with the worst girls but was not the one to instigate the really horrible stuff.”

Kushner recalled that, when she finished the book, her husband told her, “Maybe the bad Rachel is all out of your system.” When I asked him about the remark, he said, “That suggests she thinks there is a bad Rachel, which is interesting. But whatever the bad Rachel is she is probably generative. Writing Romy, she was not exactly purging but attempting to articulate her past symbolically.” He paused. “She has a stone in the shoe about childhood.”

Many of Kushner’s friends from that time didn’t finish high school. One, Jon Hirst, stabbed someone in a bar fight and went to San Bruno jail, from which he escaped, running in jailhouse slippers back to San Francisco to take refuge with his neighborhood friends. He was immediately caught, and ended up in San Quentin, then in Susanville, then dead. Kushner went to Berkeley, starting classes in the fall of 1985, when she was only sixteen.

Kushner lives with Smith and their son, Remy, in Angelino Heights, a neighborhood of splendidly restored Victorians and crumbling firetraps perched above downtown. Her house, built at the start of the last century and bought out of foreclosure during the recession, is a large Craftsman with a deep porch, filled with vintage chandeliers and pieces made by artist friends—Laura Owens, Billy Al Bengston—and by her cousin, an ironworker who fabricates for David Hammons. In the living room, there is a sculpture by the Paris collective Claire Fontaine, a brick of solid aluminum made of melted-down cans, stamped with the word “Redemptions.”

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