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.”

From the house, it is a short distance to the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, where, in the past several years, Kushner has sat in on dozens of arraignments. “The obscure person commits a crime and is pushed into this carceral light,” she said. At arraignments, the defendants, sitting behind glass in the “fish tank,” often meet their public defenders for the first time. Kushner, listening to them answer rote questions about their employment history, perceived a pattern, describing lives at the margins. The information accreted into a list that appears as a freestanding chapter in “The Mars Room”:

When asked what she did for a living, the suspect said she worked.

Recycling, he’d written.

He brought recycling to a redemption center, he explained.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Redemptions, he told them.

Redeemer was what she wrote.

—

The suspect said she had mostly made her living by collecting bottles and cans.

Late one Saturday afternoon in April, I met Kushner at her house. From there, we went downtown, past the Criminal Justice Center to Skid Row, where her friend Theresa Martinez lives in an S.R.O. By the time we got to the neighborhood, it was nearly dark, and Kushner was lost. “How did I screw this up so badly?” she muttered, embarrassed by her unreliable sense of direction. “I have walked into closets to leave people’s houses before.” She parked two blocks from the building, and, holding a bag of KFC for Martinez, steered us through a chaotic scene. Hundreds of people were on the street, in tents or not, in socks, barefoot, injured, cooking, drinking, drugging, calling out, a loose and wretched party starting to crank up. A lot of them wanted a wing.

Martinez, who is in her fifties, with highlighted dark hair, pencilled brows, and a filigree of tattoos on her chest and arms, was waiting outside, tsking Kushner for walking around. She hates Skid Row. She led us up to her room, decorated with Hello Kitty figurines and made-to-order gift baskets that she sells in the neighborhood. A large television showed the screen saver for a bootleg copy of “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

“I can’t even remember the first time we met, Stormy,” Martinez said, spooning out mashed potatoes. It was 2014, and Martinez, who had been out of prison for five years, was still struggling to adjust. First incarcerated at the age of twelve, she went back to prison at eighteen for possessing, trafficking, and selling PCP. After that, she was in and out of women’s facilities, including Chowchilla, where she was among the first inhabitants. “Over the next twenty-three years, I only had fourteen months of free-world time,” she told me. In prison, she said, she was a shot-caller for a group of Latinas. Eventually, she also became a founding board member of Justice Now, an Oakland-based legal organization that helps imprisoned women address human-rights violations. In 2014, in collaboration with women at Chowchilla, the organization successfully sponsored legislation to stop coercive sterilization in California prisons.

Kushner began visiting Chowchilla as a Justice Now volunteer, and hired Martinez as a consultant on her book. Martinez drew her detailed maps of the prison: the yards, the dorms, the blind spots, Needle Park, and Lovers’ Lane. She told her where you can fight (the porta-potties) and how to make prison cheesecake (nondairy creamers and Sprite) and what Danielle Steel book was the must-read. Martinez’s escapades entered the book, more or less unaltered, through Sammy, a shot-caller who takes Romy under her wing. “You know the situation with the hot-wired cement mixer?” Martinez said, and she and Kushner cracked up. “Theresa is a mastermind of the place,” Kushner said. “It’s a thousand acres, and she explained the water supply, the barbed wire, the electrical system.”

Martinez said, “I told her about the ad-seg area”—administrative segregation, for rule-breakers—“where death row is at. My friend Rosie Alfaro has been back there for eighteen years.” Alfaro, she said, had stabbed a child dozens of times while high on PCP. In her cell, she has a shrine to her victim.

“I put that in the book,” Kushner said. “She’s Candy Peña in my book. I wanted her to be Rosie Alfaro. She will be the first woman since the sixties to be executed in California when they do it.”

“She would have been fine with you using her name,” Martinez said. “We got along. When I was in ad-seg, we sent a lot of stuff through the toilet to death row. We used to flag each other—that’s where you write backwards really fast with your hands, and the police can’t understand.” She traced letters in the air.

In 2000, Kushner’s mother and her aunts invited her to accompany them on a trip to Cuba, to see the lost world of their youth. For several years in the early nineteen-fifties, Kushner’s grandfather, a metallurgist, worked at the American-owned nickel-processing plant in Nicaro, at the island’s eastern end. Across the bay, in Preston, where Pinky and her sisters, DeeDee, Fritzie, and Betsy, shopped and socialized, was the regional headquarters of the United Fruit Company, whose colonial culture held sway over the whole province. The Castro boys’ father had a hacienda there. Like all Cubans, they were excluded from the American commissaries, clubs, and jobs—an exclusion that later became the subject of bitter speeches by Fidel.

At the time of the trip, Kushner was recently out of school; she had graduated from Berkeley, with a degree in political economy, and finished an M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia. She was living in New York, working at the literary magazine Grand Street and writing reviews for Artforum. When she arrived in Preston, she noticed that the workers’ shacks, four decades into the revolution, were still painted United Fruit yellow, a dusty mustard that the company laced with insecticide to keep malaria infections down. The detail lodged. “This empire had been chased out, but the residue of their dominating gestures remained,” she told me. Her mother reconnected with a Jamaican-born man who had been her family’s houseboy; a proud revolutionary, he accompanied them on a visit to the Castros’ ancestral home. It was being painted, United Fruit yellow.

Kushner remembered other family stories and tracked them down. From the safety of Chattanooga, where the family moved after Nicaro, her grandfather had been madly envious when his fellow management types were kidnapped by Raúl Castro and taken into the Sierra Maestra, to drink rum and play fast draw for the benefit of a photo crew from Life. After her trip to Cuba, Kushner went to see the widow of one of the kidnapped men, in Starke, Florida. The widow showed her an album of her long-deceased husband, who was secretly half Cuban; on each page, he was posed on the same rock in Nicaro, but each time with a different Cuban woman. A character began to form, the man who keeps trying to escape the trap of his life.

Kushner told me, “I remember standing in the middle of the Grand Street office thinking, What if, when he was released from the mountains, he walked down, went into Nicaro, into his back yard, and pondered not going inside? It showed me what fiction could do, and how to imagine people in a place, and how that would require an understanding of the complicated social matrix of the place—his having hidden his ethnic origins and this pressure of appearances in nineteen-fifties corporate culture and the kidnapping that has to do with this oncoming revolution that would steamroll everything. I would have to think about this moment, to vividly imagine it and render it, and it seemed really fun to me. And that’s when I thought, I want to write a novel about this.” Her instincts, and the artists she had befriended through her work for Artforum, suggested that she go somewhere with few social obligations and cheap vegetables. In 2003, she moved to Los Angeles.

For a few years, Kushner sat on the edge of her bed and thought. Eventually, she began to write. “Telex from Cuba,” published in 2008, is a shimmering account of the turmoil leading up to Castro’s ascent, United Fruit’s expulsion, and the expropriation of the nickel mine. The effort, which feels almost archeological, drew from a comprehensive archive her grandparents kept of their sojourn in Cuba, down to the piano tuner’s business card. But Kushner is wary of appearing too reliant on source material. Jason Smith says, “She’s resistant to the word ‘research.’ She’s worried that people would see the work as sociological or too driven by historical verisimilitude. Though she’s quite emphatic about being right.”

In Kushner’s view, the value of fiction is its ability to wrap reality in a “mythical envelope,” a shroud of meaning-making that can produce stories that are truer than truth. At the heart of the book are two obscure but significant historical figures, doing things they never did. One, perhaps irritatingly, is named Rachel K., a call girl in Havana who intersects the lives of the Castros, of Cuba’s President, and of the head of United Fruit. Kushner told me, “My editor, Nan Graham, who has a wry way of speaking, said, ‘What is this Rachel K. business?’ She doesn’t have a lot of patience for that kind of thing. I said, ‘That is the name of a historical icon in Cuba who came to symbolize dictatorial decadence.’ She said, ‘Well, then you can’t change her name!’ Maybe it makes it flawed in a way. I didn’t know what the effect of that was going to be, but I like managing things that are a little outside my control.” The poet and novelist Ben Lerner, who befriended Kushner after reading her work, says, “Her research is really thorough, but also she’s willing to let the net effect of it render the notion of the fact less stable. Rachel K., the most outrageous thing—the thing that seems most like artifice—is real.”

Rachel K.’s paramour, in “Telex,” is Christian de La Mazière, a French aristocrat. In life, La Mazière scandalously joined the Charlemagne division of the Waffen S.S., during the summer of 1944. But Kushner, seeing La Mazière as attracted to violence rather than to ideology, thought that a Communist revolution would suit him fine. “He was just looking for action,” she said. “So I brought him there. I also thought it would be funny. Reversals can be quite generative. Not just for the dynamic of writing but for getting close to truth.”

Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, Kushner met Smith, a tall, cerebral doctoral student, finishing a degree in comparative literature under Jacques Derrida at the University of California, Irvine. Jack Bankowsky, a critic at Artforum, calls them Dorothy Parker and Adorno. Smith would say things like “Oh, you’re interested in courtly love? You should read Lacan’s Seminar VII.” That provided Kushner with the scaffolding to write about the idea of absence in Western conceptions of romance, a strain in the Rachel K.–La Mazière affair. She says, “He brought things into the house. It gave me the confidence to read Proust.” They were married in 2007, in the same San Francisco courthouse where her parents, after decades of cohabitation, had wed not long before. Later that year, Remy was born. (He’s ten now, and does his homework at a lima-bean-shaped desk that Rachel’s grandmother used in Nicaro.)

One day, after the book came out, an aunt called Kushner and told her that she’d been listening to Robert Stone on public radio, and he had mentioned that he was reading a great book: “Telegrams from Cuba,” by someone named Kushner. Then she got a letter from DeLillo. She worries that it’s corny, but she has it framed in her office, next to two certificates citing her as a National Book Award finalist, for “Telex” and for her second book, “The Flamethrowers.” DeLillo’s letter praises her ease with being in the action—“Telex” starts with a cane fire, set by the rebels—and also acknowledges the humor of a corporate hegemon in the homophobic nineteen-fifties going by the name United Fruit.

One Saturday, I met Rachel, Jason, and Remy at Go Kart World, just off the freeway, in Carson. They are regulars; the young guys working at the track nodded hello. I crunched myself into a car resembling a demonic, exhaust-spewing ladybug and waited for the light to turn green. “Never take your foot off the gas,” Kushner advised. She got in her car, a yellow one, and Jason and Remy each got in theirs. Chugging around the track, I caught sight of Kushner as she bore down on Remy, her lips pursed in concentration. “I lapped you guys!” she crowed when we were done. And then, without remorse, “I tried to go slow.”

When Kushner was growing up, her father had a motorcycle, a Vincent Black Shadow, but forbade her to ride. After Berkeley, she got an orange Moto Guzzi, an Italian bike for people who favor style over performance. Living in San Francisco again, she took up with her old crew and started bartending, taking creative-writing classes on the side. Her boyfriend at the time was a Moto Guzzi mechanic. So was the next one. “In my early twenties, I was attracted to men who lived and breathed motorcycles,” she writes in a nonfiction essay about that time. “And I was into motorcycles as well.” A friend from San Francisco, who went on to race professionally, told me, “There weren’t a lot of women that rode motorcycles. There were women that rode on the backs of motorcycles.” What can he say? “She likes machines.”

Like most motorcycle stories, this one ends abruptly: Kushner, in ill-fitting leathers, riding a Kawasaki Ninja 600 on Highway 1 in Baja, going over her handlebars at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. When the road rash healed, she was more or less done with riding, and ready to write about it. I mention this history because it is Kushner’s nightmare to be thought of as a dilettante—someone who rode on the back, saw a picture in a magazine, entered search terms in Google. Her immersion is the art. The written record is an artifact of the experience.

In this way, she has something in common with Reno, the twentysomething narrator of “The Flamethrowers,” which came out in 2013. When we meet Reno, she is heading for the Bonneville Salt Flats, where she is planning to make tire tracks and photograph them. (It’s the mid-seventies, and motorcycle drawing is a thing.) When it’s her turn to ride, she gooses her motorcycle up to a hundred and forty-eight miles an hour. “I was in an acute case of the present tense,” she explains, just before a gust of wind throws her from the back of her machine.

After recovering and setting a record at Bonneville as the fastest woman in the world, Reno returns to New York, where she has recently moved, from Nevada, with an art-school degree. Knowing scarcely a soul, she exhibits a foundling’s openness to experience. Through her boyfriend, Sandro Valera, a mid-career brushed-metal-box artist and the scion of an Italian industrial family known for producing motorcycles, she enters a scene of mostly older, male artists—minimalists, performance artists, land artists—who can’t stop talking. In the galleries, on the street, at Max’s, Reno sees performance “of a nature so subtle . . . that one was left unsure if the thing observed was performance or plain life.”

We never learn Reno’s real name. Her nickname is given to her by a flirtatious friend of Valera’s, who also praises her looks: a “cake-box appeal,” partly spoiled by a gap-toothed grin. She is anonymous and, to those around her, generic—a passive audience for male speechifying and dissimulation. Kushner said, “It’s a first-person voice. I wanted it to be like fact, like thought. She doesn’t talk a lot, because she’s around these blowhards who suck up all the air.” But, she went on, “I don’t see her as defeated or as ruined by men.”

Kushner’s own aesthetic education involved periods of intent reticence, an evolution of the observer-participant stance she took with her friends in the Sunset. “When I moved to New York and met artists, they were all older and part of a group of friends, and knew about music and art and architecture, and they were funny, and I was only going to learn by listening,” she said. “I felt that about Reno. She wasn’t one of the players yet.” In her late twenties, when Kushner started writing reviews for Artforum, she went to every opening and art party she could, gathering intelligence. “ ‘The Flamethrowers’ is about the seventies in New York, but a lot of her data comes from her immersion in the art world today,” Bankowsky, of Artforum, told me. “She spoofed me”—sending up the graffiti-covered dining table that he and his partner, the gallerist Matthew Marks, have in their townhouse—“and my mother discovered it before I did. She said, ‘Who is this Rachel Kushner?’ ”

With the exception of a couple of grumpy reviews—one male critic disparaged the book as “macho”—“The Flamethrowers” was widely received as a triumph of ingenious writing, and specifically as a triumph for women. Writing in Salon, Laura Miller placed “The Flamethrowers” in the category of Great American Novel, the kind of book, usually written by a man and featuring a male protagonist, that purports to “speak on behalf of an entire, fractious nation.” She wrote, “It has a seamless confidence in itself and in the significance of what it has to say that you don’t realize was missing from most fiction by American women novelists until you see it exhibited in Kushner. She seems not so much to be defying the masculine prerogative in this genre as to be unaware of it in the first place.”

One of the achievements of “The Flamethrowers” is to tell a secret history of a heavily mythologized, combed-over American moment. The artist Richard Prince (whom Kushner also spoofs) told me that most of the time when he reads about the art world, about rooms he was in, he thinks, That’s not what happened. “You’re left alone with the private version, the wild history,” he said. “I think Rachel wrote a little bit of the wild history.” What he still can’t figure out is how she got in the room.

During the rainstorm, Chowchilla got locked down. The next morning, when we arrived, the sky was blue; along the prison road, the almond orchards bloomed pale pink. Outside the visitors’ entrance, there was a field of solar panels, powering the electric fence. “The guards joke that in California you can get electrocuted by green energy,” Kushner said. Inside, a couple of guards discussed plans for a trip to the mountains, while they counted how many clear-chambered pens were in our ziplock bags, how many watches and rings. “I can’t wait to get to the snow,” one said. “It’s a whole fairy world up there.” A flyer tacked to the wall exhorted them to “Embrace the Present” and offered a hotline number for staff in need of counselling.

Kushner was wearing a black velvet jacket with gray slacks, and a lick of silver eyeshadow—her friends inside would be done up. A lawyer from Justice Now, the organization that Theresa Martinez helped found, met us by the vending-machine-card dispenser. She, too, was mainly dressed in black and gray, to avoid violating prison rules. A sign posted above the machine read:

No! Orange jumpsuit

No! Orange top and bottom

No! Blue chambray

No! Blue denim

No! Blue top and pants

No! Tan with green

No! Camouflage

Kushner views the relationships she has developed at Chowchilla as responsibilities, abiding even though her book is done. She helps her friends inside with their cases or with their writing, and sometimes sends them books. (She turned her friend Mychal Concepción, who is transitioning in prison, on to “Fat City” and “Jesus’ Son.”) “There are ethics to it,” she told me. “One person is locked in a cage and the other is free.” On her phone, she has Global Tel Link, a service that allows people on the outside to receive calls from prisoners. Someone calls her from Chowchilla just about every week.

As we followed a guard into a holding area enclosed by a metal fence and topped with razor wire, the lawyer whispered, “They can hear everything you say here. Don’t talk about it till you’re a mile away.” The lawyer remarked wonderingly that feral rabbits somehow passed through all the fencing. Kushner said that her friend Liz Lozano, who had come to Chowchilla at twenty-one, soon after giving birth to a son, had tamed a rabbit and made it into a pet. “She even sewed it clothes,” Kushner said. The guard, overhearing, said, “We got rid of the rabbits.” Affronted, the lawyer whispered that they had also threatened to remove all the trees, because they provided cover for “homosecting,” the prison’s term for inmate sex.

Inside, the visitors’ room was cinder block, with high ceilings; spherical cameras bulged like popped-out cartoon eyes in the corners of the room. Christy Phillips, a tiny woman in a blue top and pants, was escorted in by a guard. When she saw Kushner, she started bouncing on the toes of her white sneakers; squealing delightedly, she gave her a fierce hug.

Kushner has been especially invested in the stories of women who left the free world as children to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Now thirty-three, Phillips had gone to a sleepover when she was fifteen and had never been home again. When she was arrested, she repeatedly asked for her mother; the police said, Not now. A thirteen-year-old friend, arrested with her, went home with her mom that night and was never charged.

Phillips, accused of the drug-fuelled murder of an elderly woman, was one of the first minors to be charged as an adult, under legislation that passed in California when the idea of child “super-predators” was coming into vogue. During her trial, Phillips says, the prosecutor told the jury to forget that she looked like a skinny, cute kid and think of her as a “demon seed,” born premature because she couldn’t wait to get out of the womb and start killing people. Her sentence, two life terms plus an additional six years, was the inspiration for Romy’s.

Phillips sat at a table with Kushner, facing the guard. Her arms were delicate and hashed with scars. She mentioned that she had been working on understanding her crime and the intensely abusive home she came from. After a rough adjustment to prison, years when she couldn’t stop crying, she is in the honor dorm and on the gardening committee.

“You have to keep your record perfect,” Kushner told her. California has begun to change its approach to juveniles sentenced to life in prison, and Kushner has enlisted her college friend Mitch Kamin—a partner at Covington & Burling, where Eric Holder also works—to do pro-bono work on Phillips’s behalf. The shifting legal landscape means that Phillips may go before a parole board many years sooner than she otherwise would have.

When we left Chowchilla, Kushner seemed depleted. She said that even her husband was perplexed that she had involved herself with the women in such a consuming and small-bore way. Why not use her prominence to advocate, writing op-eds for the newspaper? “It’s not about me being a do-gooder,” she said. “Nor is it about usurping the lives of people for my own gain. It’s about caring about people whose life trajectories are totally different from my own and stepping out there so that our lives intersect.”

On the long drive back to Los Angeles, we passed Pine Flat, a tiny town in the sequoias where a friend of Kushner’s, an artist named James Benning, lives. During the years of prison visits, Kushner has often met up with him for fried shrimp at the Pyrenees, in Bakersfield, or stayed the night in Pine Flat. Going there is a release. She and Benning sit by the wood-burning stove, drink beer, talk about funny jobs they had as teen-agers and projects they’re working on now.

Like Kushner, Benning learns by doing. Investigating outsider traditions and his own obsessions, he meticulously re-creates the works of earlier artists: Emily Dickinson’s back-of-envelope poems, the paintings of a former Alabama slave named Bill Traylor. On his property, there is a pair of one-room cabins. One is a replica of Thoreau’s. The other is a model of the cabin where the Unabomber plotted his attacks. Kushner walked me through the cabins, noting the precisely assembled details with a sense of affinity. To think about these people, to think into them, as she would say, Benning had to build their rooms with his bare hands. ♦