Kushner is an American novelist, here snapped leaning, Didion-style, on the trunk of her Ford Galaxie 500 (black cherry, natch), dressed in a miniskirt and squinting quizzically into the sun. The cover of Rachel Kushner’s new essay collection, The Hard Crowd, brought all these dreamy vistas back.
As a gen-X teenager, I stole it from my father’s shelf and it helped feed a fantasy vision of what a writer should be: ironic, experienced, hard-boiled, and above all present at the scene, a mode encapsulated by the famous photograph of Didion lounging against a white Stingray, looking antsy. It epitomised a style of reportage that drew the writer into the frame, no longer neutral witness but active participant, a character as sharply dressed and developed as any of their subjects. The New Journalism gathered together the work of crack young writers such as Joan Didion, Hunter S Thompson and Truman Capote.
I n 1973, Tom Wolfe edited a collection that cast a long shadow over American letters.
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