Rachel Kushner’s “A King Alone"

“...sincerity can be delivered in a container of camp..."

A couple of weeks ago, walking alone through downtown Rome, I remembered Rachel Kushner’s “A King Alone,” a story I read in the New Yorker the previous July. Initially, I didn’t know why the story came to mind. But as I listened to Kushner read the story (highly recommended HERE), I remembered a lonely, appropriately crude and comic scene that occurs in Graceland. It made sense, the story came back to me on January 12, the day I woke to the news of the sad death of Lisa Marie Presley. As I listened to Kushner read, I took a wrong turn and ended up, still alone, but mixed into the ever-present crowd staring at the entrance of the Pantheon. Still listening to Kushner narrate George’s winding drive through rural, bleakly American terrain, I wound through Rome’s allies and side streets, passing craftspeople whittling sculptures from raw carrots or sand and chestnut roasters stationed with their coals and paper cones. A skinny street musician danced as he played “My Way,” on an amplified electric violin.

 “A King Alone” tells the story of a road trip constantly circling in on itself, a trip doomed to sadness or perhaps even death. In the story, George, a songwriter, is estranged from his daughter Jenny a more successful songwriter. Trying to drive his way back to her in Nashville, George retraces his relationship with Jenny, a diner they visited, abandoned and covered with kudzu, a cottage where she used to live among gun toting neighbors; and finally the last place where she used to live where George confesses to new inhabitants of the cottage—and perhaps to himself—that she has abandoned him. 

 From the first sentence, we learn George picks up hitchhikers, each time almost against his own will, distracting himself by making their stories his own for a while. Numbed, George seems to pick people up just so he can feel something for a while, or at least feel something for the stories they offer him. Like him, they have lost something and are caught in a loop trying to get who they were back. An alcoholic missing a leg because he got run over by a train while trying to get to happy hour, a hiker with split feet who compulsively keeps hiking, a woman who asks him to burn her with a cigarette. The riders anchor him temporarily and offer connection he can control––his car, his hands on the wheel, his decision when to let them go.

In the way of his riders, George gets in the way of what he wants. The last disastrous time he saw Jenny, he sabotaged the visit by arriving late after he, among other things, toured Graceland (with a now haunting glimpse of the memorial garden with its growing number of tragic Presleys) not as acolyte, but as an observer, a songwriter seeking impressions, sadness, ideas.  He moves through the site listening to Priscilla Presley narrate on an audio guide, but he is distracted by the fact that Elvis’ favorite horse has a giant erection.

Like the hapless but entertaining Rita in the second half of Nabokov’s Lolita, who hitches a ride with the doomed cruiser Humbert Humbert but can’t keep from returning the Michigan town she’s been banned from, people in “A King Alone” are tethered to places they wish to flee.

Craft, Camp, and Beautiful Sentences:

                Though it’s difficult to imagine George sitting down long enough to write, revise, submit work, or go through the process of selling lyrics, some of the most beautiful lines in this story convey George’s understanding of his craft. “The magic of song lyrics had to do with their simplicity. There had to be space for the singer. And space for the two people on a dance floor in a one-bar town.” A skilled writer steps back, gets out of the way to let the reader, the singer, and the dancer each pick up the lines and inflate them with their own truth and meaning. Even here, George’s expertise is stepping away. Leaving.

 Another moment on craft is when the reader learns George’s first turn to songwriting came after taking a job teaching remedial students in Chicago. George understands the female students “run circles” around George, but from them he came to understand how, in voicing their everyday language and concerns: “They bent language like glassmakers, folding and molding it to custom uses.” He quits the job of course but takes their stories with him. Somehow for George, it’s always women, women he is constantly moving away from remembering at a safe distance.

Still thinking about this story, I listened to a discussion between Kushner and the writer Ottessa Moshfegh produced by City Arts and Lectures. Kushner’s reflection on humor and craft interested me and related to my reading of this story. Reminiscent of her character George, Kushner states in the discussion:

“I’m taken with what people have to say. . .when people start to talk, I guess I’ve always been interested in the way they tell the story. Cadence of speech is very important to me.”

Echoing her own character, George who knows there needs to be “space for the singer,” Kushner says:

“Once people start to talk, I just give them space to talk. Because that’s how I know how to conjure their personhood into the book and make them feel lifelike, to me. So maybe it comes from being addicted to listening to people." (at 10:50)

 The story’s structure reads like a song with skilled repetitions, stanzas made of these embedded stories, and like country music lyrics, things get sadder as they go on. Kushner’s imagery sticks, a dying era of rusted out cars, road signs, and mile markers. Old women dancing in tight pants. Flavored creamers. Oreos for breakfast. Characters who refer to their guns as “Mr. Smith and Miss Wesson.”

 “Sincerity can come delivered in a container of camp,” Kushner says memorably in her discussion on City Lights.

The importance of imagery to George and the story itself is heightened by an ekphrastic scene near the middle of the story when a professional photographer, an improbably hitchhiker, shows George a brochure for his museum show. (For more into Kushner’s use of the photographer William Eggleston, see “Rachel Kushner on Sharing a Ride with a Stranger.”) men discuss the cover photograph (also the photograph that accompanies Kushner’s story in the New Yorker). A woman appears caught off-guard, looking at something outside of the viewer’s range. Beautiful, George notices, and “long-suffering.”  

“The point isn’t her,” the photographer emphasizes. George understands. 

Both men see and don’t see things in a particular way. They hide behind “stuff” and stories, “cars and attitudes” and downplay how they hurt and abandon women. The art contains but isn’t about the women. The women are caught in the net of universal pain as these two men perceive it. Kushner does something with the wonder of these two who leave hurt in their wake, men who like to think they don’t need to play by rules others play but get entirely thrown off when others don’t respond as they expect them to do.

Travelling and constant movement changes how time is experienced. Being “enroute” allows for interactions with strangers we’ll never see again, adding intensity and mystery to conversations that might otherwise be banal. There is less expectation of consequence or follow-up. People try each other out, joking with service workers and waitstaff who must deal with everyone. Whether on planes or trains, people eventually must take their seats.  Rules and structure dictate a set number of hours with predictability most day-to-day experiences don’t provide. We allow ourselves to feel we are “getting somewhere.”

This added intensity to the banal may contribute perhaps why George prefers to live his life in transit. Alone on the road, no one makes him confront his selfishness or his failed dreams. Staring at the road, he avoids looking directly at his life. The reader understands the quote from Pascal that the photographer shares with George, about being “a king alone,” about misery. George doesn’t. And so keeps driving.

In this story of people in a desperate places in their lives, George, as humans often do, rationalizes the choices he’s made, fashions himself a lonely hero, even as he desperately reaches toward people who don’t want his gestures of connection: an old woman in a roadside bar who compulsively dances with anyone, an emaciated, semi-wild woman/girl he can’t bear to leave, and, achingly, his daughter, who abandons him after he reacts undesirably to a story of her own wounds. “I ain’t the one,” is a line from a new song George is considering, repeated like a mantra both in voice and action.

In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “How Should One Read a Book,” she discusses how a good book, or story, lingers. We can’t put together the details or events as they are being revealed. Only after completing a text, even after putting the book or story down, can we begin to understand the strands or “separate phrases” of received narrative. Woolf writes:

“Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish.”

I first read this story last July in the New Yorker fiction issue (July 11/18, 2022) while trying to get from Paris to JFK-New York. Our flight had been cancelled. I read it during an afternoon of airport hotels, breakfast buffets, fleeting interactions with strangers, split decisions that must be made when things go wrong. These fit with the story along with the brand names and bright imagery that glared from convenience store shelves––strange, disconnected things, embarrassingly bright.

This story, its shape and details, hung with me enough to emerge in my memory months later. There was the depressing Lisa Marie Presley connection of course on the morning I read it in January 2023. The campy combination of tourists, carrot sculptures, and “My Way.” But taken as a whole, this story of nostalgia and sadness and loneliness and the gorgeous prose that drives the reader through this landscape of humanity lingers like the best fiction does.