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In January, a preview excerpt in The New Yorker of Rachel Kushner’s essay collection The Hard Crowd (2021) warned us that this might turn out to be a boring book This is not to say that the excerpt in question was so boring as to suggest the likely tedium of the whole Rather, the warning came from the author herself ‘I’m talking about my own life’, writes Kushner ‘Which not only can’t matter to you, it might bore you’   The Hard Crowd is indeed a personal collection – not only first-person in vantage but preoccupied with figures specific to the author’s youth: artists, writers, friends, activists, motorcyclists, hustlers ‘I admired a lot of these people I am describing to you’, Kushner writes in the excerpted passage They were workers of strip-club doors between prison stints, charismatic tattooists, dealers who preferred to eat their cocaine, nibbling sliced-off rocks ‘like powdery peanut brittle’ ‘I put them above myself’, she writes, ‘in a hierarchy that is re-established in the fact that I am the one who lived to tell’   I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home   Kushner, a writer in her fifties, appears to have outlived the fast-living crowd of her youth Those who have typically delighted in her novels, populated by characters so ‘present’ as to have no future, might well anticipate boredom at the personal essays of so watchful a self-preserver The Flamethrowers (2013), perhaps Kushner’s best-known work, is packaged as a Great American ode to rebellion and risk: blurb quotations describe the novel as ‘adrenalin-fuelled’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘fearless’, ‘high-octane’, ‘thrilling’ In 1970s New York, the book’s narrator Reno dreams of becoming the fastest motorcyclist in the world, and falls