To sum up Rachel Kushner’s life as depicted in the two decades of essays contained in THE HARD CROWD, I have to fall back on that ubiquitous pop culture phrase, “Don’t try this at home.”

In Kushner’s own telling, her free-ranging, sometimes alarmingly spontaneous approach to life did in fact start at home, in a permissively risky west coast environment encouraged by educated and cultured bohemian parents. Right from the get go, she flouted the “don’t try this” maxim at every opportunity.

While growing up, she ran with packs of ratty delinquent peer group teenagers, soaking up impressions and experiences that would seem to be headed nowhere as useful adult skills. But as she mentions or alludes to more than once in THE HARD CROWD, she was always the soft one among hard, often dangerous, yet vulnerable people with whom she spent much of her early adulthood.

"Unable to pick a single favorite among the 19 diverse and always surprising reflections that comprise THE HARD CROWD, I can only say that each one is a powerful 'trip' on multiple levels."

In her eponymous final essay, “The Hard Crowd,” she reflects: “I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine.”

It’s that intense, discerning absorption, coupled with a deep knowledge acquired through reading literature and philosophy beyond her social milieu (a virtue for which she barely gives herself credit), that really knits THE HARD CROWD together. Every page unfolds with an energy and rigor that places it distinctly apart from typical survival-lit fare whose superficial sensations can pall after a few dangerous yarns.

Despite the seeming superficiality of a 1980s California scene populated by wrecked people --- artists, addicts, bar musicians, cheaters, gamblers, motorcycle and car nerds, the working poor, and many combinations of the foregoing --- Kushner has a way of making every individual worth something as a literary figure.

She doesn’t “gentrify” anyone with words; in fact, it's often quite the opposite. Her language flows without any sense of effort into shapes that suit her subject of the moment. And in the continuum of life as we prefer to know it, that’s all many of her youthful friends and mentors had --- just moments to flash across her path and be gone, like small meteors burning up in the unforgiving atmosphere of here-and-now reality.

The fact that she herself is still here after half a century, and considered a mature writer for decades of that time, shows that Kushner is made of sterner stuff. By her own standards, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean better or more virtuous stuff than the many people she has outlived from her wilder years. It means something more like donning a mantle of literary stewardship for the memories that so many of her ill-fated cohorts were unable to sustain for themselves.

Unable to pick a single favorite among the 19 diverse and always surprising reflections that comprise THE HARD CROWD, I can only say that each one is a powerful “trip” on multiple levels. They often run pell-mell into one another, crashing, burning or floating away at their own pace.

The next time I see a gang of mouthy, defiant, risk-taking teen girls swarming down the main street of my city as if they owned it (not for a while, though, with pandemic restrictions still in force), I will still feel some irritation at their apparent total lack of mindfulness and manners.

But I also may spare a momentary thought that there might be a brilliant Rachel Kushner among them, cleverly disguised, absorbing like crazy.