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Synopsis:
From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and “one of the most gifted authors of her generation” (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor.
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
Review:
In Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, Sadie Smith is at a place in her life where she is starting to wonder if the work she is doing is worth the risk. After being fired from the US government as a secret agent due to a poor finish to one of her assignments, she starts to work around the world as a private agent. For this assignment, her faceless and nameless bosses have hired her to infiltrate a radical group who have plans to stop developments on French farmland. While doing research she meets Pascal Balmy, the leader of the group, and she is able to guess the password to the email of Bruno Lacombe, the mentor of the group. Bruno is a mystery, someone who lives close but off the grid, rumored to be in a cave in the countryside. He uses his daughter’s computer to write the group emails but most of them are ramblings about Neanderthals, Prometheus, Polynesian sailing, and his life.
The novel unfolds in strange ways, slowly and mostly off of any actual path. The writing is immersive, and even though it might not feel like it is going anywhere, before long you realized that you are a long way from where you started. The character of Sadie Smith, an alias for this mission that is chosen because it is sort of interesting yet hard to find anything if Googled, is a mixture of hard coldness and soft yearning. She spends so much of her social time keeping all of her stories straight, trying to get everyone in the anarchist group to trust her, that when she is done, back in the house that she is using, she can do nothing but drink beer and enjoy the quiet. The hours where she can turn off her secret agent become a haven of piled up empty bottles of beer and wine and dirty glasses in the kitchen. This turns into something that she likes more than having an agenda and needing to talk to people. Before too long, she becomes wrapped in the curiosities contained in Bruno’s emails, and the chances of looking for a new life after this mission grow more and more appealing.
Creation Lake is a stellar novel that starts a little odd, but the cohesion of the different pieces show a novel that is well written and well crafted. In a general sense, I have very little interest in many of the subjects that come up in this book, the thriller/spy aspect does not have much tension, and the conclusion is a little thin, but there is something about Creation Lake, something about it being more of character study than a secret agent adventure story that makes me feel like it is only done well because Rachel Kushner did it.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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