Brian Dillon
Agent provocateur without a cause: Rachel Kushner’s latest novel follows an American secret agent with no loyalties and even fewer judgments.
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, Scribner, 407 pages, $29.99
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The thematic and historical reach of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel is ambitiously broad, taking in the lives and art of Neanderthals, the mysterious medieval culture of the persecuted Cagot minority in France, and the political sundering of that country during the Vichy years. But the chief intellectual thread of Creation Lake is a postwar lineage of diminishing interest: from the Lettrist and Situationist milieu around Guy Debord, through his fictional associate Bruno Lacombe—Neanderthal fan, cave dweller, post-Marxist guru—to a group of would-be primitives living in a southwestern commune called Le Moulin and plotting to sabotage local agribusiness infrastructure. These pastoral militants like to repeat a line from Fredric Jameson that was later recast by Mark Fisher: “easier to imagine the end of the world than . . . to imagine the end of capitalism.” At its best, Creation Lake essays an absurd but subtle analysis of antinomies arising between anti-capitalist and environmental politics. At its weakest, it feels like a bet-hedging period study of same.
Into the ideological muddle walks the novel’s smartest invention: a narrator who has assumed the name Sadie Smith and cracks wise throughout, asserting her sang-froid, but seems to have arrived from a stylish TV storyline about the existential distress of the covert operative. (Think Matthew McConaughey’s undercover scenes in True Detective, or the whole of The Americans.) Sadie is a former FBI agent now freelancing for who-knows-what shady paymasters; it’s unclear if her agent-provocateur role at the commune is warranted by state or corporate actors. What we do know, because Sadie likes to remind us: she is blandly attractive with large and firm breasts, which advantages she must deploy carefully with the stereotypical saps who make up the commune’s cast of old and young radicals—not to mention these guys’ suspicious female partners, who seem to do most of the work in a scene that fetishizes the dignity of labor. While Sadie entangles herself with key figures among the “Moulinards,” she is secretly reading Bruno’s emails, in which he outlines his philosophy of anti-modern retreat—“modern” means everything from the advent of farming onward—and declares his beloved “Thals” superior to homo sapiens.
Creation Lake is set in 2013, or shortly after: Sadie can’t escape the sound of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” released in the spring of a year that saw the usual complement in France of strikes, terrorist attacks, and demonstrations: conservative Catholics against the new gay-marriage law, egg-smashing farmers against the plummeting price of their produce. A decade and more ago, certain stark aspects of European politics were not totally obvious. 2013 is three years before the Brexit referendum and the brief flirtation of the French right with an angry “Frexit.” Marine Le Pen had been seen off in the presidential elections in 2012: coming third, for the moment. Agrarian resentments had not yet thrown up the gilets jaunes or more recent efforts to align real concerns about inequality with the racist outlook of the Rassemblement National. In part, Kushner has written a novel in which the lineaments of present fascism are visible but blurry, not yet resolved.
How much of this is clear to Sadie Smith? Not a great deal, it seems. Alongside her insistence on her own elegantly wasted proficiency as a lethal spy—she arrives well stocked with weapons and satellite phone, but also hits the booze hard—there is her weary disbelief in any political position. At four in the morning, she tells us, nothing is left of a person’s faith or principles, just a human residue, like a salt. She looks around at the Moulinards and thinks: “You people are not real to me. No one is.” Sadie’s (or Kushner’s) cold way with a damning physical description is a rich source of the book’s Gallic-baiting comedy: one man’s potbelly, another’s ragged espadrilles, the Mao-like getup of an older couple. But isn’t this keenness of judgment also an index of the narrator’s naive assurance about what she is seeing? “The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate . . . The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport.” Well, who ever said otherwise?
Eventually, Sadie tries to turn her provocations of the French radicals—and their American addition, Burdmoore, a decayed ’60s revolutionary who also appears in Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers—into murderous action. A junior minister arrives at a nearby fair; he is modeled on Manuel Valls (Minister of the Interior in 2013), and accompanied by Michel Thomas, a writer who, with his “strange wig of destroyed hair,” is an obvious ringer for Michel Houellebecq. The last hundred pages or so of Creation Lake have a riotous season-finale energy, culminating in dark slapstick and the sort of post-farce, dissociated retreat on Sadie’s part that has also occasionally been a feature of Houellebecq’s fiction. The provocateur’s implacable nihilism turns to a kind of atavistic mysticism: a familiar narrative move of the violent spy genre, which Kushner leaves us to judge as we will, or calmly accept as part of the comedy.
A novel about political violence and protest, shady state operations farmed out to the private sector, far-right appropriation of traditionally left-wing ideals: it all seems very apropos for 2024. (Kushner, who has written vividly about the plight of Palestinians, includes a fleeting reference to a protest against links between US industry and the Israeli government.) Yet for all its fizzing voice and narrative texture, its intellectual curiosity, Kushner’s clever skew on genre-fiction conventions, and the ways 2013 may function as allegory of today, something in Creation Lake remains muffled and distant. Interviewed about this book, Kushner has spoken about not wanting to judge her characters or their ideas. Admirable, essential position for a novelist—except that when the stakes are caricatured to a choice between fanciful primitivism, cynical individualism, and faceless capital, then the writer’s irresolution may seem less heroic. (Is it still a novel of ideas if the ideas are mostly bad ones?) Rachel Kushner on more urgent or intractable tensions in radical politics today—that is a story (or essay) to look forward to.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities: On Art and Fascination, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction are published by New York Review Books. He is working on a memoir, Ambivalence.