Rachel Kushner is a mighty writer of fierce intelligence but whose novels I generally find less compelling and engaging than they are instructive and aspirational. Reading Creation Lake, Kushner’s fourth work of fiction, which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was an exasperating and exhausting experience.
The plot, such as it is, is this: the protagonist is a spy for hire whose pseudonym is Sadie Smith (we never learn her real name). She is outside of everything and deems her estrangement a consequence of her superior beauty and intelligence. Crafted in the image of a lusciously tactical Bond heroine, she has gone rogue after her contract with the FBI turned to custard when she was accused of entrapment after seducing a vulnerable young revolutionary to commit a minor act of domestic terrorism. She is now employed (by whom we do not know) to infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical environmentalist commune in rural southwest France. The commune, made up of mostly middle-class Parisian “hippies”, is dedicated to returning the land to the people, and is currently protesting a government scheme to construct “mega basins” to mitigate the effects of drought, but which deplete the water table and adversely affect local farmers.
Like many collectives, the Moulinards are selective, their members chosen by the cabal’s charismatic leader, Pascal Balmy. Sadie has joined their outer ranks by seducing Balmy’s childhood friend, Lucien, a film-maker away on location. Sadie is living in his family home, the “Dubois house”, owned by him due to primogeniture. They are communicating mostly by text. Sadie, one of the few Americans at the commune, is employed by the Moulinards as a translator.
There is a sexual cast to the Moulinards, Pascal its charismatic centre. But the philosophical centre of the group as well as the novel lies in the emails to the Moulinards from elder Bruno Lacombe, hiding in caves due to his fugitive status. The chapters of the novel are short, but they are often Bruno’s philosophical disquisitions, by way of those long and discursive emails, which stall whatever plot remains. These are intelligent but dull primers on European ecoterrorism, anarchist philosophy and an examination of the conflicting development of homo sapiens and Neanderthals (often referred to as Thals) through primitive artwork discovered in the caves where Bruno is hiding. It’s all complex and some critics believe it to be brilliant, but if I had wanted to read Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, I would have read them.
Reading Creation Lake, I was reminded by a workshop instructor that novels which adhere to a philosophical premise are bound to fail. Perhaps that’s wrong. These are Kushner’s own words about the novel’s inspiration. “The novel takes place over six weeks, but the real trajectory is not chronological. It is Earth to sky. Through Bruno, I felt I was tunnelling down into the sedimented secrets of human existence, digging a hole through the centre of the Earth. When I got there, I was able to see the cosmos from a chambered but roofless place, an unreachable wonder framed in a human content.”
For this reviewer, it was all simply unreachable.
Creation Lake, by by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape, $38), is out now.
