Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Published by ‎ Scribner on September 3, 2024

Rachel Kushner devoted Creation Lake to the creation of a female character who refuses to regret the dubious path she has chosen. The character uses the name Sadie Smith, a name she will discard by the novel’s end. Sadie has made a career of working undercover. While she is schooled in deceit, she is reasonably honest with the reader about her checkered life. Sadie isn’t someone who much cares what you think of her.

Sadie’s backstory includes an aborted career working for the FBI. She infiltrated organizations of drug dealers but her later focus was on environmental/political activists. Federal authorities brand activists as “terrorists” if they do anything to disrupt business or government operations. Sadie understands but is indifferent to the reality that her job is more about generating good press for the FBI than about fighting actual terrorism.

To the extent that Sadie fights crime, she does so by using her looks and breasts to win the trust of men. During her final mission as a government agent, her supervisor pressured her to find (or, saying the silent part out loud, to manufacture) evidence that an animal rights group was planning to commit violent acts of sabotage. Sadie convinced a young man that he would have a chance with her if he proved his commitment by taking direct action in support of their cause. Following Sadie's instructions, he purchased fertilizer to make a bomb and delivered it to a woman who was the FBI’s real target.

To the surprise of everyone, a jury accepted the boy’s entrapment defense. His embarrassing acquittal deprived the FBI of a chance to claim a victory in the war against terrorism. Professing to be shocked that one of their agents would entrap an innocent person, the FBI fired Sadie, sending her into the more lucrative world of private clandestine employment.

The entrapped activists would like to sue Sadie but haven’t yet discovered her true identity. Near the novel’s end, Sadie becomes concerned that the FBI might reveal that information to make her a scapegoat. If she regrets setting up an innocent boy for a potentially lengthy prison sentence, her regret is based on her loss of employment and future consequences that she might face. She appears to feel no guilt, having convinced herself that she had “no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.”

Now Sadie is pretending to be the girlfriend of Lucien Dubois. She is staying in his (otherwise empty) family house in the Guyenne Valley, a rural area in southwestern France where the commune of Le Moulin is located. The Moulinards are environmental activists who, like most activists, are well-meaning but generally ineffectual. Their most urgent concern is that industry wants to divert water for its own uses without regard to the impact that loss of water will have on local farmers.

Sadie has been hired to keep tabs on the Moulinards by unseen interests with a hidden agenda. She soon manages to insinuate herself into the organization.

Some of the novel’s interest lies in its depiction of squabbling activists who might agree about broad goals while disagreeing about the means of achieving them. Some activists view violence as a tool while others reject it. Some believe capitalism will collapse on its own while others want to precipitate a worker’s revolution. Whether their actions advance or undermine their cause is unclear, although taking action seems to be less important to most of them than the intellectual exercise of debating the purpose and methodology of activism.

Sadie’s employers have outfitted her with technology that allows her to read email exchanges between Bruno Lacombe and Le Moulin’s leader, Pascal Balmy. Sadie believes that Bruno, as Pascal’s mentor, would want to guide Pascal’s strategy for hindering industrial development in the valley, but most of Bruno’s emails discuss his theories about Neanderthals, theories he developed while living in a cave. Bruno is “anti-civ,” or against civilization in the parlance of French activism, although he might best be seen as a tragic figure who responded to the death of his daughter (run over by Bruno’s own tractor) by rejecting farming and most human interaction. Lacombe now believes it is time for mankind to return to the caves, to live in “tiny clans,” a recipe for a future that seems more post-apocalyptic than visionary.

Bruno’s obsession with Neanderthals opens the door for informative discussions of archeology and evolution, language and war. For example, Bruno distinguishes his preference for cave dwelling from living in a bunker to avoid nuclear annihilation. “In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.” In the cave, Bruno can hear everything, including languages he doesn’t understand, prompting him to comment upon the development of language.

Kushner seems to use Neanderthals and environmental activism and even the choice of sex partners to develop a deeper theme about human progress, but the precise definition of that theme is open to debate. Perhaps book clubs will be able to ferret it out.

The novel explores several other topics, including the French Revolution, map making in the time of Captain Cook, and the tendency to mistake random luck for fate. These are interesting discussions even if they do not obviously advance the plot. Repeated references to Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist who influenced Pascal, fit more comfortably into the story, although the characters are primarily interested in whether Debord is worthy of a place in the activist pantheon, given his incestuous relationship with his sister. 

Speaking of the plot, Sadie manipulates Lucien to connect her with Le Moulin. Believing Sadie to be an unemployed American grad student, Lucien arranges for Sadie to translate into English a book that Pascal and the other Moulinards are writing. She dutifully spies on the activists and takes the opportunity to shag one because “even as I maintained a fraudulent persona, within that persona I found methods to meet real needs.”

As Sadie discharges her duties to her employer, she is again asked to set up an act of violence that would not occur without her intervention. The reader will wonder whether Sadie learned anything from her earlier experience with entrapment and whether that experience will shape her response to her employer’s deadly demand.

While I wouldn’t categorize Creation Lake as a thriller, the story does build tension by raising concern about Sarah’s fate as an undercover operative. Perhaps because Kushner focuses on ideas and characterization, the novel’s pace is uneven. Few novels can be everything to every reader; those looking for an action novel might be disappointed by Creation Lake. Still, a fast-moving scene near the end provides a satisfying, if anti-climactic, answer to whether Sadie's effort to set up the Moulinards will succeed.

Sadie is an interesting character but isn’t particularly sympathetic. Some readers might find Kushner’s digressions into the purpose of Neanderthal cave paintings to be distracting. I would agree that, while the novel's various asides are interesting, they add unnecessary words to the book. The words are nevertheless wielded with great skill and the novel is a welcome departure from formulaic spy/undercover cop stories.

RECOMMENDED