Use your human mind!

Rachel Kushner​ ’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, shuttles between the story of Sadie Smith, a spy-for-hire tasked with observing Le Moulin, a radical environmentalist commune in rural southwest France, and the intercepted emails of Bruno Lacombe, a cave-dwelling local eccentric who serves as the Moulinards’ mentor and spiritual icon. You might expect this marriage between cool intrigue and the ramblings of a man deeply interested in early hominids to produce one of those shaggy-dog contemporary novels that are praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?

Sadie Smith (the name did make me laugh because, seriously, come on) makes her living by embedding with radical organisations and snitching to the authorities. A job for the FBI went pear-shaped when Sadie was accused of entrapment – she perhaps did entrap a young man by making him believe that she loved him and that they had to save the world by doing some light domestic terrorism – but as she tells us when recollecting the events leading up to the trial, she doesn’t blame herself. The Feds do, however, and since then she’s been taking on less savoury work in the private sector.

At the start of the novel, she’s been sent by an unknown party to spy on the Moulinards, who are suspected of torching several excavators, worth hundreds of thousands of euros, as a protest against a government scheme to construct several ‘megabasins’: enormous reservoirs meant to mitigate the effects of drought. These artificial reservoirs are a controversial issue in drought-plagued regions of France because they involve pumping groundwater into privately owned, man-made structures, depleting the water table. Without snow, rainfall or other natural forms of precipitation to replenish the reserves, megabasins can actually intensify the impact of drought. The Moulinards would also like to rewild the region, remove non-native species and return to more traditional forms of land management – the kind of project that’s difficult to take seriously, though it probably makes a great deal of sense.

The Moulinards are led by Pascal Balmy, often accused of being a bourgeois from Paris (he is in fact a bourgeois from Paris) in the style of Guy Debord. Sadie has secured an introduction by way of Balmy’s childhood friend Lucien, to whom Sadie has got herself engaged following a rapid courtship. Sadie tells us how she ‘cold-bumped’ Lucien – that is, pretended to meet him by chance – and played him into a relationship in order to get to Pascal. Kushner shows the ease with which a biography can be formed if its subject hides in shadows and silences, allowing other people’s projections and assumptions to fill in the gaps between a few direct lies. The most persuasive fake identities, as Sadie demonstrates, come not from what you say but from the inferences that you allow – or encourage – others to draw.

Lucien’s family house – the ‘Dubois place’ – is near Le Moulin’s headquarters, and Sadie perches there with all her espionage equipment. It is also here that the carelessness of Kushner’s construction first becomes evident. On the third page of the novel, we learn that Sadie is meeting Pascal the following day. This meeting occurs 141 pages later. The intervening 140 pages describe, in this order: Sadie in the Dubois house reporting on its crumbling structure, a flashback to Sadie approaching the house along its winding driveway, a flashback to Sadie’s drive from Marseille (where she had been staying with Lucien) and a description of the shops she stopped at to buy cheap wine, further progress on her trip from Marseille, Sadie driving in the woods near Vantôme to get a glimpse of Le Moulin, a flashback to her ‘cold bump’ with Lucien, further flashbacks of her relationship with Lucien and her working him over, a flashback to her trial for entrapment, more time with Lucien and a flashback to their trip to Marseille, even more of their stay in Marseille, a description of her first night in the Dubois house and a return of sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her way backwards through the novel and then decided to leave it this way. I understand that some people think chronology is passé or redolent of tedious realism, but I longed for a justification, no matter how small, for the scrambling of the timeline through the first third of the novel. Instead, it just felt like contempt.

Sadie has her meeting and we learn her cover story: she will help the Moulinards translate some of their writings into English. We know of course that she’s there as a rat and a snitch, and perhaps to instigate behaviour that will make them easier to arrest. Once begun, the espionage proves far more interesting than the deadened narration and ‘clever’ observations that comprise much of the Sadie sections. Describing a view: ‘The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.’ Another bit of landscape painting: ‘The woods gave way to a plateau with farmland on either side, fields of yellow grass and large rolls of hay wrapped in white plastic like giant pills.’ Here is Sadie on first meeting Lucien:

I knew plenty about him, and that he had a kind of mannered affection for old Paris, that he conceived of reality as stage-directed in black and white. The truth is that even when Jean-Luc Godard and people like that were making those movies in black and white, with actors in fedoras who talk like gangsters, they were already an affectation.

Sadie tells us about her breasts:

I laughed, my own implants barely contained in the triangles of my white bikini. Mine were expensively done. But it could be on account of something more subtle – an assumption Amélie made about me, and about herself, that we were both too clever and naturally pretty to stoop to paying for shortcuts – that she would not suspect my breasts aren’t real.

Later, she tells us about someone else’s breasts: ‘She wore the timeless hippie look of an old random faded men’s T-shirt of no particular size over an ankle-length skirt and no bra, her breasts stretched tragically low for someone her age, so young – and pretty too – but with these long breasts swinging around under her shirt.’

I mentioned to a friend that I was having a hard time with Sadie as a narrator because she seemed stupid and unaware that she was stupid, and my friend suggested that perhaps Kushner had done this on purpose, as a commentary on the ‘sharp woman’ archetype that has predominated in the fiction of the last decade. Perhaps. I replied that I couldn’t decide if the book was a smart person’s idea of a stupid book or a stupid person’s idea of a smart book. But I’ve come to think that the larger problem with Sadie is the difficulty presented by a character who reminds you on every page that nothing matters and nothing is real, and that the people she is scamming are phonies too, that everything is empty and hollow and that she’s smarter than everyone else because she knows the game is a game and is playing to win, but only for mercenary reasons. It brings me back to the question, why did you write this? What are you exploring here?

The other parts of the novel are given over to Bruno Lacombe’s (very long) emails from his cave lair. The emails are sent to the Moulinards, and Sadie reads them in secret. Bruno opens the novel with a discussion of Neanderthals and evolutionary biology, and draws from Sadie some of her most pleasing observations, for example, imagining all Neanderthals as having the face of Joan Crawford. The best section of the book is the fifth, when Bruno writes about his life in a mini memoir, chronicling his childhood outside Paris during the Second World War. In a particularly vivid scene, Bruno gets lice from the helmet of a dead German and the old woman who is looking after him douses his head in kerosene at the block where they decapitate chickens:

Bruno put his head on the stump. The old woman treated his scalp with kerosene, which she glugged from a metal can that had lost its nozzle and splashed unevenly. The kerosene was for refilling a lantern that the Germans had smashed.

The vapours from the kerosene made young Bruno ill. Its noxious effects did not kill his lice.

The lice ranged over his head as the Germans had ranged over the Corrèze. They did eventually leave, having explored, as he now put it, the limits of possibility on his scalp. In this way, he tangented, lice have yet a second metaphorical meaning: the bromides marketed to us to fix our problems, like kerosene was once believed a remedy for lice, these posited solutions tend to give us hope more than material benefit. In reality, problems leave when they are ready to go, when they have exhausted their stay, just as these lice did.

The kerosene leaves Bruno with what Sadie suspects are visual migraines:

The effects of the kerosene, he said, remained. Thereafter his vision sometimes had a tremble at its edge like a ruffle or pleat that crimped his field of sight. The crimp came and went. It was happening now, he wrote to them, as he was composing this very email, and it was this visual phenomenon that had precipitated his boyhood memory of the soldier and the helmet and the lice, his foolish joy at the death of the enemy, a joy that displaced the memory of learning his family had been murdered.

Here at least we glimpse a logic to Bruno’s thoughts, which elsewhere in his emails leap about seemingly at random. A friend once described the Lehman Trilogy as ‘Wikipedia in play form’. I’ve thought of this description often, when reading recent novels which seem to confuse looking things up for erudition. I thought of it again, keenly, reading Creation Lake. The effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of factoids about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as ‘discursive’. This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight. Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that they leave us not with a fragmented form – which might still have something to offer readers – but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.

The Moulinards​ are often described in the novel, both by Sadie and by the locals, as ‘activists from Paris’ or ‘people from Paris’. Why deal with the content of someone’s politics and activism when you can accuse them of being middle class? They’re just some nerds from Paris who have decamped to a rural region whose own young people are fleeing:

I took a road that bordered Le Moulin and saw the commune’s sun-singed squashes, their scraggly lettuces. Their land did not border a creek or river tributary and would be difficult to irrigate. The soil here was rocky. Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this.

Much of the population had fled this region for its lack of jobs, its stagnancy, its disconnection from modern life. There was no future here, and so young people had moved to cities, to Toulouse or Bordeaux or further, to seek jobs in factories or in the service sector, to get an education, try to find a pathway into middle-class life.

The passage sums up Sadie’s – and the novel’s – estimation of the politics and project of the Moulinards while simultaneously vilifying and reifying the middle class. The radicals cannot have sincere politics because they are middle class, and the evidence for this is that they want to come to a region in the process of being abandoned by its working-class inhabitants, who are moving elsewhere in order to become middle class.

It’s not easy to write a realist novel about a revolutionary. I don’t mean a novel about a person with revolutionary ideas, or a person who sometimes goes to protests and posts on social media about climate change. There are plenty of novels about that sort of thing. I mean a novel about a world-historical individual, someone who actively and violently changes the world in pursuit of revolutionary principles. The world of the revolutionary is both dream and nightmare, filled with shadows, feints and dodges. Doublespeak and betrayals. Authorities evaded in the nick of time. Orders given through trusted comrades. Encoded maps and plans for blowing up the bridge. Setting the police car on fire. Filling the square. Demanding change. Halting the engines of state power. The eyes of the revolutionary reflect the glow of the funeral pyre of the old world, over whose ashes the new world will be built. The parallels between the life of the revolutionary and that of the spy only emphasise the distinctions: the spy, agent of power, views the revolutionary with the cold cynicism that stems from conceiving of the world as a totalised, finished product.

While trudging through Creation Lake, I thought often of Zola’s Germinal, another novel about an operative who goes to a hardscrabble region of France in order to infiltrate and observe (I wrote about Zola in the LRB of 4 April 2024). Sadie Smith isn’t Étienne Lantier, but there are some useful parallels between them. Sadie has come to spy and to steer her targets to a particular end, to crush their revolutionary or insurrectionary aims. Étienne goes to work in a mining village and becomes a strike leader, as the miners join a worldwide coalition of workers in an attempt to achieve better conditions for all. One feels that Étienne doesn’t just want this particular village to join the cause, but is fighting to save the world. For him, the material and the spiritual are connected. Germinal shows how he arrives at this belief, by means of a series of dialogues, arguments and hardships. His politics come to be inseparable from his life, for good and bad. He isn’t play-acting. He’s at the coalface every day. When the villages starve, he starves.

Sadie doesn’t need to go down a mine, of course. But I find it remarkable that Kushner sends a woman posing as a translator to join Le Moulin when what these people probably need is an agriculturalist or a paediatrician or just an extra pair of hands. Kushner is interested in the petty neoliberal social mores of the radical commune – see how they reconstitute gendered divisions of labour, see how the men spit and the women fume etc. Not so radical now, are they? Which is fine! But it feels silly to me, next to Germinal, in which work is the site of collision, drawing in workers, management and intellectuals. The main idea of Creation Lake is that the work the Moulinards are doing – trying to grow their own food, trying to build homes and barns and live on their own terms – is not really work because they can leave it at any point and do something else, meaning, probably, an email job in Paris. Maybe. Maybe there are email jobs waiting for these anarchists in Paris. But they have chosen this life. Farming the land. Swimming at the quarry. Arguing with the old man who lives in the cave. That’s the life they’ve chosen, and the novel’s unwillingness to make this the site of collision feels, again, like contempt.

I kept remembering the care with which Zola describes every part of the winches and levers that lower the miners into the shaft and bring them back again, and the way he unfolds the internal landscape of the coalface itself, allowing his readers to see the veins glinting in the dark. I thought of Zola and wanted to weep as I read Kushner struggling to describe a car going up a hill, or to advance her book beyond the momentary delights of Neanderthals having faces like Joan Crawford. It’s like, stand up, sister! Use your human mind!

At one point Sadie tells us that in her ‘life before this life’, she was a graduate student surrounded by

know-it-all women in my department who held their hands up and curved their pointer and middle fingers to frame a word or phrase they were voicing with irony, as a critique. They were fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. They were getting PhDs in rhetoric at Berkeley, as I had planned to, before I abandoned the plan (and spared myself their fate, which was to subject themselves to academic job interviews in DoubleTree hotel rooms at a Modern Language Association conference). Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare-quoting women.

The passage follows from the observation that ‘the not-so-literate and the hyper-literate both love quotation marks.’ This is the most specific and trenchant piece of analysis in the whole novel. Perhaps it is there to make us wonder why a PhD dropout saved herself from the fate of being a ‘scare-quoting woman’ by becoming a spy who makes a living by thwarting the plans of genuine radicals. But the passage seems to have wandered in from an entirely different novel.

Another flash of interest derives from a documentary Sadie watches about a sexually precocious young Italian boy called Franc. The story of Franc haunts Sadie, particularly after she finds out that one of the young boys at Le Moulin impregnated a woman who left the camp almost immediately after giving birth. The two boys begin to blur as Sadie works through the idea of innocence and what makes someone an innocent and whether sexual intelligence can be a kind of genius. As with Bruno’s mini memoir, there is a looseness and a natural discursiveness to these sections, a fluidity that is otherwise absent. If you combine this with the passage about the scare-quoting women, you can almost imagine the shape of the book that Kushner might have set out to write. One about a stranger who comes to town looking for something and finds something else. You could almost start to trace in Bruno’s emails a coherent story about shame, stigma, the tension between the civilised and the ‘natural’, the brutality of society and the force of law. One can imagine the way this might intersect with a story about a young boy in a remote village and an academic coming in search of a story about sexual power but finding only the murky reality of what goes down in the countryside.

Instead, we get a ‘spy novel’. This makes sense, I guess. It’s difficult to forge a novel out of the moral nuances of everyday life, to spend hour after hour labouring in the dark like Zola’s miners. There’s a moment in Germinal when they lower a fresh horse into the mine and the old horse, which has spent most of its life in darkness, becomes almost delirious with joy at encountering another animal, one that has so recently stood in the sun. For the new horse, there is only the terror of the endless dark. The spy novel could seem a comforting prospect by comparison: it’s just a game, after all, played to its foregone conclusion, a cheat code for those anxious about writing another bourgeois novel. The contemporary novel no longer has any saviours or knights or true prophets. We have only the exhausted media worker rolling onto their side just before their iPhone alarm blares in their face, scrolling memes for a little hit of dopamine. The spy novel is the cynical counterpart to the revolutionary novel. You could read Creation Lake as a brilliant commentary on the concept of the ‘spy’ in contemporary life – if a spy is a person who creates a false self in order to achieve material comfort. Still, I would have preferred a novel.