Creation Lake

An Operative Without Warmth

Sadie Smith is introduced with a gesture of cold precision: she assesses every man she encounters in terms of how easily she could manipulate him, what his weakness is, how quickly the manipulation could be accomplished. She is not cruel — cruelty would require emotional engagement — but she is relentlessly analytical about the human material around her, and the reader quickly understands that Sadie’s intelligence is both her most powerful tool and the thing that makes her most dangerous to be near.

Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, and it uses the spy thriller form to do what Kushner does in all her work: place a character with a specific and carefully constructed political consciousness into a situation that tests it, and observe what happens with precision and detachment. The result is the most accomplished novel she has written.

The Assignment and the Obsession

Sadie is embedded in the Guyenne region of France, where she is tasked with infiltrating a loosely organised leftist commune called La Goutte d’Or — a community of young people committed to living off the grid, resisting industrial agriculture, and maintaining ties to traditional rural practices. The commune is loosely associated with a series of sabotage actions that have drawn American intelligence interest.

The assignment is straightforward by Sadie’s standards. What is not straightforward is her growing obsession with Bruno Lacombe: an elderly French philosopher, formerly associated with the radical movements of 1968 and their afterlives, who now lives in a cave in the Dordogne and communicates with the commune through long, digressive emails about prehistory, the nature of humanity, and the meaning of existence in the era of the Anthropocene.

Sadie intercepts Bruno’s emails as part of her surveillance, and she cannot stop reading them.

Bruno’s Philosophy

The emails that Bruno sends form an intellectual counterpoint to the thriller plot. They are meditations on Neanderthal man, on the question of what human civilisation actually is, on the relationship between modern political radicalism and deeper human tendencies toward community and resistance. They are also, in their way, beautiful — Kushner has written some of the best philosophical prose of any American novelist.

The conceit that Sadie — a professional deceiver who reads people as manipulation opportunities — would become genuinely moved by Bruno’s thought is the novel’s central risk. Kushner makes it work by rendering both Sadie’s coldness and Bruno’s ideas with enough specificity that the juxtaposition creates genuine friction. Something is happening to Sadie as she reads; what exactly is happening remains partly opaque.

France and Its Politics

Kushner renders the Dordogne with the sensory richness of someone who has spent real time there: the landscape, the agricultural texture, the specific social culture of a region that is both economically struggling and historically proud. The French radical left has a genealogy that Kushner traces from 1968 through the 1970s communes and into the contemporary moment with more accuracy and depth than almost any American novelist has previously achieved.

The commune’s young members — their politics, their conflicts, their personal histories — are rendered with sympathy and clear-eyed honesty simultaneously. Kushner does not romanticise or dismiss.

The Form

Creation Lake is formally a spy thriller, and the genre mechanics are present and functional. But the novel’s real business is philosophical and psychological. The thriller elements create the circumstances; the interior material is the content. This combination is what Kushner’s best work achieves, and here she achieves it more completely than in any previous novel.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Kushner’s most accomplished novel — a spy thriller that is really a novel of ideas, with one of the most original narrators in recent American fiction.