Arts Alive San Antonio

“CREATION LAKE” by Rachel Kushner
Reviewed by Steven G Kellman

After a federal agent bungles an undercover mission to entrap two animal rights advocates in criminal acts, a journalist asks: “What kind of person would manipulate and frame young people with utopian hopes and principles?

            That person narrates Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s seductive fifth novel. A 34-year-old American who calls herself Sadie Smith, she has left government service in order to work as a freelance operative, paid handsomely to infiltrate others’ lives and cause them trouble. She is, for example, hired to pose as an art expert and convince two wealthy dealers to buy some forged Picasso drawings. At present, she is using her long legs, enlarged breasts, fluency in French, and superior cunning to insinuate herself into Le Moulin, a commune of radical environmentalists in southwestern France. If the Moulinards are not about to commit some act of sabotage, she will goad them into it.

            Commissioned by unidentified private patrons to stir up trouble in the Guyenne region, “Sadie” sets about her task by seducing wealthy Lucien Dubois, an old friend of Pascal Balmy, the leader of Le Moulin. Gaining sole access to Lucien’s nearby ancestral estate while he is off in Marseille making a film, she convinces Pascal to recruit her to translate the commune’s manifestos into English. She exploits her access to stir up dissension within the commune, whose social dynamics she studies. They are preparing to use the upcoming Guyenne Agricultural Exposition to stage a demonstration against plans by the French government to create a megabasin by flooding the region. A hated French official will attend.

            Sadie hacks into the emails that the commune’s octogenarian mentor, Bruno Lacombe, frequently sends them. Orphaned by the Nazis, Bruno now lives ascetically in a cave and addresses the outside world in astonishing email essays on varied subjects including the history of the Neanderthals, Polynesian navigation, astral patterns, and how to catch fish with bare hands. He also discusses the forgotten Cagot Rebellion of 1594, in which a despised minority in Guyenne rose up against the region’s nobles. Although Sadie hopes to find material relevant to dealing with Le Moulin, she, a dropout from the Ph.D. in Rhetoric at Berkeley, is as fascinated as the reader will be by the intellectual issues raised by Bruno’s emails.

            Her own nihilistic world view leaves no space for sentiment. “Life goes on a while,” she states. “Then it ends.” She knows that what she calls “The four a.m. reality of being” is not very flattering. At the end of each assignment, Sadie moves on, with another name, to play another subversive role. Although she concedes that: “People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending,” Sadie never allows herself to forget that it is all performance. She never becomes attached to Guyenne, “a place I couldn’t care less about.” That cynical indifference applies as well to every other place Sadie happens to find herself in, including Creation Lake, the site of the agricultural fair. The only exception is Priest Valley, a spot on the map in central California she once passed through. She pointedly notes that its population is zero.

            There is much more to Creation Lake than plot, but Sadie beguiles us into turning pages in order to learn what happens when the Moulinards mount their protest at the agricultural fair. Also visiting the fair is Michel Thomas, a famous novelist collecting material for his fiction. Thomas, Sadie tells us, is a writer “with a talent for washing up on the shores of chaos.” That is an apt description of Kushner herself, a writer who, in this hardboiled spy thriller, shines a bright light on the darkness that suffuses noir.

————————————————————————————————————– Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner; Scribner; 2024; $29.99