Rachel Kushner is one tough customer. She disdains sentimentality and traditional storytelling, instead challenging readers to keep up with her and not to flinch.
In acclaimed novels like and , Kushner has written about political extremists, motorcycle daredevils and artists living on cigarettes and turpentine fumes. Given a literary track record studded with broken glass, it鈥檚 surprising that Kushner has taken so long to try her hand at one of the bleakest genres of them all.
Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir. Existential dread and exhaustion are its signature moods; double-crossing, seduction and sudden death its plot devices. Orson Welles fans may find themselves humming the iconic theme music from The Third Man as they read Kushner鈥檚 latest novel: She鈥檚 Welles鈥� partner-in-grime in terms of her stylized depictions of the world as a spiritual and moral vacuum.
The main character of Creation Lake is a hard-drinking, good-looking, 34-year-old American woman called Sadie Smith 鈥� at least that鈥檚 her name for the time being. Sadie has been known by lots of names 鈥� aliases 鈥� in her work as an undercover agent, at first for the FBI; more recently, for anonymous private clients. That鈥檚 all we know of Sadie鈥檚 backstory: Like many fictional spies, she arrives on the page scrubbed of a personal past.
Sadie鈥檚 current assignment requires infiltrating a radical farming collective in a remote region of France. Local water supplies there are being diverted into planned 鈥渕egabasins鈥� for the use of agricultural corporations. Some of the construction equipment of those corporations has been sabotaged and the "anarchists" living on that collective are the prime suspects.
Deploying her self-described 鈥渂land鈥� good looks and a breast augmentation, Sadie initiates what鈥檚 known in the spy trade as a "cold bump鈥� 鈥� a seemingly random encounter with a filmmaker named Lucien who鈥檚 an old friend of the co-op鈥檚 leader. Soon enough, she and Lucien are living together and Sadie wields her status as his girlfriend to insinuate herself into the anarchist group.
But, seductive as Sadie is, she meets her match in an intellectual seducer of sorts: an elderly philosopher named Bruno who advocates pre-industrial 鈥� even pre-historic 鈥� modes of living and serves as a guru to the anarchists. For months, Sadie has been monitoring Bruno鈥檚 emails back and forth with the group, hoping to find incriminating sabotage plans.
Even as she dismisses him as a 鈥渓unatic,鈥� Sadie becomes intrigued by Bruno鈥檚 rejection of modern life and his decision to retreat underground long ago and live in a network of caves beneath his farm. 鈥淲e are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car [Bruno writes in one of his emails], and the question is: How do we exit this car?鈥� The idea of making an exit from her own 鈥渃ar鈥� 鈥� her own vacant life of disguises 鈥� takes possession of Sadie.
You don鈥檛 read Kushner for the 鈥渞elatability鈥� of her characters or even, particularly, for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines. Here, for instance, are snippets of an extended passage where Sadie makes a pit stop on her drive from Paris to the secluded region where the collective is located. Pulling into the parking lot of an abandoned inn Sadie tells us:
Like Bruno-the-philosopher, Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times. The only thing that isn鈥檛 disposable in her novels is her own singular voice as a writer.
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