Creation Lake

You say you want a revolution
Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Any book that starts off with a Beat generation veteran sending out email blasts from his cave dwelling in France in order to educate his followers about cigarette-smoking Neanderthals, just has to grab one’s attention.

It also should let the reader know that what follows is going to be fiction rather than fact.

With her sharp dead-pan wit and her incredible powers of observation Kushner has managed to craft an intelligent novel where her imagination examines human behavior, especially its fallibilities.

The heroine is a sexy young American who goes by the name of Sadie Smith. Sadie is a spy who will work for anyone. She is not only intelligent but she’s show more sexy, a ruthless seductress capable of pulling off both espionage and counter-espionage with ease. Or so she tells us.

The story uses a loose plot of Sadie’s assignments in order to comment on modern society and its critics. Her projects are a: to have a sub-minister of the French government assassinated, and b: to infiltrate a commune of eco-warrior wannabes. She manages to combine these two projects so that both aims are achieved simultaneously.

The commune - Moulin is set somewhere in southern France. Its people are adherents of the pseudo-philosophies of the old Beat Bruno - the one who sends out emails about Neanderthals - and a couple of his cronies. Their aim is to destroy “the system”, and they go about this by persuading young eco-protesters to form a commune to implement their ideas, which of course, as is the practice of so many revolutions, recreates the very things that they are destroying.

The Les Moulinards turn out to be a vacant lot, only too wiling to believe that the Neanderthals were a superior type of human, prone to depression and easily addicted. They had big noses and brains and were tall. Bruno liked to refer to them as The Talls. The members of the commune believe their leaders, partly because they were morally hampered by their parents who grew up in the culturally-dead eighties. Or are they are those parents? In the commune of the Moulinards anything is posible.

The idea of the leaders of the commune is that by looking to the distant past, modern humans could live in harmony blah blah. Sadie takes all this nonsense in her stride, and as the novel progreses she plans her two projects - the assassination and the infiltration of the Moulinages, on the fly in situ. She improvises, has sex, drinks fine and not so fine wine, all the while observing wryly the actions of those who will believe.

I enjoyed Creation Lake. It’s sharp, witty and does not lecture. show less

I really enjoyed this novel. Kushner has got France right - which was lovely after reading bland novels or, worse, ones that got the culture wrong (looking at you, Kristin Hannah). I loved the mix of philosophy and action, the meanderings of the story and the slow unveiling of Sadie who, in the end, remains rather a mystery. The plot becomes increasingly uncomfortable when it becomes clear that Sadie is unravelling and is perhaps not as good at her job as she thinks she is. The peripheral characters are also much more complex than they appear and glimpses into their personalities grab the attention. Overall, it is a creative and interesting novel even if it did leave me a bit hungry for more depth - Sadie does remain very elusive.

A rich romp that's part spy novel, part treatise on human evolution, part dark workplace comedy, part takedown of police tactics. My favourite thing Kushner's done yet.

"Sadie" (not her real name) worked undercover for the government, infiltrating groups to see whether they are planning any terrorist acts, and sometimes encouraging them to do so. When a job goes badly, she works as a private contractor, doing the bidding of corporations or unknown groups. In Creation Lake, she works her way into a secretive cult/environmental group living in an obscure corner of France. To do so, she moves to the area and insinuates her way into the group and as she does so, she is taken with the writings of a man corresponding with the group, with ideas about Neanderthal society. The goals of the people who hired her have nothing to do with finding out the truth, and more to do about protecting powerful corporate show more interests and Sadie will have to decide what she wants.

Creation Lake is superficially an undercover thriller where the protagonist is possibly the bad guy, possibly just interested in collecting her fee, and the novel is told entirely from her point of view. Rachel Kushner isn't writing genre fiction, though, so while the scaffolding is there, you won't find much in the way of adventurous chases or even a propulsive plot, as Kushner casts her eye on how societies and groups structure themselves and what can cause them to change. I'm still figuring out what I think about this books, which contains some interesting ideas but also seemed to get so dragged down in ideas and the narrator's cynical ennui that it forgot that a book with a set up like this should also be full of tension and forward momentum. show less

Creation Lake was definitely one of the more interesting and thought provoking novels that I have read in quite some time despite the fact that it took me more than half the book to get hooked. Although it wove together philosophy, eco-terrorism, and a spy plot, I thought that it was more tightly woven than The Flamethrowers, and had a well-defined character arc at the same time. The protagonist is amoral and anti-social, but clearly suffers from anxiety and insomnia that she fights in a fairly controlled way with drugs and alcohol. I loved her cynically wry asides. The philosophical part of the novel sets out the emails of a depressed character living in a cave who is sort of an enlightenment thinker like Rousseau in the beginning but show more who finally seems to ascribe to a more modern French existentialism that searches for personal meaning outside of, and in spite of, society. There are many more things to notice such as the examination of modernity and progress, as well as the observation of entrenched and changing French culture and how it differs (or not) from Italian culture. show less

Sadie Smith is deep undercover. She barely knows who she is anymore. She’s a bit like Bruno Lacombe, the enigmatic and secretive inspirational leader of an anti-capitalist movement, who has found himself in the deep dark of caves he believes were once frequented by Neanderthals. Sadie has unobserved access to his emails. She submerges herself in his meandering thoughts on life, work, and meaning. But is he really leading the Moulinardians or is he merely an obsolete jester on the sidelines? Sadie doesn’t know. Yet. Just as she doesn’t know precisely whom she is working for. She has a primary objective, to implicate the group in an unlawful action that will get them arrested. But there may be secondary or tertiary objectives that show more arise. If she chooses. If choice is a factor. If it isn’t all just written in the stars.

Rachel Kushner creates a remarkable tenuous narrative voice in “Sadie,” whomever she might be. Her journey becomes our journey as together we attempt to fathom what is really at stake. And her escape, if it occurs, will be the same one we take to the non-existent Priest Valley, California: population 0.

Certainly recommended. show less

Of all things that I have read about this fabulous novel, the most fitting was: "Think Kill Bill written by John le Carré". It is as entertaining and funny as it is thoughtful, sometimes even quite philosophical. A story about espionage that slowly builds up over hundreds of pages, right until the unexpected showdown, some ten pages from the end.

We follow Sadie Smith, a nihilistic but self-confident young Californian woman, to rural south-western France, into a region called Guyenne. The Guyenne is known for its ancient cave art and traces of prehistoric humans (both modern Homo sapiens and - arguably - not so modern Neanderthals). Otherwise it is unspectacular due to its plain agricultural life, far away from trendy cities. Since show more governmental development plans triggered resistance by the environmentalist commune "Les Mulinards", Sadie has been hired to infiltrate this commune as an undercover agent, without a clue about who actually hired her (it's just "her contacts"). The book begins with Sadie driving from Marseille to the Guyenne, where she moves into the deserted family home of her current partner's aunt. She got involved with this partner, Lucien - a wealthy young Parisian intellectual and movie director - only to get in contact with his childhood friend Pascal, the charismatic leader of Les Mulinards. For several weeks, she takes on translation work in the commune, getting acquainted with their life style, families and various member biographies.

All of this is told in many, seemingly unrelated text passages that jump between memories of former cases and partners, communications with Lucien and his team, stories about youth sexuality, observations of the Mulinard commune life (including a commune bathing event), acquaintances with political activists that were rejected by the Mulinards, or sexual encounters with one of the Mulinard workers. These episodes mix beautifully entertaining stories, sensual descriptions of Sadie's experience, with bizarre logic and/or hilarious thoughts about her personal way to manage life (apparently always feeling in control, yet hardly controlling anything).

In another story line, Sadie reads the (hacked) email correspondence between the Mulinards and the aged naturalist Bruno, a man who has retired from modern society, in search of the pure natural life of the Neanderthals. These episodes are often poetic, sometimes absurd, but always thoughtful and often philosophical, ranging from descriptions of hallucinations in the dark, to the sensual experience of catching fish by hand, to the navigational skills of polynesian seafarers. Amongst the chaotic mix of experiences and happenings in Sadie's real life, Bruno's thoughts provide her with spiritual guidance. She gets on best with the one person she will never meet.

In summary, it is pretty hard to summarize what this book is about, perhaps because it describes the search of a young nihilist and individualist for guidance and for a firm place in life. show less