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Los Angeles-based author Rachel Kushner caused a sensation in the literary scene with her debut novel Telex from Cuba (2008) about life as an expatriate in Cuba in the 1950s. Her second work, The flamethrowers (2013), about the New York art scene in the 1970s, led to a second National Book Award nomination, the only time an author was nominated for both a first and second novel. It was followed by a short story collection, The Curious Case of Rachel K. (2015) and The Mars Room (2018), a novel about a women’s prison in California that was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. A collection of Kushner’s essays, The hard masswas also released in 2021 with great success.
The protagonist of Lake of Creationwhich was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, is about “Sadie Smith” (an alias), a 34-year-old secret agent who was fired from the FBI for luring a 23-year-old into a trap. She attributes her becoming an agent provocateur to pressure from her superior: “The urge to prove that eco-activists are terrorists was so strong and so relentless that I felt I had no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he wasn’t coming up with it well enough on his own.”
The year is 2013 (Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” is blaring everywhere). Sadie is hired by a shady private organization to infiltrate Le Moulin, an anarchist collective operating in a remote part of southwestern France. The eco-activists hope to sabotage a government plan to pump groundwater into “mega-basins” to benefit large-scale operations at the expense of smaller ones – a controversial issue in France to this day.
As part of her mission, Sadie hacks into email exchanges between the director of Le Moulin and his mentor Bruno Lacombe, an anti-civilizationist who was close to the Marxist theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord. Lacombe’s philosophical and anthropological musings – on the superiority of Neanderthals and the failings of capitalism – take up much of the pages.
He lives in a cave – as part of a group of disillusioned Soixante-Huitards who retreated to rural areas in Europe when urban uprisings failed to lead to revolution. He perseveres, unlike most of his fellow radicals who were “disillusioned by the challenges of farming, the isolation of the region, and the insular community of the natives,” Kushner writes. Sadie also begins an affair with a member of Le Moulin, whom she meets through “cold touch” – a supposedly chance encounter.
While Lake of Creation is not genre literature, Kushner said it was “a kind of secret homage” to French black Novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette, who believed that the “solution to the problem of the bourgeois form of the novel” was the crime novel. She was inspired, she says, by Manchette’s usual narrative form, which “leads to this great event that should determine the fate of the protagonist and instead becomes a full-blown fiasco.”
The book actually gets more exciting at the end, when Platon is visited by Paul, the deputy minister for rural coherence, who wants to build local support for the megabasin regions. (The character, a Spaniard, is a reference to Manuel Valls, a former prime minister under François Hollande.) Sadie, initially tasked with surveillance, is tasked with murdering Platon to make it look like an accident.
Kushner believes that writers are either inward-looking or outward-looking: “I look outward,” she said The Paris Review in 2021. “Even when I was very young, I was drawn to worlds of knowledge and people, subcultures, that I had to get to know directly, through experience, as if this process of immersion in the unknown would help me understand myself.” Although she resists the term “research,” to create the captivating atmospheres of her earlier work, Kushner delved into archives from her grandparents’ time in Cuba, first-person accounts of mid-1970s New York and Italy, and extensive visits to California prisons.
Kushner’s novels are always more containers for thoughts than plot-driven narratives. But while her first three burst with energy and astounded readers, Lake of Creation feels more distant. The world of espionage has, of course, provided endless atmosphere for fiction. But Lake of Creation is less a parody of a spy novel or an eco-exposé than an anthropological treatise.
For Bruno’s philosophy, Kushner has said it was inspired by the work of geneticist David Reich, whose 2018 book Who we are and how we got here Joint advances in our understanding of migration patterns based on DNA analysis of ancient bones, suggesting far more mobility and interbreeding than previously thought. Reich’s research is fascinating, but refracted in Bruno’s vision through Sadie’s retelling of his emails, it has less vitality than the worlds conjured up in Kushner’s earlier books.
As living proof of the subjectivity of the reading experience, the Booker Prize jury, amidst an outstanding longlist, found “the prose gripping, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.” In stark contrast to the rest of Kushner’s work, however, I found Lake of CreationDisappointingly, I couldn’t put down one of my most eagerly awaited reads this year.
Lake of Creation by Rachel Kushner Jonathan Cape 18,99 €, 416 pages
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