Any novel narrated by an attractive young spy with large (and fake) breasts who stalks a group of French communists and tries to incite them to eco-terrorism can be cheesy. But a novel that also features emails full of lecture-like sermons detailing the history of radical groups and the relationship between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens? That risks becoming what I consider the plague of contemporary publishing. Because at first glance, Creation Lake could be one of those cynical novels full of superficial “explainers” on topics like colonialism and its legacy—explanations so basic that they’re obviously not intended to improve your understanding, but merely to instill a sense of smugness for having engaged with the material in the first place.
Not in Rachel Kushner’s hands. She is the author of three previous novels, including The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, and many searingly intelligent essays for media outlets such as The New York Times Magazine. Creation Lake is already on this year’s Booker longlist, and rightly so. It is a remarkably original book in which profound meditations on the human condition are thoughtfully and convincingly embedded in the framework of a thriller and in the minds of characters who are unforgettably drawn.
When we first meet the attractive spy, she is researching a group of young French radicals led by Pascal Balmy, a seemingly charismatic man in his early 30s from the Parisian upper class. She reads (and Kushner shows us) the emails the radicals exchange with Bruno Lacombe, a mysterious older academic and mentor who has spent most of the last decade in a cave after a personal tragedy.
Lacombe is obsessed with the idea that Neanderthals were a purer form of life than humans, and sees his new life as a way to get closer to theirs. Many people, he writes in an email, still carry traces of Neanderthals in their DNA – “the remnant of a person deep within us who knew our world before the Fall, before humanity’s collapse into a cruel society of class and domination.” In his soft, thoughtful voice, Kushner delivers truly strange, fascinating, esoteric stories and theories about Neanderthals, peasant revolts and astronavigation, not to mention Lacombe’s own strange and wonderful life spent as an orphan among Left Bank intellectuals in the 1950s.
Balmy’s group has set up a commune near a farming community in the Guyenne region. It opposes the state, particularly its agricultural plans, and is suspected of sabotaging some industrial facilities. Although the attractive spy has been tasked with infiltration, we never learn who exactly hired her, or anything else. The only name we know is the one she takes for the job, “Sadie Smith”: she pretends to be from a place in California called Priest Valley. She views everything with scorn and contempt. Of another activist group, she says, “These people stab each other in the back. They twist key witnesses. When interrogated, they give a self-serving account.” She explains that “cinematologists are accountants.” But Kushner is careful to show us that this jaded nihilism gives the spy only an extremely superficial understanding of the world around her. We learn that she was wrong about these activists, and that her intelligence career consisted of one botched mission after another, for which she always blames others. She couldn’t even convince two art collectors to buy a fake Picasso.
