RRadical politics, confused heroines and the threat of violence are the main ingredients of the novels of Rachel Kushner, who was called one of the greatest American novelists of the century with her second book, “The Last Man”. The flamethrowers (2013), about a biker in the art world of New York in the 1970s and Italy during the “years of lead”. But although her third novel, The Mars Roomabout women serving life sentences in a Californian prison, was nominated for the 2018 Booker Prize, I am not convinced that it is really on the radar of most readers on this side of the Atlantic, where we are more suspicious of the kind of long, concise and imaginative narratives that ambitious American writers tend not to shy away from.

Her highly entertaining new novel, Lake of Creationalready nominated for this year’s Booker, should secure her a permanent place in history. A spy drama full of surprising revelations and drip-feeds of backstory, it deals with anarchy, farming and prehistory, expanding the scope and sophistication of her previous work with a killer plot and deft pacing, as well as plenty of fun. The American narrator, 34-year-old Sadie, is another memorable Kushner heroine, a polyglot former postgraduate blessed (as she tells us) with a stunning figure and a plain face – all the more convenient for her role as a spy for hire after she is kicked out by the FBI following a botched attempt to bust an animal rights activist.

We meet her in Guyenne, in southwest France, where she is now being paid to track down the founders of a radical agricultural cooperative called Le Moulin, who are suspected of thwarting a government-approved plan to convert the local fields into a corn monoculture. A mysterious paymaster, whose name is not given, has tasked Sadie with finding evidence of their criminal scheme – and failing that, obtaining it herself by any means available.

The opening pages are an interplay between Sadie’s trip to Guyenne and her unauthorized reading of the hacked correspondence between the Moulinards and their old guru Bruno, a former cave dweller. Soixante-Huitard who regularly shows up to type emails on his daughter’s computer, offering eccentric theories about the fate of Neanderthals – in his opinion an often misunderstood species from whom we can learn a lot, not least that they (apparently) recognised the subversive potential of sleep.

As Sadie settles into the commune disguised as a translator, much of the initial intrigue lies in the fact that Bruno’s musings – a far-fetched mishmash of speculation and fact about the real persecution of the native Cagot – are not only silly but seductive, even when filtered through Sadie’s wry summary. The drama intensifies when she meets the leader of Le Moulin, Pascal, a wealthy Parisian ex-Brother by Guy Debord, as the novel begins to spread our attention across an impressively wide range of settlers. We see how the Commune’s dangerously lax norms allow for sinister goings-on – an 11-year-old father gets a key role in the story – and how the diverse population of rural dwellers and young intellectuals from the capital are constantly under pressure, as are factory workers licking their wounds after a failed strike. There is also a serial criminal from New York who has already The flamethrowerswhich Sadie likes to arm when things get heated; and there is even a thinly veiled cameo by Michel Houellebecq, or “Michel Thomas,” which is perfectly captured when he shows up at the climax of the plot to research an “agricultural science novel” (2019s Serotoninthis is the closest Kushner comes to putting any kind of timestamp on her novel).

The biggest drama, though, is Sadie herself. From the start, there are hints that – surprise – spies don’t tell the whole story. An early reference to “a valley of pure green, as if you were looking at the landscape through a Heineken bottle” isn’t a hoax, but a sign that our narrator might do just that. She claims she can handle her rented Skoda hatchback better if she has a few drinks on the way, but as the narrative reaches boiling point, she misses her wake-up call in a Xanax-and-whiskey haze.

It’s pretty unusual these days for a novel to go out of its way to lure you into the worldview of a real villain pursuing powerful interests, but that’s exactly what we get here. (Not that the agricultural cooperative represents any kind of idyll – Lake of Creation is the kind of novel that brings a plague to everyone’s house.) Sadie’s resume includes selling fake Picassos on behalf of a dealer out to discredit his rivals, and yet we can’t help but root for her; it’s particularly thrilling to see her at one point silence a suspicious local with a tasty piece of kompromat. For much of the story, she’s basically an all-conquering superhero. But then there are the chinks in her armor – the vulnerability hinted at between the lines – as when she boasts about her reflexes and danger sensitivity during a bathroom stop in the bushes (her bladder full of wine from a motorway service station, she doesn’t exactly explain) before managing to pee herself, startled by footsteps that turn out to be her own and crunching up a crumpled food wrapper.

To Kushner’s credit, the novel doesn’t paint Sadie’s actions in shades of gray, though it does flirt with the notion that only her full-blown addiction allows her to maintain the self-delusion required for elite-level deception. This novel is braver than that. It’s not the narrator’s sense of hidden pain that captivates us; it’s more that she’s excellent company on the page for the reader – boastful, caustic, savage, she tells us about her breasts, her disdain for Italian food, why graffiti is more heinous than murder, and what “the real Europe” is: not a “posh café on the Rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of the famous hot chocolate” but “a limitless network of supply and transportation… shrink-wrapped pallets of superpasteurized milk or Nesquik powder or semiconductors… highways and nuclear power plants… windowless distribution warehouses.”

For a long time, the closest the story comes to pulling a trigger is a sick cow who is heartlessly put out of her misery at the center – a bullet fired just to remind us that what Chekhov said about one gun on stage must also apply to the four that Kushner’s antiheroine has hidden up her sleeve. The final 100 pages, which oscillate between danger and farce, are astonishingly gripping: nonstop entertainment and a real treat.

RRadical politics, confused heroines and the threat of violence are the main ingredients of the novels of Rachel Kushner, who was called one of the greatest American novelists of the century with her second book, “The Last Man”. The flamethrowers (2013), about a biker in the art world of New York in the 1970s and Italy during the “years of lead”. But although her third novel, The Mars Roomabout women serving life sentences in a Californian prison, was nominated for the 2018 Booker Prize, I am not convinced that it is really on the radar of most readers on this side of the Atlantic, where we are more suspicious of the kind of long, concise and imaginative narratives that ambitious American writers tend not to shy away from.

Her highly entertaining new novel, Lake of Creationalready nominated for this year’s Booker, should secure her a permanent place in history. A spy drama full of surprising revelations and drip-feeds of backstory, it deals with anarchy, farming and prehistory, expanding the scope and sophistication of her previous work with a killer plot and deft pacing, as well as plenty of fun. The American narrator, 34-year-old Sadie, is another memorable Kushner heroine, a polyglot former postgraduate blessed (as she tells us) with a stunning figure and a plain face – all the more convenient for her role as a spy for hire after she is kicked out by the FBI following a botched attempt to bust an animal rights activist.

We meet her in Guyenne, in southwest France, where she is now being paid to track down the founders of a radical agricultural cooperative called Le Moulin, who are suspected of thwarting a government-approved plan to convert the local fields into a corn monoculture. A mysterious paymaster, whose name is not given, has tasked Sadie with finding evidence of their criminal scheme – and failing that, obtaining it herself by any means available.

The opening pages are an interplay between Sadie’s trip to Guyenne and her unauthorized reading of the hacked correspondence between the Moulinards and their old guru Bruno, a former cave dweller. Soixante-Huitard who regularly shows up to type emails on his daughter’s computer, offering eccentric theories about the fate of Neanderthals – in his opinion an often misunderstood species from whom we can learn a lot, not least that they (apparently) recognised the subversive potential of sleep.

As Sadie settles into the commune disguised as a translator, much of the initial intrigue lies in the fact that Bruno’s musings – a far-fetched mishmash of speculation and fact about the real persecution of the native Cagot – are not only silly but seductive, even when filtered through Sadie’s wry summary. The drama intensifies when she meets the leader of Le Moulin, Pascal, a wealthy Parisian ex-Brother by Guy Debord, as the novel begins to spread our attention across an impressively wide range of settlers. We see how the Commune’s dangerously lax norms allow for sinister goings-on – an 11-year-old father gets a key role in the story – and how the diverse population of rural dwellers and young intellectuals from the capital are constantly under pressure, as are factory workers licking their wounds after a failed strike. There is also a serial criminal from New York who has already The flamethrowerswhich Sadie likes to arm when things get heated; and there is even a thinly veiled cameo by Michel Houellebecq, or “Michel Thomas,” which is perfectly captured when he shows up at the climax of the plot to research an “agricultural science novel” (2019s Serotoninthis is the closest Kushner comes to putting any kind of timestamp on her novel).

The biggest drama, though, is Sadie herself. From the start, there are hints that – surprise – spies don’t tell the whole story. An early reference to “a valley of pure green, as if you were looking at the landscape through a Heineken bottle” isn’t a hoax, but a sign that our narrator might do just that. She claims she can handle her rented Skoda hatchback better if she has a few drinks on the way, but as the narrative reaches boiling point, she misses her wake-up call in a Xanax-and-whiskey haze.

It’s pretty unusual these days for a novel to go out of its way to lure you into the worldview of a real villain pursuing powerful interests, but that’s exactly what we get here. (Not that the agricultural cooperative represents any kind of idyll – Lake of Creation is the kind of novel that brings a plague to everyone’s house.) Sadie’s resume includes selling fake Picassos on behalf of a dealer out to discredit his rivals, and yet we can’t help but root for her; it’s particularly thrilling to see her at one point silence a suspicious local with a tasty piece of kompromat. For much of the story, she’s basically an all-conquering superhero. But then there are the chinks in her armor – the vulnerability hinted at between the lines – as when she boasts about her reflexes and danger sensitivity during a bathroom stop in the bushes (her bladder full of wine from a motorway service station, she doesn’t exactly explain) before managing to pee herself, startled by footsteps that turn out to be her own and crunching up a crumpled food wrapper.

To Kushner’s credit, the novel doesn’t paint Sadie’s actions in shades of gray, though it does flirt with the notion that only her full-blown addiction allows her to maintain the self-delusion required for elite-level deception. This novel is braver than that. It’s not the narrator’s sense of hidden pain that captivates us; it’s more that she’s excellent company on the page for the reader – boastful, caustic, savage, she tells us about her breasts, her disdain for Italian food, why graffiti is more heinous than murder, and what “the real Europe” is: not a “posh café on the Rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of the famous hot chocolate” but “a limitless network of supply and transportation… shrink-wrapped pallets of superpasteurized milk or Nesquik powder or semiconductors… highways and nuclear power plants… windowless distribution warehouses.”

For a long time, the closest the story comes to pulling a trigger is a sick cow who is heartlessly put out of her misery at the center – a bullet fired just to remind us that what Chekhov said about one gun on stage must also apply to the four that Kushner’s antiheroine has hidden up her sleeve. The final 100 pages, which oscillate between danger and farce, are astonishingly gripping: nonstop entertainment and a real treat.