31 Dazzling Features of Rachael Kushner’s novel ‘Creation Lake’

Rachael Kushner’s novel ‘Creation Lake‘ is a wonderfully deep and interesting novel.

Unlike some other book reviewers, I try to let the book and the characters speak for themselves, by providing you with short quotes taken directly from the novel.

This allows you to hear what the characters say in their own words and to make your own decision about how to evaluate them as a reader.  The goal would be to put my own subjective interpretations closer to the rear of things.

One of my favorite NY Times book reviewers (David Garner) says Rachael Kushner deserves “status as one of the finest novelists working in the English language.”

Wow!

Below, check out some of the interesting facets of ‘Creation Farm’ and what other folks have said about it.

If you haven’t read the novel yet, don’t worry– no spoilers below.

I’d love to hear from YOU.

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Creation Lake by Rachael Kushner

441 print pages.

Modern-Day, Spy Noir, with a Twist

 

“Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” is set in rural France, but not the rural France of guidebooks and Peter Mayle memoirs. No one rhapsodizes over an escargot or a tarte Tatin. We’re in the country’s southwest, where the soil is rocky. More essentially, we are in what Kushner calls the proletarian “real Europe,” with vistas of “highways and nuclear power plants” and “windowless distribution warehouses.”

–NY Times

“The core of my assignment and duties had been to infiltrate and to monitor Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards for proof they had committed sabotage and were planning more of it.”

–(Sadie/from the novel)

Sadie Smith is trying to join a commune of radical folks as a spy, then expose their leader, Bruno Lacombe and the group as the source of some destructive behavior in the name of ecology.

The format for the beginning portions of the novel are– Sadie secretly reading email correspondence between Bruno and Pascal, looking for evidence.

But as she reads these mails, she’s also giving the reader a glimpse into something deeper. The rest of the novel is about her infiltrating the group, the discoveries she unearths, and the larger implications of those discoveries.

“Sadie Smith,” a pseudonymous freelance spy, works to undermine environmental activists. After being hired to disrupt a farming cooperative in France, she begins to suspect that her mission risks undermining her own humanity.”

—Wikipedia

 

When the positives and negatives of a novel either balance out, or are intrinsically part of the novel’s overall appeal, it shows that the author was aware of these factors, but made an artistic decision to spend time on them, as opposed to editing them out, or using the page real-estate on something else.

‘Creation Lake’  doesn’t simply give us items that tap all the correct plot points for a spy novel.

It takes us deep into the internal reactions of the main character.

Here’s one of many examples:

“Stop acting pious, I told myself. Admit it: you knew all along that they were setting up Platon for something grievous. You knew in Marseille. You knew six months ago, when they had you following the guy around Spanish villages. It was time to pull back and negotiate. I upped my price to an absurdly high number. My own worth is an existential metric. It is not determined by the market. I was certain they would balk. They agreed to the price. And suddenly, my purpose here was to get these people to kill a man.”

–(Sadie/from the novel)

“The annals of history are filled with descriptions of gifted and charismatic people who wanted to remake the world, special souls with second sight, natural leaders who burned clean and bright, and who brought the promise of their vision to the masses, but who gorged on joy until it wrecked them.”

–(Sadie/Internalization)

“If people do not start out as imbeciles, they are made imbecilic by the corporate contours of their daily life, lulled into a sleep, a sleep which, according to Debord, prevents them from wanting a more authentic life.”

–(Sadie/Internalization)

“The curls of the baby’s hair are as lustrous as a silent screen star’s.”

–(Description/from the novel)

 Sadie’s dialog with the other characters in the novel does its job just fine, but does not seem to be the author’s go-to emphasis in this novel.

The more interesting parts of the novel, however, are when we get a glimpse inside Sadie’s head. Bottom line?– the point of view was perfectly selected for this particular novel.

“The more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use, and Bruno was no exception (and neither am I, even as I deplore this habit in others).”

–(Sadie/from the novel)

“Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.”

― opening sentences from “Creation Lake: A Novel“

You’ll be fascinated by Sadie’s internal dialog!

“Murder is understandable when you think about it.”

–(Sadie/from the novel)

[No spoilers].

Things are wrapped up in an interesting and well done way.

Well worth the time invested.

The main character of Rachael Kushner’s Creation Lake’ is  Sadie Smith (although this is probably an alias).. She’s kind-of a free-lance spy, who’s a drop out from Berkley. Her ethics are questionable, but she remains profoundly interesting.

Sadie is good at what she does.

But what she does is not always socially acceptable, which defines her as an interesting character.

She’s emotionally cold and intellectually astute.

She’s been know to have sex with other people only because it will move her closer to her job-goal.

She’s a deliberate liar, a shoplifter for the thrill of it, an explorer, an incredible observer, a manipulator, and a woman who’s appealingly bitter.

“If you have a good memory, and if you don’t get in the way of your constructed self, it’s not hard, even under duress, to remember who you are supposed to be.”

–(Sadie/from the novel)

The novel’s length gives the reader plenty of time to explore the depths of personality shown in not only Sadie, but the other main characters.

Sadie is mysterious, deep, and double-edged, in every way.

A thinking, strongly nuanced, female anti-hero.

What I liked most about ‘Creation Lake’ was Sadie’s inner ability to be truthful with herself at all times.

Often, she is self-contradictory, but not a completely unreliable narrator. Her internalizations and expressions of these truths are done in an insightful, and sometimes even comic way that gives the novels its primary strength– we enjoy spending time with her as we move through the pages.

Here are some quotes from Sadie, in the novel, to consider in this light:

Time well spent.

I enjoyed the ride.

See Even MoreAmazon.com Reviews

See Even More Reviews on Goodreads

“Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and her nonfiction in Harpers and the New York Times Magazine.”

—Author’s Website

“She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”

—Author’s Website

Maureen Corrigan, NPR: ‘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’s latest novel: She’s Welles’ partner-in-grime in terms of her stylized depictions of the world as a spiritual and moral vacuum.’

Anthony Cummings, the Guardian” ‘For a long time, the closest the story comes to the pulling of a trigger is a sick cow callously put out of its misery at the halfway point – a bullet fired just to remind us that what Chekhov said about a gun on stage must apply to the four that Kushner’s anti-heroine has stashed up her sleeve. The final 100 pages, pinballing between peril and farce, are amazingly tense: wall-to-wall entertainment, and a real treat.’

Estelle Birdy, Irish Independent: ‘Sadie’s views on everything from pasta and Italian wines to the script for the perfunctory sex she performs with her duped boyfriend Lucien, delivered with such straight-faced aplomb, are the pivot about which this whole reading experience turns. She says (among other casually insulting things): “Late Debord’s face had grown to resemble that of a dead goldfish clotted with scurf, and I am not being fanciful here, but forensic and precise…”

Header-Image Montage by: Lewis Faulkner at FaulknerFiction