By I picked up this book because of its premise.
About the Book
Title: Creation Lake
Author: Rachel Kushner
Published: 2024
Genre: fiction, literary fiction
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.”
My Thoughts
I picked up this book because of its premise — I had never heard of this author previously, but the synopsis immediately intrigued me. A novel following a woman working for mysterious government/corporate people as she is paid to infiltrate an anarchist commune in France sounded right up my alley. I have actually written a short story with really similar subject matter (it’s not published…. yet… because I’m not a real writer… yet…)
Actually, there was a subplot in this novel involving animal rights activists that was EXTREMELY similar to a few of my own short stories, so I was super interested in the book.
The story is told completely from the perspective of the undercover woman, who assumes the name Sadie, and it flips back and forth between recounting the events of her mission and describing the content of email correspondence she has intercepted between the commune leader and a mysterious figure, Bruno, who serves as their an-prim-coded ideological influence. The parts about Bruno’s emails are some of the most interesting sections of the book, actually, with their long tangents into obscure historical topics that I ended up Googling later.
As for the temporal plot, while I was interested in the book’s premise, I didn’t feel that it was explored the way I was hoping. I do like literary fiction, but this one kind of veered into really typical litfic territory of sex and more sex and yapping, leaving the plot itself to the wayside even though this story had so much potential.
Probably the most interesting yet bizarre thing about the novel was our distance from the main character, despite the book being written in first person. We only ever know the narrator as “Sadie”, but this is only the alias she is using for this assignment. We have no idea who she “really” is, which makes sense, given her job as a spy. However, the narrative distance did leave me feeling a bit frustrated because it was extremely difficult to tell what her feelings on the situations in the book really were. Everything is told extremely dispassionately, even when her actions become more erratic and she seems to be having major changes in her outlook.
Overall, I thought this would be a 5-star book at the beginning, but it ended up petering out as it went on. However, I looked at the synopses of Kushner’s other books, and they all sound very unique and interesting to me, so I put them on my TBR.
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