Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 6.1.2025
Book from: Library
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie 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 centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life 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 Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
I’ve lost track of how I came across this high-brow bestseller, but by golly, I loved it! It’s deeply cynical yet lovely; sensitive and sensual, yet despairing. Creation Lake is one of those delightful literary novels that grabs up exciting genre elements (conspiracies, guns, seductions…) while drifting along at a philosophical pace, lingering in atmosphere, tone, and situational humor. Sadie is a hilarious narrator, and Kushner’s observations about the French are hyper-specific, affectionate, and brutal, e.g.,
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- “My rule is that the older the Frenchman, and the more rural his location, the higher his pants will be belted.”
- A celebrated, wizened male author (a doppelganger of Michel Houellebecq…?) is described as having “the sexual energy of a grandmother with bone density issues.”
Kushner said in an interview that her characterization of Sadie was inspired by the experience of seeing street photographs of friends that had been snapped by real-life secret agents; she wondered what kind of person could do such a thing. While reading, I intuited that same motivation: like Humbert Humbert and Ripley, Sadie answers the question, what would it look and feel like to be witty, intellectual, and sensitive to beauty, yet utterly indifferent to violent rupture of others’ lives? Like her casual alcoholism, even Sadie’s more “tender” admissions are skewed and off-putting. Several times, she reflects that the only way that she’d be willing to become a parent would be if she found a baby abandoned in a dumpster, ready for her to claim. At the same time, there’s a dark satisfaction in witnessing how Sadie skewers the pretentions and chauvinism of the male activists; they’re so self-aggrandizing that part of you feels like they deserve Sadie.
But Kushner keeps unbalancing Sadie, so that this doesn’t just become a pointlessly slick, mean thriller about a world-weary femme fatale. The cave-philosopher, cave-priest Bruno seems to seize control of Sadie’s psyche with his strange, sad, hypnotic missives about late capitalism and our estrangement from the natural world. They cause Sadie to feel her own emptiness; they resonated deeply with the anxieties I feel about how displaced and artificial contemporary life can feel. (On being able to navigate with a GPS without looking out the window: “You can know things without ever knowing anything.”) As a backdrop to Bruno’s philosophizing, Kushner depicts many of the uneasy, pathetic compromises of contemporary rural Europe: that traditional French farmers, for example, are subsidized by the government by being paid to mow walking trails that no one uses.
The world of this novel just feels so rich yet unsettling. Over the past few years, I’ve been indulging in a number of thrillers all along the lines of “disaffected, overeducated American woman vacations in a sinister Europe,” but Creation Lake reached a depth of strangeness and moral unease that was memorably provocative to me.
This review is dedicated to R., who mentioned that she still checks the RSS feed for this dust-covered blog…