Rachel Kushner’s latest, Creation Lake, has been called a spy novel. Shadowy corporate interests have enlisted the operative (alias: Sadie Smith) to safeguard the construction of a megabasin designed to divert local water to industrial monocroppers. In the tradition of honey-trap saboteurs infiltrating radical movements, Sadie seduces targets close to the anarcho-subsistence farmers fighting to preserve sustainable agrarian life in the region. A femme fatale functionary of corporate greed, Sadie is resolutely blank. For her marks, she feels only contempt.
In the American author’s prior book, the 2021 essay collection The Hard Crowd, Kushner wrote about her deep appreciation for the novels of Nanni Balestrini, which she describes as “fueled not by contempt but instead by a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility.” Balestrini showed Kushner that style need not always be linked to cynicism. Creation Lake feels a product of this tension and epiphany. An exception to Sadie’s blanket disdain forms the heart of the novel. A one-sided love story takes shape between her and a cave-dwelling elder radical named Bruno, who doesn’t know she exists but whose emails she’s intercepting. It’s in this old man’s musings and biography, which span Neanderthal inheritance, peasant revolts, Nazi atrocities, and Guy Debord, that the novel finds, almost in spite of itself, a strand of revolutionary possibility, gentle and unyielding.
