Creation Lake: A Novel
“the reader is alone at the end of the novel, left to contemplate the cavernous world below and the mysteries of the star-cluttered sky.”
As with her previous novels—The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba—and her uncompromising and brilliant essay collection—The Hard Crowd—in Creation Lake Rachel Kushner creates a story at once multi-layered and haunting. Although the novel could and most likely will be classified by some readers and critics as a spy novel, it is actually sui generis. The narrator and protagonist, Sadie Smith (a pseudonym), is an existentialist spy, a tad harder than hard-boiled, as cool as any undercover agent in recent memory. Sadie is more inclined to bring her icy intellectual persona to bear on her duties than she is, until the very end of the story, to consider coming in from the very cold world of espionage where the ends always justify the means.
Sadie is living a false life. All such operatives do. According to Thoreau, perhaps most people lead such lives. On the surface Creation Lake is a spy thriller, but beneath the surface—and so much bubbles beneath the surface—the novel asks the question: What might constitute an authentic life, a moral and meaningful one?
Tangentially, as she casually does the manipulative work she has been hired to do, Sadie considers many questions that seem less procedural than philosophical. Questions that might be more perfectly suited to a 34-year-old former Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley than one might expect to be bubbling up in the consciousness of a mole. The fact that Sadie is able to rationalize state murders and encourage the weak-willed to commit acts of violence while she ponders the Cagot Rebellion in 16th century France, the mysteries of Polynesian explorers, and the ironies of cave-dwelling Neanderthals, and environmental extremists helps make this a spy thriller that might have appealed to Kierkegaard and Descartes, as well as fans of John le Carre.
The plot of the story is fairly straightforward, but the novel is anything but simple. Sadie Smith is an amoral contract worker. Her previous spying for a government agency went awry, and she has become a freelancer. Her current bosses (she doesn’t know who they are and has never met them) pay very well for her to infiltrate a radical French environmentalist group. She is directed to keep an eye on its narcissistic leader, Pascal Balmy, in the rural French countryside on his commune, Le Moulin. The commune consists of about 27 acres and 45 men and women, all devoted to the cause of living beyond the grip of technology and government.
Sadie’s job is to seduce the group into committing an act of terrorism that will justify a response from the authorities. She is patient and smart, patient enough to initiate an affair with Lucien, a filmmaker friend of the eco-hippie tribe’s leader. She is an expert at seduction and entrapment. She has done it before, and she plans to do it again.
The guru of the group at Moulin, Pascal Balmy, is not the principal authority for the activists. Balmy is just an acolyte. The philosophical founder of the group, now just an invisible presence with his own tragic backstory, Bruno Lacombe, is a man who believes that a return to the ancient ways, to the lives of cave dwellers will be the path to a more authentic way of living. Lacombe goes so far as to live in a catacomb of caves beneath his property in an attempt to re-create what he imagines as the purity of the lives of the Thals. He regrets that the underground world has been lost to humans in the 21st century. “The industrial uses of the earth, the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not count, Bruno said. Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. . . . What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.”
While Sadie digests the wisdom of Lacombe, she continues to do her morally suspect work. It’s the kind of task, like stealing when she was younger, that “puts reality into sharper relief.” It’s her way of stopping time and testing her ability to see clearly, as if she is compensating for her occasional vision problems. The question that the novel ends up posing for Sadie and for the reader is where, ultimately, is the lake of our creation? Like Sadie, the reader is alone at the end of the novel, left to contemplate the cavernous world below and the mysteries of the star-cluttered sky.