This might be sacrilegious to say as a book reviewer and English major, but in general, if you’re looking to get the gist of a novel, you can probably skate by just by reading a Wikipedia summary. You’ll obviously miss most of the depth, nuance and detail of the book in question, as well as the inherent joy that lies in experiencing a story, but if you’re in a pinch and need to parrot off what a novel is “about,” you’ll probably do fine with this method.
However, you could not do this for Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake.” Here’s how Wikipedia would likely summarize the plot: Sadie Smith, the alias of a private espionage agent with a troubled past, has been hired to infiltrate a French radical anarcho-primitive farming commune suspected of committing leftist eco-terrorist acts. Sounds like a fascinating and high-stakes spy thriller, full of ethical tension and tons of near-miss encounters. What no Wiki page can describe, though — shocking me and likely anyone else who might pick up the book — is that the novel has almost none of these qualities. Even more astonishing, these omissions aren’t signs of failure: They’re instead marks of brilliance.
The hallmarks of the classic espionage story are there — tracking equipment, shady bosses with obscure motives and a complex false identity created to extract information from those living in Le Moulin, the commune Sadie has been hired to monitor and gather intel from. These elements, while interesting, take a backseat when compared to the rest of the novel. In her opening pages, instead of focusing on Sadie’s espionage machinations, Kushner focuses on a series of emails written to the head of Le Moulin, Pascal. These emails come from a man named Bruno who, unbeknownst to us, will soon become the novel’s most important character. To understand why this is, we must understand the core of “Creation Lake” — Sadie Smith herself.
Sadie narrates the story with near-diaristic internal monologues. Through this, it quickly becomes clear she is not a good person. While her past is relatively obscured — she once was in grad school, but that’s all we find out, personal-life-wise — she does speak of her past espionage work in the public sector, which involved encouraging a young target to commit eco-terrorism crimes to land her agency a conviction, ultimately resulting in a 20-year prison sentence.
Sadie’s unethical behavior isn’t just in the past — to get close to Pascal she has formed a completely false and increasingly serious relationship with his childhood friend, Lucien. Lucien is gone filming an independent movie for the duration of the main story, leaving his summer home near Le Moulin open to Sadie, who lives there under the guise of her work to translate Pascal’s radical writings from French to English. Although distant, Sadie’s disdain for Lucien is clear. When Lucien expresses affection for her via text, she responds with disgust; there is little to no sympathy for him, whom she characterizes as weak on account of his privileged upbringing.
Here the novel will likely reach its fork-in-the-road moment for most readers. Sadie fits squarely into the recent trend of amoral first-person female narrators, although her character falls more in line with a Sally Rooney protagonist than an Ottessa Moshfegh one. Sadie is radically neutral in her approach to both her work and herself, cooly diagnosing judgments of people and situations with barely any emotional input. Her relationship with the commune is not, as many readers may expect from the book’s premise, a sympathetic one. She recognizes their struggles and understands their desire to fix a world exploited by capitalism, then easily dismisses their attempt as just another way to form a new identity. Sadie’s obsession with human nature and identity forms a sort of black-and-white worldview: To her, everyone has a core self, obscured by behavior that she feels she can see through and exploit. This core, which she describes as a “pillar of salt,” fuels her justification of her actions, no matter how cruel.
Such a heartless character may seem hard to follow, and it is a testament to Kushner’s power with language that the book is so wildly entertaining despite this. Her language is so precise, and Sadie’s observations so concise, that hearing her thoughts is a delight, even if plot-wise the narrative has slowed. She reads almost like Joan Didion in her famous “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” documenting and analyzing everything around her while at the same time trying to fit into a world she does not belong in.
The problem is that Sadie is almost too compelling. Her confidence in her own intelligence can sneakily convince a reader that what she is saying and thinking is true, and the apt analysis she puts into some of her surroundings makes this all the more convincing. When Sadie analyzes Le Moulin and its white middle-class leftists as near-posers, readers who disagree with such an assessment may believe that Kushner herself is pushing these beliefs. I felt this tension myself while reading and still am not sure whether such an internal battle was intended by the author. In this way, the book serves as a sort of political litmus test for the reader: Do you follow Sadie’s worldview and believe her to be “right,” or disagree and interpret Kushner’s protagonist as a bad person not to be trusted?
Either way, Sadie’s radical cynicism is why Bruno’s emails are so crucial to the novel’s structure. Interlaced between almost all narrative action are scenes of Sadie reading Bruno’s communications to Pascal. Bruno is the most radical of the anarcho-primitivists, literally believing that to regain their true nature, humans should regress back to a Nethanderthal-like lifestyle, living in caves and relative darkness. It is another testament to Kusher’s skills with language that Bruno’s arguments do not sound completely insane. His poetic diatribes come across as poignant, albeit a little extreme. Sadie resists Bruno’s philosophy at first but begins to feel a kinship with Bruno and his ideas, especially his beliefs that retreat from the constructed world as the only path man has toward salvation.
Despite all her attempts to disguise her actions as logical and calculated, Sadie is still only human after all. She has a self-serving affair with one of the Le Moulin members, consistently gets drunk on the job and attempts to seek out Bruno more than once, although unsuccessfully. We never meet Bruno in person — he is living in a cave while their correspondence is taking place — but Sadie’s reactions to his ideas, beyond the spy work she does, form the core of the novel.
Bruno’s worldview, though overlapping with that of the leader of Le Moulin, is markedly different. Pascal, who Sadie discovers to be a rude and chauvinistic leader, is emblematic of the kind of political-for-ego-only individual that Sadie detests. As she sees more of the commune and its startling flaws, her worldview seems to be all but confirmed. But Bruno’s words slowly begin to change her perspective on things. His ideas of human connection and our deep, genetic ties to our ancestral past appeal to Sadie and her idea of identity. Here, Bruno’s mysticism seems to be at odds with Pascal’s sheer philosophical justifications of his group’s behaviors.
This concept is shown in the very structure of the book. Often, Kushner hands Sadie incredible luck. Characters and plot points from early in the novel are used to her own benefit over and over, almost as if they had been placed there for that specific purpose. At its most extreme, one of Lucien’s suspicious relatives ends up in a coma and dies, leaving his pesky interference neutralized. Is this the work of the mysterious funders of Sadie’s mission, fate or sheer coincidence? Sadie doesn’t seem sure, and in terms of her objective, it doesn’t really matter. She is a pragmatist; for her, the strings manipulating how events unfold aren’t relevant. Bruno ideologically stands against this thought pattern. To him, how things unfold does matter, as the past ripples forward to the present and future in one continuous pattern.
Can you see why it’s hard to remember that this is actually all a spy novel? This lack of focus on the espionage side of things seems purposeful and works more as a metaphorical framing device rather than a literal one. Sadie’s status as a “spy” helps us understand her character’s layers of personal deceit to fit inside a mold of individuals she does not agree with and punctuates the impact of finding a source of legitimate ideology she does find common ground with. The novel’s plot may require a powerful entity wanting information on Le Moulin, but the thematic weight of her character’s many faces would remain intact even without them.
“Creation Lake” is not a book about being a spy, and to a large extent, it isn’t even really a book about leftism. When examined as a whole, it’s a book about identity — what goes into our own formation as humans and how we show those versions of ourselves to each other. This does not mean the political intent of the novel is random. The flawed project of collective living with one another and the land under a system that makes such a thing almost impossible shows how our reliance on each other for identity is a dead end. To find oneself, the book says, one must retreat backward.
While I loved this novel, the length of this review says something about its potency. To some, its complexity will be fascinating, but to others, confusing and overwrought. To some, Sadie’s extreme neutrality and moral ambiguity will prove an interesting lens to examine humanity and efforts at human resistance to power and to others, an annoying and unrealistic caricature of a protagonist with an inconsistent and illogical worldview. Both takes on this novel require some mental stretching on the reader’s part. Sadie and her story are fluid and dynamic and seem to slip out of the bounds of categorization from page to page. But, perhaps that’s intentional — it’s human nature, after all.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.
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