Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

My mom loved literature and she was a voracious reader. She's in memory care now, and maybe we should have seen it coming.  She always had a tough time putting her thoughts into words.( I'm sure she had some sort of learning disability. Born in 1939, she of course pre-dated all the fancy diagnoses we have now. My grandma Dorothy, my mother's mother, used to simply say, "Well, she _did_ have a long birth.")
 
And whenever my mother would encounter a piece of art, or film or writing that was thought-provoking, she would squint into the distance, nod her head meaningfully and say, "It's ... interesting."
 
With Creation Lake, I have my mother's voice in my head. And Creation Lake _is_ interesting–an interesting book full of interesting dialogue, interesting characters, interesting observations on leftist cults, interesting thoughts on European food and wine and convenience stores, neolithic cave drawings, Neanderthals, medieval history (including a tangent about a mysterious subculture of untouchables called The Cagots), and some deep reflections on the end of history which unfortunately for us seems to be about right about now.
 
I liked this book a lot, and I like it more the more I think about it. It's 'voicey,' fun and thought-provoking, if not exactly thoughtful. It plays with the heaviest ideas we have weighing on our hearts and minds, with the absentminded lightness of a cat playing with a toy.
 
But I don't want people to dismiss it because it's playful. If this was the first Rachel Kushner book you ever read, I'm concerned that you might just say, along with my Mom, "well, that's interesting," and not feel obligated to read another Rachel Kushner book.
 
So I've put together this nifty ad hoc guide to the books of Rachel Kushner, and the order I would recommend reading them. (time permitting, I mean who has time for books).  
 
1) The Mars Room (excellent, required reading)
2) The Hard Crowd (extra credit–you can also read an essay or two)
3) Telex From Cuba (extra credit, but good)
4) The Flamethrowers (awesome, required reading)
5) Creation Lake (yep, so now you're ready.)
 
#1 - The Mars Room is a tight, well-crafted narrative with a topical theme - it's the story of a woman, Romy, incarcerated in a women's prison in California San Joaquin Valley. Romy is serving a life sentence for killing the man that was stalking her. The Mars Room is everything fiction should be. After you're done, you'll feel like you've done a life sentence in a high security women's prison in the Central Valley–all without having to kill any abusive men or anything. You'll be a better person.
 
#2 – The Hard Crowd is the book that really sunk the hook for me. Rachel grew up in a time in San Francisco that was very much like the Seattle I grew up in. She was emmeshed in the alt/west coast punk sensibilities of the time and had dangerous creative friends who made just living their life an art form. She went to college (Berkley) while remaining part of this culture–it was all just grist for the mill. Because Rachel Kushner is a woman, and her breakout novel was in 2008, as opposed to the 90's and her protagonists are young women, people seem to think she's some sort up-and-comer "cool girl writer." In my view, she's a writer of ideas, part of the great class of 199– ... David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Frantzen, Donna Tartt, Eggers, Lethem, Rachel Kushner. These are the writers I run with; they are philosophically, emotionally as much a part of my development as Sonic Youth and Spike Jonze and the cigarette burns on Kurt Cobain's sweaters and the Gun Club and some other bands you've never heard of. We have a collective Gen-X sensibility that was something once and a fittingly less-than-zero now. I never finish writing anything, but this is my tribe, and we hold the collective keys to all mythologies. We find the same things beautiful and/or funny or both.  
 
#3 – Telex From Cuba is the story of the plantation families that had to leave when Castro comes to power. It's super solid and well-researched. It fills in a little piece of western hemisphere history that a lot of people including myself, know nothing about. ; I think it was her first book; it is very good though not quite great if only because it lacks the singularly unforgettable character of her other books. Nonetheless, it will enrich your life and help you to have insights that other mere non-book-reading mortals don't.
 
#4 – I would read The Flamethrowers next. This is RK's opus. It's the story of a young woman who grows up in Nevada. She's a bit of what used to be called a tomboy– she grows up working on motorcycles with her Dad and is absolutely fearless. She leaves home and (part 1) races motorcycles in speed trials on the salt flats and then (part 2) moves to NYC to become part of the arts scene where she starts dating the ne'er-do-well scion of a rich Italian industrialist and (part 3) ends up in Italy being ignored and resented by his rich effed-up family. Along the way, you have this sort of dispassionate look at desert landscapes and hot rod life on the Salt Flats; NYC 70's underground art and music scene before moving on to the gorgeous monied villas counterpointed with the social upheavals of '70's Italy. We see it all through the lens of "Reno" – the young woman whose name you never know– in fact, you know nothing about her other than what you gather from how people react to her. As a narrative technique, it's an extraordinary tightrope walk, but Rachel K makes it effortless as a Simone Biles doing, I don't know, something that would be easy for Simone Biles, like tree pose. Or something.
 
Okay! So now you're as prepared as an Eagle Scout and have all the context you need.
 
For one thing, the interior narration style of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers will help you to "get" Sadie and Creation Lake. No one does women narrators like Rachel K – but it's just a book, with a distinct voice and character. And since Romy and Reno and Sadie are all different enough that you won't conflate the protagonist of Creation Lake with the author and believe that since the narrator is shallow and mercenary and "cool" that the author is 34 years old and mercenary and cool.
 
Secondly, after reading her other books, you'll understand that this is a writer at the top of her powers. The book has a sort of subtle authority-in-repose. I mean, this is just part of my personal approach to creative offerings, but when, say, the Coen Brothers put out a movie like A Serious Man I don't ask, man what's up with that ending? Parking lot, whaa? I just assume the Bros know what the F they're doing and give it a think. An easier analogy might be, I don't think for a second that Picasso didn't know how to draw. If Rachel Kushner breaking conventions or going against type, it's a choice. On one hand, sure, the narrator Sadie does meander and sometimes repeat and loop on themes. Other women's appearances and alcohol, for example. But what questions does that raise, beyond the obvious observation that minds do indeed wander and repeat themselves? There is possibility that the reader is being messed with a little; that despite the overall straightforwardness of the narrative, there's a cubist/aburdist moment here and there. Just maybe we're being asked to bring our own context, both personal and societal to the book. So for me, this isn't ENGL 621 though of course where every book is a chance for critic to flex and dissect. (I'm looking at you, London Review of Books, don't embarrass yourself.)*
 
The raw materials here - Sadie, the oddly too real secret agent, the leftist commune, the unflattering look at Europe and late-stage capitalism and later stage idealism, the man in the cave, the historical meanderings. We're all struggling with these questions. The struggle needs to happen. Can we do more than retreat? Every judgement, every critique is a mirror after all. If I think Sadie is a nympho, maybe I look at my own relationships to sex. If Sadie is despicable, perhaps investigate my own misogynistic tendencies. If she's sympathetic, maybe I'm hurt and wondering why no one says hey, why are you doing all this self-destructive, self-defeating behaviors? Need someone to talk to? Etc.
                                                                                                                            
 
It should be obvious by now that I really like Rachel Kushner as a writer. I'm invested in people liking this book. I want everyone to get it, to be in on the joke–as much of it as I'm getting, anyway. That's all.
                                                                                                                                                           
Notes on Structure and Style
 
The book is written in short chapters. You're in Sadie's head, and hers only, for the duration. It's a modified stream-of-consciousness. You get nothing from other characters and no helpful backstory about Sadie either–other than cases that come to mind while she's doing her secret-agent surveille-and-subvert thing. You're learning things about her and about the world as she observes them, circa 2013, rural France. She likes French wine better than Italian. She is not overly charmed by the postcard version of Europe but helps us sees the trashy rural convenience store reality. You can really feel the joy of the writer in the short chapter format. It's like someone smart talking to you with little punchy stories about a sort of business trip, that add up, one after another, to raise questions which creates a kind of forward propulsion. What's going to happen? Is anything going to happen? In the New York Times profile, Rachel Kushner says that she wrote it faster (it took her 14 months) and “It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life,” she said. “When I was writing that book, I do think that I preferred the world that I had made.”
 
So I'm rolling along with Sadie, driving through the French countryside, reading Bruno's emails, plotting and planning, and remembering sometimes, and then at a certain point, you stop trusting the narrator. And I don't mean that Sadie's the traditional modernist "unreliable narrator." What I mean is this: we're all used to reading books about a likeable young woman overcoming the odds in a male dominated society, except ... this strong young woman is a paid operative actively undermining the sort of eco-conscious actions that I, the progressive reader, believe in. And she's getting paid a lot of money to do it. She's just in it for the money.
 
So I begin to question and get a little uncomfortable: Sadie keeps on keepin' on, making insightful funny observations and saying smart things, but are they really? I want to be on her side, because I'm insightful and smart and cool too, and I want to be on the side of the underdog manic pixie dream girl secret agent, but I soon realize her point of view defaults to a cold and mercenary perspective. On top of that, she has an expensive boob job and her attractiveness–for her–is just another weapon in her arsenal. I thought secret agents were supposed to be like a cross between James Bond and Charlie's Angels and AOC. Sadie Smith is not as cool as I thought; just cold. And we never learn why, other than to hear her recount other operations that went sideways. We can guess, of course, from the collective experience of all attractive women growing up in the USA. She's hard-boiled because we ordered our eggs that way.
 
Operationally and structurally speaking, there is a second narrator as well. Bruno is–I'm not joking–an old leftist philosopher who lives in a cave and comes out to eat and send long diatribes via email. He's the sagely elder statesman of group, and ironically, the least ridiculous character. (I know nothing about French leftist politics but he's apparently based on a real person, or at least the people he references are real.) His emails–which Sadie intercepts with her spy skills–form a parallel, and very compelling second narrative. He writes about Neanderthals, and whether they were depressed and smoked; if prehistoric cave paintings were maps of the heavens; he writes a lot about Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and of how the skills that made us the sole surviving. He writes about the reductive/expansive clarity one experiences in the absence of light and sound. Down in the caves he hears things. Voices. The voices of the past and the geographically distant are all present, alive and comingling. This is the Lake of Creation, where the name of the novel comes from. Sadie gets curious and digs into his personal history. His tractor rolled over which killed his young daughter when she was eight years old. Since then, he had progressively retreated from modernity. First, into the barn and then into the darkness of this neolithic cave. Sadie looks forward with anticipation to reading these emails and so do we. It's another device that moves the narrative forward. What will Bruno say next? The promise seems to be that he will eventually come to some sort of insight that will not only give the book a robust philosophical conclusion but will help guide us all - the anarchists of the commune, Sadie, all of us purposeless present-day humans.  
 
Something about the characters.
 
We've talked about Sadie and also Bruno. In addition, tare the upper middle-class French intellectual besties, Pascal and Lucien. Lucien is a filmmaker. Sadie manipulates and uses him to get to Pascal, who is the leader of the leftists. And then there are the various eco-radical residents, ex-residents and wanna-be residents of the commune. The outsiders are the most compelling. Like the aging homeless couple hanging around town.  Sadie calls "The Maos" because they wear Mao hats. There's another older woman who got booted from the commune because she was too loud and old. She's bitter, sort of crazy and sees right through Sadie and keeps a truffle pig in her trunk. And then there's an American ex-con with New York accent and a beer gut who's doesn't really know French but seems to be the only true baddass who lives at the commune. (And in the end, seems to be the only one with any street smarts.) If you want a more professional-ish rundown, feel free to check some other reviews online.
 
The plot is actually a "plot."
 
Most of the rising action of the book takes place in a rural part of France, the Guyenne, which I looked up on Google Maps to confirm if it's real. It's kinda between Bordeaux and Toulouse. Sadie Smith, is hired to infiltrate the group and monitor them. If they haven't already done something stupid enough to get themselves in trouble with the powers-that-be, she's has 'carte blanche' to instigate something so that the right-wing police state can do what it does best: send in the cops. As the book progresses, we learn about her other "missions" in the past. She infiltrates a biker gang, become the leader's "old lady" at the age of 23. She manipulates a naive young man to buy explosives, for which he gets sent to jail. This case gets thrown out on charges of entrapment, for which she loses her government job, and goes freelance after that.
 
Sadie's circuitous way in: She gets Lucien, the best friend of the commune's leader, to fall in love with her. Lucian is a French filmmaker and French and romantic and maybe just dumb. She says she's a dogwalker and he doesn't ask any questions. Why would he; she gets the hot girl bypass.
 
When Lucien gets into production on his movie project, she's able to activate her true intention: she heads off to meet Pascal and supposedly help with some translations at the commune out in the country. That transition is a little blurry, but once again she gets the hot-girl gby
 
After some refreshingly un-charming accounts of the French countryside, she arrives and sets up shop in an old farmhouse owned by Lucien's family. We get the low down on how the commune works. Here in the cloistered commune environment–no surprise–they've imported a class-based system. Ahhh, zee French. We get to know the various duties that people perform and the associated hierarchies. There are the intellectual elite, the Sorbonne-style upper middle class French intellectual types who hang out in the library. The Thinkers. There are the carpenters and guys that do the building. These are the doers. Because they haven't been to college, Pascal and team look down their narrow noses but of course rely upon Rene and his crew to do any actual work. Finally, predictably, though everyone is ostensibly equal, it's the young women who get stuck doing the cleaning, the cooking, and watching the kids.  
 
The head carpenter is a very French, masculine homme called Rene (what else?) with his shocking-blue French eyes and sensual smelling armpits and his sexy breath of beer and cigarettes. He and Sadie have an ongoing affair that is disturbing in its physicality and lovelessness. And I don't mean it's too graphic, it's just a bit too real. The sex that Sadie wants to have with Rene is as straightforward and functional as the sex she doesn't want to have with Lucien. Both relationships make you wish you were a eunuch or a monk; preferably both.  
 
Despite all of her advanced listening tech and skills, no one is saying or doing anything too revolutionary. The commune itself is as harmless as homogenized milk that will eventually get spilled. Pascal does more pontificating than agitating. And Bruno turns out to be a world-weary nonviolent Gandhian at heart, so inevitably, Sadie needs to agitate the agitators and she goes to work.
 
That's enough. Deux pouces vers le haut. Cinq étoiles. You should read it.
 
            *******
 
There was a lot of anticipatory chatter about the book. Rachel Kushner even got a New York Times front-page-of-the-arts-section profile. I tried to stay away from the reviews because I didn't want to get tilted or to receive any spoilers. I like to come to things clean. However, I did read most of a review in the London Review of Books and I skimmed the review in the New Yorker, which I will go back and read. Both reviews were ambivalent at best and the LRB was starkly harsh. It began with bemoaning how our short attention-span culture has infiltrated novel writing. In classic LRB style, they had hired someone to skewer the book because they really have it in for Gen X Americans like Kushner, Franzen and David Foster Wallace.* I really love the LRB but I'm guessing ours is an asymmetrical relationship. I'll bet they don't even like Iggy Pop or the Butthole Surfers, either.
 
And just a few final notes.
 
This book is a poppy narrative, a quick read, with subtle post-novel tendencies. There's some sly social commentary going on, but in a post-ironic way that's easy to miss. Here's what I mean by that: up till now, social commentary might take the form of parody. It could be bitter, it could by dry and observational, it could highly comedic or delivered deadpan. But irony is useless when people really think fluoride makes frogs gay. So we need a new way to point out what's funny. Irony is just too cute, with its just-so jabs and witty rejoinders. What we need now is something French and absurdist; as random and as dumb as the guy who used to run Miss America now running America. 
 
 (As a side note, it helps to imagine the characters in every made-for-TV drama that passes for news to be played by Jerry Lewis or Marcel Marceau.)
 
The book is about subversives being subverted, and in further act of subterfuge, I believe that the book itself subverts our expectations of how a young woman narrator should behave, of what a secret agent should be, of what tourist-trampled Europe is supposed to be, of what left wing idealists are supposed to be, and in the end, of what a novel is supposed to be. It's a little bit of a subversion of the current zeitgeist (which imho, doesn't really have much of a geist at all) of youth when we think we know it all, of idealism, and finally, of the species formerly known as mankind. Another sort of post-novel novel that it reminds me of: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. This book set up certain mysteries and plays with expectations in the same way. We expect the mystery to be solved, but maybe that's not the way life works. We expect the old wise guy to give us the answers, but maybe it's still not time yet. Maybe we're too late stage ... everything ... for Aesops fables and "just-so" stories, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Maybe shit just happens. It leaves us with more questions than answers. And that's how it should be. Keep questioning. We are meant to be as curious as even soul-dead sleuthin' Sadie is when she goes looking for Bruno, and as disappointed when he doesn't appear. Another profitless prophet. Apparently, e can't retreat to the past, either. We gotta find a new path to the waterfall.
 
Right now, we should be questioning–how's it going? How's it working for me? Maybe we are all Sadie, getting paid by The Man, perform daily acts of just to get paid. Or, if we're employed in what appears to be an organization dedicated to good, how are our modes of change working? Are we getting anywhere? Without a workable vision of utopia, if idealism itself is so coldly and inevitably always undermined? how do we move forward to a post-(you fill in the blankness) world?
 
Or have we all just given up and I'm gonna get mine while the ship goes down. That, too be honest, is the most terrifying prospect of all.
 
Though it's set in 2013, Creation Lake is a child of the times. It has the same vertiginous dream logic that I get by just looking around at how people act, both on-screen and off, circa 2024. Reality is the monster on our trail and we are powerless to move and run. Wake me up. While I'm writing this, someone on the plane is watching The Walking Dead. That show seemed to go on and on and - against the odds, with all the zombies around, I take it. Never appealed to me really. We would rather imagine zombies coming back from the dead and attacking us, when the real issue is we are at war with ourselves. That's the real end-times statement, isn't it? Humans have won the battle for survival against the other humanoids and all the megafauna, and now we are, and remain, forever at war with ourselves. If history is our future, and I wish it wasn't, then this doesn't end well.
 
Someone else is texting on their phone, which, unknown to them, distracts me, setting off my misokinesia, which is a new word I learned on r/Reddit, in my searching for a solution to my misophonia. Misokinesia isn't a word of course but I knew immediately what that meant. Hatred of small repetitive movements. Nowadays I need blinders as well as earplugs. So I just put my hat on sideways. I'm too old to give a shit.
 
Maybe I should live in a cave like Bruno, just another aging broken idealist. Or maybe I'll end up in a hillside villa overlooking a deserted cove in Spain, like Sadie.
 
We are self-sabotaging people who all together make a self-sabotaging society.  
 
Put the last touches on this, Thursday November 7, 2024.
 
Well, as my Mom would say, "This should be interesting."
______________________________________________________________________________
 
*Okay, so in true David Foster Wallace fashion, I'm laying a footnote on ya. So, I did just recently re-subscribe to the LRB so I searched the archives and found an incredibly bitter and unkind review of Infinite Jest from 1996. It didn't just pan David Foster Wallace, but lampooned Frantzen as well. I honestly didn't remember too much of Infinite Jest so it was good to get a recap, bitter as it was. One hilarious thing, was that the three things the reviewer pointed out as being most ridiculous, or "Well, duh." were 1) DFW's take on the video phones. 2) DFW's take on monetizing everything, and 3) the main premise of the book, the Monty Python concept of The Killing Joke - (also a band name from back then) or Infinite Jest. The Entertainment that kills. And these are pretty much my favorite prescient things about Infinite Jest and elements that I often point out as his being brilliant and to know enough about human nature to predict the future.
 
1) in the case of video phones, he talked about how everyone got video phones to begin with, but then they missed being able to do anything, like sit on the can, while they were talking on the phone. And then everyone got bummed out because they didn't look great all of the time on video phones. So they started just putting up the best picture of themselves. And then they said to themselves, why stop there? And started putting up a picture of their favorite famous movie star or whatever as an avatar. And then everyone just went back to not using video phones. This of course, isn't exactly right, but does roughly predict our behaviors not just on video calls, but on Zoom and social media and everything that is messing people up nowadays.
 
2) In Infinite Jest, even the years are sponsored. I think it takes place in the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar. Every year a certain product is placed in Lady Liberty's hand, instead of the torch. There had been the year of the Tucks Medicated pad, etc. Nowadays, every inch of everything is branded like a NASCAR car.
 
3) And finally, what is social media if not the killing entertainment, that we can't let go? So compelling that we can't stop looking. It's killing our kids, killing us in cars. We can't even walk the fucking dog anymore without staring crook-necked at the phone the whole time.
 
When I was in 6th grade I was in this "class for the gifted" where they showed us this movie called Future Shock about people's inability to deal with the pace of modern change. We have upped the voltage considerably.
 
The only thing really that's different from Infinite Jest is that the future we're living in is in some ways worse, some ways better and honestly weirder across the board.
 
As for the review of Creation Lake, I skimmed it before reading - This LRB reviewer found the Sadie - the main character – distinctly vapid. Talking about her fake breasts and how sorry she feels for the young mother with the sagging breasts. What the reviewer didn't also mention as context that Sadie is a having a shallow and very physical affair with the woman's husband. That's a Woke Fashion Don't!
 
My immediate intuition was that the LRB reviewer just didn't get it. That maybe the character – a 34-year-old attractive sisgender wanna-be secret agent who thinks she's pulling one over on everyone – is exactly a sendup of self-involved too-cool-for-school tendencies. And after reading the book, my suspicions were confirmed. Though RK isn't taking a swipe at millennials, per se, what she's pointing out is that we're all a bit vacuous, perhaps and undermining our best efforts to be our best. 
 
I personally think when you're a young novelist fresh out of the Iowa Writer's Conference or wherever and you're stewing in your little midwestern swamp, you should approach a writer of RK's talent and track record with a little respect. Everyone's got their own POV, certainly, but the best thing with a writer of RK's caliber is to look at in in context of her output, and learn.
 
 
*******
 
Yet Another Addendum
 
On Thursday, November 21st, 2024 we went to see Rachel Kushner in conversation with Jake Silverstein at the local Unitarian Church here in Montclair, NJ. She's three months or so into a non-stop book tour and they spoke almost exclusively about Creation Lake. Jake Silverstein is the editor in chief of the NY Times Magazine and kind of a heavy hitter. I thought maybe he would talk a little more but he sat back and let Rachel carry the evening. She was more than patient with the questions, and quite transparently enjoy herself. I felt a little bit self-consciously coda about Montclair's light turnout. The room was only about 2/3 full and mostly older folks at that but they took it in stride, making light jokes about the rain–what a relief, it's been months!–and growing up in Unitarian Churches where they were always having bake sales for Nicaragua. In addition she referenced that she'd had an earlier engagement at NYU, so I felt assured she'd had her "cool kids" talk for the day.
 
As it turned out, there were a few there were some artsy/rebel types sprinkled in with the older folks, that surfaced through the questions at the end, regarding cameos by French novelists and the NY art scene. She really brightened up at the last question from the audience, about a NY art persona named Fuque (?) pronouned Fuck-you, which is a lovely little stunt to play on the tongue. So who knows, gray hair and wrinkles can hide an edge, as evidenced by my present obsession with Pippa Garner.
 
Overall, the reassuring and instructive.
 
Right off the bat, just to get it out of the way almost, she characterized Sadie as a "Devil" and utterly unlike herself, the author. In fact, it seems that the narrator Sadie was a complete foil to what the author was really interested in, which was the leftist/anarchist commune and the ideas of Bruno.
 
One mild surprise: She only read only passage, the part where Bruno is talking about being underground and the voices etc and he characterizes it as a Lake of Creation - so now I know where the name came from. I looked for the exact pages until I decided that I was procrastinating and stopped.  
 
And I had one quibble - Rachel and Jake talked a lot about betrayal as a theme. My take is that Sadie had no one to betray, because that's just the way she was built. Built for mischief, without a conscience or much of an interior emotional life. I still think theme of the book is subversion, whether it's all the characters out to subvert the government, or a person subverting them, or subverting our expectations about what a hottie secret agent is supposed to be.  
 
According to the Oxford Dictionary, to subvert is to "undermine the power and authority of an established system, or institution," and I would extend that too people and principles or ideas.
 
Maybe it's just on my mind, because subversion just seems to be going around nowdays.
 
Much of the book was based on time spent in rural France. The truffle pig. The prehistoric objects pulled from the earth and displayed by a farmer. Also, the he writer in the book is a real person, that was researching a book that had similar incident - dairy farmers standing up against the government.
 
With any good writer, they not only entertain, but show you how to see the world. Patti Smith being a prime example of that. Rachel Kushner wanted to write a book with these elements and brought it to life with a sort of writerly hodge-podge, a dream logic. Even Sadie is roughly based on a British male agent who infiltrated these groups and had affairs with some of the women. Who sued the British government. And then the agent did too, because he was - I mean, I should follow this up, but Rachel Kushner said he sued the British government for putting him in a position where he could fall in love.
 
Dangerous business, this subversion.