Creation Lake, a very buzzy novel from last year, is a spy novel not content with “merely” being a spy novel. It’s protagonist is a freelance agent, currently on an assignment to infiltrate a commune of environmentalists living in the French countryside. She is meant to find out if they are planning any violent protests due to some recent pro-business policies put in place by the French government, or possibly to foment some plans if none are currently in the works.
Not even the reader is privy to the protagonist’s actual name, but Sadie Smith is the false name she is using for this particular job. Sadie made her way into the commune by seducing a French filmmaker who is the commune leader’s oldest friend. While Sadie expresses ambivalence at using sex to get information, her disgust stems much more from her paramour’s lack of skills than any ethical quandary.
In addition to her in-person work at the commune, Sadie dives into researching the movement and its inspirations, including a retired, elderly activist named Bruno Lacombe living largely apart from society in a series of caves in the remote countryside and emerging only periodically to reply to emails from the commune in which they seek guidance for building a stronger movement while he mostly responds with lengthy digressions on his pet subject: anthropology.
While Sadie can tell the leaders of the commune are growing tired of Bruno’s lectures on the ever-changing scholarship on the early humans known as Neanderthals, but she finds herself drawn to the man and his ideas, even though they ostensibly have little to do with her assignment. While at first, the reader is likely to relate to Sadie’s interest in Bruno’s puzzling obsession, over time I believe most will come to understand the other activist’s point of view.
Creation Lake is a remarkably daring tightrope walk of a novel. Not many authors would dare to thwart genre expectations so thoroughly. Nor would they attempt to get readers to accept such an unlikable, unreliable narrator on top. In this way Creation Lake reminded me a bit of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, like Remains of the Day or Klara and the Sun, where he sets himself a very difficult challenge by filtering the story through an extremely limited perspective. In the case of Creation Lake, the story has to be revealed through Sadie’s eyes, and is thus limited by her hypocrisy and ultimate lack of self-awareness. “Sadie” is a very opinionated person, given to making outrageous pronouncements with little actual evidence to back them up. She acts like she is a master of her craft, while making some very obvious mistakes to the reader’s eyes.
The thing about tightrope walks, though, is that they can be quite boring in the middle. Seeing someone have the audacity to get on the wire is exhilarating, and seeing them make it across is a tremendous relief. But in between, unless there appears to be a real danger of falling, there’s not a whole lot going on. While Kushner is laying out the extent of her self-imposed challenge, the reader is enthralled. But after that, Creation Lake gets bogged down in repetition. Kushner keeps going back to Bruno’s anthropology lectures long after they have ceased to be of interest, whereas her efforts among the actual activists get short shrift. Kushner also botches the ending, opting for an anti-climax that raises the question of why she bothered to write such a novel and why anyone else would enjoy reading it.
As one of those readers, I admire Kushner’s ambition, but the execution left a lot to be desired.
