Creation Lake

April 1, 2024

Award-winning Kushner (The Mars Room) writes a literary noir. An American secret agent, "Sadie Smith," is sent to infiltrate an anarchist collective in France. She first targets member Lucien but soon becomes intrigued by the mysterious Bruno, whose ideas and own tragic story are beginning to seduce her. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from June 17, 2024
An undercover agent embeds with radical French environmentalists in this scintillating story of activism and espionage from Kushner (The Mars Room).
Sadie Smith, a former FBI agent who lost her job after she was accused of entrapment, takes an assignment from unidentified contacts in the private sector. Her mission is to infiltrate the subversive commune Le Moulin, which is led by activist Pascal Balmy and is suspected of having destroyed a set of excavators at a reservoir construction site. Le Moulin’s ideas derive from their elderly mentor, Bruno Lacombe, who has spent the past 12 years living in caves. Bruno emerges from time to time to communicate with the group by email, but none of the characters see him in person. In Paris, Sadie seduces a filmmaker friend of Pascal’s to secure an introduction to him. Kushner intersperses Sadie’s tale with Bruno’s colorful claims, such as the alleged superiority of the Neanderthals (their square jaw was a “sunk cost”) and the existence of mythological creatures like Bigfoot (“We are not alone”). Eventually, Sadie learns of the group’s plans to protest a local fair, and she
approaches the conclusion of her assignment with alarming amorality. Most of the narrative is dedicated to the activists’ philosophizing and Sadie’s gimlet-eyed observations, which Kushner magically weaves together (“People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position,” Sadie muses. “But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric... is to shore up their own identity”). Readers will be captivated. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

Starred review from July 1, 2024
A woman infiltrates a cabal of French radicals. Will she go native? The narrator of Kushner's fourth novel goes by Sadie, though her real name--like much of her identity--is clouded in mystery. She works undercover to undermine environmental activists, formerly for the U.S. government, but since a case went sideways, she's gone freelance. Now, she's been commissioned by unnamed "contacts" to disrupt the Moulinards, a small farming cooperative in southwestern France protesting a government effort to construct a "megabasin" to support large-scale corporate farming. The Moulinards' leader, Bruno, is an "anti-civver," skeptical not just of capitalism but of the entire human species. (His writings--he exists largely in the form of email dispatches--argue that Neanderthals might have been better adapted for the planet.) Sadie has an arsenal of tools to monkey-wrench the monkey wrenchers--a willingness to exchange sex for access, a knack for languages and hacking, well-made cover stories, fake passports--but her work among the Moulinards stokes her own identity crisis. As she enters their world, she processes their enthusiasm, their philosophy (there are abundant references to critic Guy Debord), and their paranoia, which escalates as a national minister plans a visit to the region, upping the stakes. As if echoing Bruno's concern, Sadie is such a slyly clever human that she's undermining her own humanity. Sadie is similar to Kushner's earlier fictional protagonists--astringent, thrill-seeking, serious, worldly--but here the author has tapped into a more melancholy, contemplative mode that weaves neatly around a spy story. Nobody would mistake it for a thriller, but Kushner has captured the internal crisis of ideology that spy yarns often ignore, while creating an engaging tale in its own right. A deft, brainy take on the espionage novel.

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Starred review from August 1, 2024
She had planned to earn a PhD in rhetoric at Berkley. Instead, the narrator in Kushner's surprising and delectable fourth novel, following The Mars Room (2018), became a secret agent versed in undermining social justice movements. A gig with the federal government went disastrously wrong, and now this tough, polylingual, snidely witty 34-year-old adept at weaponizing her good looks is in rural France. Her assignment is to infiltrate a radical farming cooperative her shadowy employers believe is intent on sabotaging the building of a "massive industrial reservoir." Calling herself Sadie Smith, she has seduced a Frenchman from a prominent family in the region and commandeered their 300-year-old house in the Guyenne Valley while he's away. Her spying includes intercepting and reading emails sent by the group's cave-dwelling guru, Bruno Lacombe, who shares provocative, inadvertently hilarious, ultimately affecting theories about Neanderthals, caves, and the deep subterranean "lake of our creation." This ecstatic vision of the collective human experience shimmers in stark opposition to the corporate plan to extract and lock up the valley's groundwater. Kushner's long fascination with underground rebels and their uprisings attains new depths and resonance in this bravura improvisation on the secret-agent trope; this brain-spinning tale of lies, greed, surveillance, crimes against nature, and ecowarriors; this searing look at our perilous estrangement from nature.

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