Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake
Loved by prize committees. Panned by critics. Here’s where I landed.
One of my most anticipated books of the year, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake was longlisted for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award months before its launch. As I think has become typical with Kushner, the mega-attention and high prestige profiles leading up to the book’s release were met with pushback from the critics.
And true to form, knowing this only leads to regret but unwilling to resist, I let myself be sucked into the discourse before I’d even opened the book. Note to self: request an advance copy next time. The criticism impacted my experience of the book and I need to talk about it.
Can you offer some literary therapy today?
NO, BRANDON, I DON’T CARE
If you’re on the fence or haven’t yet heard anything about this book, I have read all the criticism and here’s where I landed.
It’s true. The Creation Lake marketing copy, implying a noir spy novel, sets the casual reader up for disappointment. Creation Lake depicts spycraft as a job that involves a lot of waiting around and indifferent aims subject to the whims of the people in charge. Kind of like most jobs? It’s quite droll, but lacks the typical plot and scheme of the genre.
And the thing the critics generally harped on is true: a cursory interest in anthropology or at least willingness to play along with a character who passes off Wikipedia-like compilations of facts as insight will be helpful to even get through this book.
But I think the slams are overblown. Why expect Kushner to be Zola just because she has set this novel exposing the lack of coherence in what passes for contemporary class conflict in rural France, and a particular critic has recently written a lot about the 19th century French novelist?
That would be like me saying she should write like Edward Abbey because my October list includes the Monkey Wrench Gang, which is also a novel about a group of ecology-minded industrial saboteurs who set bulldozers on fire, featuring a main character who likes beer and littering.
I don’t think having an MFA exempts a critic from the requirement to earn the right to be rude by first having clear in their own mind what an author is exploring before writing the review, and to show they’re taking that project seriously even as they take issue with its execution. To do otherwise reduces the criticism to self-aggrandizing playground taunts, deserving of the classic “I am rubber, you are glue” response.
It’s funny though: as if she anticipates this criticism within her novel, Kushner’s main character Sadie mentions the superiority of the classic French novels, written by men. It’s easy to spot references to French and American classics layered into Creation Lake, if only to poke fun at their conventions and to show how much indifference and resignation has entered into our social mores on these subjects over time.
My take is: Whereas the critics' attention may be fragmented by the pressures of maintaining their own public profiles while influencing that of an author who always seems to draw significant attention, the prize committees focused on the work itself. They judged the plotlessness and pedantic tone of one the characters a fair price to be in on the writerly jokes and for the pay off: a thawing that exposes an ancient, underlying DNA that says “I’m still here,” even as humans change our earth and skies.
What to expect if you read Creation Lake
In the opening scenes, Sadie Smith, the assumed name of a main character whose real name we’ll never learn, drives toward rural Guyenne, France, an area known for its ancient cave dwellings now inhabited mostly by aging hicks.
She becomes increasingly blotto as she stops at each highway rest stop to enjoy the wine selection, all while assuring herself and the reader her driving will remain unaffected. From the outset, we know we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator.
The highway wine sounds varied and passable, but this is not some Emily in Paris vacation scenario, redolent with the scent of lavender and fresh cheese. Sadie’s here from the U.S. on a dirty job, to infiltrate a commune known as Le Moulin. Her aim is ostensibly to discover whether they’re behind the destruction of heavy equipment associated with construction of “megabasins” to hold water in an effort to turn the hard scrabble dairy farm land to industrial production of corn. She assures us with her we’ll see the real Europe: trucking and immigrant labor. Orange panties abandoned on the side of a road.
We get a little of Sadie’s backstory as she drives and settles into the country house where she’ll stage her stakeout. Her mode seduction of a target to gain acceptance into a group of radicals, then entice someone into doing an actionable thing. She’s plainly pretty with well-done breast implants to help make this possible. She’s slightly obsessed with noticing other women’s breast implants, assuring herself that the fact that others will joke about them with her means no one can tell hers are also fake.
As with the drunk driving, her sense of security in her false identity seems to come from a strong belief in her own exceptionalism. She’s irritating in this way, but I did find some amusement in both her snicker-worthy snarkiness and in the opportunities Kushner creates for the reader to see through Sadie’s self-delusions.
Sadie used to work for the FBI, but recently got fired after a job gone wrong, in which the defense successfully argued a case for entrapment. Now she’s working for private “contacts.” She doesn’t really care to know who they are or what their real aims might be.
What follows: a lot of waiting around for direction or intel, tossing empties into the corner of her safe house, to show how much she really does not care. In case you miss this theme of indifference, it will be driven home in a later chapter that consists of a single all-caps sentence: NO, VITO, I DO NOT CARE.
This made me laugh out loud, in part because it marks a switch from the slow pacing and false pretenses into some real action, finally.
And in part because I could imagine Kushner having the same response to her critics.
To pass the time, Sadie reads long lecture-y emails supposedly sent between Le Moulin’s leader Pascal and a character named Bruno Lacombe, an octogenarian writer whose retreat from civilization to live in a cave nearby inspired the commune’s leader. Though Sadie needs portable satellite technology for her spycraft, he’s supposedly writing these emails from said cave then venturing out occasionally to send them.
As the residents of the commune become bored with Bruno’s meditations on Neanderthals and the lessons the extinct race can teach about human progress, Sadie becomes more entranced. Which is mainly indicative of how boring the supposed rabble rousers of the Moulinards really are. They do not do much beyond fulfilling every cliche of this kind of community: the men think and become muddled in their aims. While the women cook and clean and eye each other sideways, the children experience neglect and abuse.
Kushner’s affinity for obscure mid-20th century Italian documentaries of exploited youth carries over from Reno in The Flamethrowers to Sadie. It’s the device that provides us a glimpse of Sadie’s otherwise hidden capacity for empathy. In this case, it focuses her attention toward a minor character, who she mentally calls Franck because she does not know his name, who will become central to the climax of the novel.
In my experience, Creation Lake was a slow read. At 404 pages there were moments I wondered if I should finish it. But threads like Franck and his family, and Bruno’s backstory as a Holocaust survivor plus the occasional flashes of wit from Sadie, kept me in it.
Both of these narratives inform Sadie’s own escape from the world she has pseudo-inhabited. In the end, I found myself caring about her despite myself.
Final thoughts
Writing this summary made me want to go back a read certain parts of Creation Lake again. But honestly, I probably will not put myself through that. Let me know if you want to borrow my copy.
Creation Lake feels like a risky recommendation, and I think that’s part of its intent.
The important thing is to decide for yourself.
Which book are you rooting for to win all the prizes?
Who are the critics you trust enough to read what they have to say before picking up the actual book?
Has a character you disliked ever won you over in the end?
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At the same time I was reading Creation Lake I stumbled across
by , a woman who apparently spent two years living in a cave in a commune near Joshua Tree. I don’t know where this is going but I am invested.
This is interesting! I felt this way about the flamethrowers. Like it’s long and slow but I didn’t regret finishing it? She writes about worlds I’m interested in. But it’s never as exciting as I want them to be haha.
Interesting- i appreciated this Abra! I’ve been curious about it since THE list but there’s nothing I hate more than a blurb that does not live up to the book. I also saw someone from booktok I follow say it was boring so, specifically flat and a bit confusing and would it be fair to say you agree w that? An interesting consensus from you both !