“Creation Lake,” Reviewed: Rachel Kushner’s Anti-Spy, Anti-Realism Novel

“Creation Lake” is studded—you might say clogged—with such musings. What is Bruno actually proposing in these hundred and twenty-nine words? That we all come from somewhere, from someone. The inflated pedantry of his style, all those technical-sounding terms and incantatory clauses in the service of a simple idea, seems practically comic, but Kushner presents it earnestly, without a hint of irony. She has staged her novel as a kind of dialectic; if Sadie is all superficial knowingness, Bruno seems to represent actual knowledge, his mystical isolation offered up as a counterweight to her worldly glibness, and a salvation from it.

As a literary conceit, this is all well and good. As a literary device, it deadens the page. Between Bruno’s philosophizing and Sadie’s speechifying, your enjoyment of the novel may depend on your tolerance for being lectured. Mine, low to begin with, vanished as the book progressed, or, rather, failed to. Sadie’s “real Europe” bit appears on page 29. More than a hundred pages later, she is back to riffing on the same theme, this time inspired by the sight of two road workers in coveralls, but she still has not met Pascal. Kushner heaps flashback upon flashback; minor characters flare promisingly to life—a creepy uncle of Lucien’s, a disgruntled ex-Moulinard—before sputtering out, victims of their own inconsequence. Eventually, Sadie has a tryst with a Moulinard named René, who is straight out of central casting for terse French men who like to smoke and fuck. “Creation Lake” has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and I can hear the rebuttals from the novel’s defenders: Kushner is not writing a spy novel—she is subverting the spy novel! She is the true secret agent, using the ruse of promised genre pleasures to smuggle in a discussion of ideas! But the notion that a book is playing with its genre is cold comfort when the play proves a slog. Stalling is not the same thing as suspense, and plot is an unfortunate thing to dispense with in a spy story, even—maybe especially—if it is only a pastiche of one.

A novel, of course, can survive, even thrive, without plot. What it cannot weather is indifference. “The Mars Room” and “The Flamethrowers” are riveting books, but it is not story alone that makes them so; it is their protagonists, those bruised women who come spectacularly alive on the page—who, with their ambitions, their vulnerabilities, their pride and confusion and painful regrets, seem fully human, and, yes, real. You want to see what Reno and Romy see, to feel what they feel. You care, and caring, in fiction, is the whole game.

In that sense, readers of novels are as much of a mark as people who fall for any other kind of scam, and Kushner knows it. When Sadie, referring to the persona that she puts on to lure Lucien, calls herself “a woman who didn’t exist,” she is telling the truth two times over. Can we really blame Lucien for falling in love with an imaginary character when we do it all the time? Throughout the novel, Kushner draws our attention to the trickery that is her trade; where she once encouraged our sympathetic intimacy with her fictions, she now prefers estrangement. To stress Sadie’s artificiality, Kushner tells us nearly nothing of her “actual” life, save for the bizarrely specific detail that she was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in rhetoric at Berkeley, where she despised a cohort of “fake tough girls” for their “craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge.” This could double as a description of Sadie. In some ways, she seems to be a classic unreliable narrator: the woman who claims to see through others can’t truly see herself.

But, where the novel should open a gap between our perception and hers, it too often mirrors her withering, blinkered point of view. Take Pascal Balmy. Before she meets him, Sadie suspects that she will find him ridiculous; she knows that he is a wealthy Parisian—he purchased the land for Le Moulin with his inheritance—who apparently models himself on the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord. Balmy does prove to be slightly sinister and fully absurd, in the way of self-important cult leaders everywhere, and Le Moulin even more so. As an agricultural project, it is a failure; as a revolutionary one, it is a joke. When Sadie finally arrives at the commune, she immediately notices that society’s ancient disparities have been magnified there. Women do the dishes, men do the thinking; the children are left to fend for themselves. “We are not the first group to discover that a division of labor between the genders reasserts itself when you try to live in a communal structure,” Pascal tells her. This is funny, biting. But a leftist commune that falls short of its utopian ideals is as obvious a target for ridicule as a fancy Parisian café—and since Kushner gives us no reason to take the people who live there seriously, we don’t.