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Rachel Kushner can pinpoint the exact moment she figured out how to write her fourth novel, Creation Lake.
The American author spent years looking for a path to her story about a mysterious American woman who infiltrates a group of eco-activists in rural France while working as an operative for shadowy, unseen powers. Kushner released both the novella, The Mayor of Leipzig, and the non-fiction collection, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, in 2021. But for most fans, Creation Lake is the proper follow-up to her 2018 novel, The Mars Room, a harrowing book about a young mother’s experiences in prison while serving two life sentences. The novel brought Kushner an army of new readers, gushing critical acclaim and landed on the shortlist of the Booker Prize. It also “extracted a serious cost” on her when it came to developing, writing and talking about the novel. With Creation Lake, she searched for a way to execute the story for three years. When she finally wrote what would become the first two lines of the novel, she “all at once figured it out” and found not only clarity but an unusual amount of joy.
“Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking” are the intriguing, if somewhat cryptic, sentences that open Creation Lake. The “he” is Bruno Lacombe, a mysterious mentor to the French activists who communicates through email and seems more fixated on philosophical musings and spreading his views than offering practical nuts-and-bolts advice about revolution. Our protagonist, the 34-year-old secret agent who goes by the name Sadie Smith, intercepts his missives and becomes obsessed with him and his ideas while remaining unsympathetic to the group she has infiltrated.
“I understood that those lines were the thoughts of this man, Bruno Lacombe, who would be the heart of the book, but that they would be conveyed by an intermediary, a woman,” Kushner says.”Very quickly, in writing the first two pages, I came to understand that this woman was a hostile force. She had arrived upon this milieu, this scene in rural France, and this group of activists and hacked into the email account of this very tender elder up there and his somewhat doctrinaire ideas and that she would pull back from conveying those ideas to critique them. So she took form for me as somebody who is a kind of enemy. I have never written that way before.”
Released in early September, Creation Lake has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. The reviews are, for the most part, suitably glowing. The New York Times called it “A smart, sinuous espionage thriller brimming with heat.” Kirkus Reviews called it “a deft, brainy take on the espionage novel” while The Atlantic called it a “surprising swerve” for the novelist.
More than a few reviewers have compared it to Kushner’s 2013 sophomore novel, The Flamethrowers, a similarly multi-layered tale that included sections about the inner workings of a group of young Italian radicals in the 1970s. She says the first spark of inspiration for Creation Lake was imagining a remote village in southwestern France and “a group of young people having decamped there to try to live ideally who are set on a collision course with the French state.” From there, it did take a few swerves.
“I have long wanted to write a novel about such a group and a certain kind of predicament and the opposition between the state and these young people and the social relations between the young people and the locals — the farmers, the bar — I saw the whole scene,” she says. “And then having decided that their mentor would have an investment (in) pre-history, I started looking into pre-history. For a minute I thought it would be an amazing flex to write a novel that took place 30,000 years ago. I toyed with that for a little bit. But it was almost like a joke, or a self-dare. Ultimately, I decided it would be like tying both hands behind the back not to be able to crack into any of the dynamism of contemporary language, thought and environment. I wasn’t really willing to let all that go.”
But she did read a lot about pre-history, which gave shape to Bruno Lacombe.
“I had the milieu and I had Bruno first,” she says. “Sadie only came along last.”
Sadie is certainly an intriguing protagonist. For one, her real name isn’t Sadie and the reader never learns what it is, or much about her at her except that she once did similar undercover work for the government before accusations of entrapment sent her to the private sector. For this assignment, Sadie infiltrates the group of anarchist eco-activists in rural France by offering herself as a lover to Lucien, a well-heeled Parisian with ties to the so-called “Moulinards.” Sadie’s employers are a murky bunch whose true identity is never revealed to her or the reader, but they want her to steer the group into more direct, and perhaps violent, action.
“He slept with a bunch of different people in that milieu and was eventually caught,” Kushner says. “When he was caught by the people he was spying on, they confronted him and he flipped and claimed he went onto their side and was crying and saying ‘It’s you guys I really love.’ It turned out that either that was an act or a momentary feeling that then changed and he flipped back and subsequently disappeared into the private sector. I always wondered what kind of person could do that.”
It may seem like this has the ingredients for a steamy espionage thriller about sex and betrayal and indoctrination and the slippery ethics of undercover work. But while some reviewers have called Creation Lake a spy or espionage thriller, Kushner’s approach to the genre was more nuanced and character-driven.
“(Sadie) seems to be living in a world that is, to a degree, shaped by that genre, even if the novel itself is not quite shaped by the genre,” she says. “I don’t really consider it a thriller. It just doesn’t submit to some of the terms of that form, which can be rather rigid. I do have a lot of respect for the form, but it doesn’t really lend itself to the kind of speculation and thinking that Bruno does, for instance.”
Whatever the case, Kushner says the process of writing the novel once she figured out those first two lines was “the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything.”
“The activity of writing it took on a clarity for me,” she says. “Each day I went into work, the parallel universe I was creating began to shine very vividly. It was almost as if it felt more real to me than my actual life. I am a person who loves life. I think the small joys are so blessed and holy and are there for the pickings daily. But I almost came to prefer the world of the novel as I lived in it for long, breathless jags of writing many hours of the day. After three years of attempting, I executed the whole book in 14 months, which for me is pretty fast. I don’t know what it was specifically about it, but it was just immensely pleasurable for me.”
Rachel Kushner will be in Calgary for Wordfest’s Imaginairium on Oct. 21 at 7:30 PM at the Memorial Park Library.
Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor