Creation Lake
It’s like when you’re sitting in a window-filled room and the clouds start moving juuust a smidge so that when the sunlight peeks and then recedes you nonetheless feel your entire mood fluctuate with these subtlest of shifts. Quietly provocative.
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s Booker-shortlisted novel, isn’t really a spy novel. Nor is it a novel explicitly about double lives or identity crises or lying. It doesn’t possess the zippiness or superficiality that would deem a book pinned only to those descriptors a “romp.” But the main character is, in fact, an American operative, and she (“Sadie Smith”) has been sent to a commune in rural France to get the skinny on planned acts of violence.
There’s a lot of anthropology and archaeology and general culture study going on here. Between Sadie’s study of character (the subjects she’s following, but also hers because…who is she, really?) and the book’s fixation on species/groups who came before — Neanderthals, Hominids, Cagots — I spent beaucoup de time pondering something that I already think about a lot: Is it true that “people are the same wherever you go”?
So I’d say that Creation Lake is quietly provocative — maybe like an effective spy. (That said, I haven’t been able to suss out whether Sadie is, actually, a good spy or not…)
originally published on instagram