‘Creation Lake,’ Potential Booker Prize Winner: Really?

One must imagine Rachel Kushner happy that her latest novel Creation Lake landed on the short list for the Booker Prize. But, alas, one must also wonder if she thought, “Really?”

The book is not what you call good, and is a marked letdown from her earlier work, including 2013’s The Flamethrowers. It has many of the hallmarks from her previous fiction — explorations of paranoia, conspiracy and the long hand of history rendered in beautifully crafted, sometimes startling sentences — but it lacks the deft handling and lacks the spark. And, it drags.

“Creation Lake” tells the story of free-lance provocateur Sadie Smith (not her real name) who shady corporate interests hire to infiltrate an anarchist collective in southwestern France suspected of sabotaging the construction of a massive industrial reservoir. To get close to the group, she seduces a young filmmaker who comes from money and knows the leader of the collective, the similarly well-heeled Pascal Balmy. As she researches the group she grows obsessed with the writings of one Bruno Lacombe, a sort of guru for the group who lives in a cave and is convinced that the Neanderthals were superior to the Homo sapiens (us). And along the way she makes many, many observations about wine, pasta, sex, politics, etc. Positive reviews, and the attendant PR campaign, hail these bon mots as brilliant and hilarious. If you disagree with this consensus, you’re likely not going to enjoy the book.

Let’s take one example, oft-cited presumably because it appears early on. Sadie is taking a leak in the woods behind a closed mountain inn when she discovers a pair of women’s underpants hanging from some bushes, the apparent memento of an assignation between a trucker and prostitute. For Sadie the panties become a synecdoche for “Europe.” “The real Europe is not a posh cafe on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate … That is a conception of Europe cherished by certain Parisians and as imaginary as the pastoral scenes in the frescoes on the walls of the posh cafe.”

What’s the real Europe?

“The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. … It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move though a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.” These men will ignore weight limitations on their loads, and safety inspections on their brakes. They will text someone at home in their ethno-national language, listen to pop music in English, and get their needs met locally, in empty lots on mountain passes.”

As Alexandra Schwartz notes in her New Yorker review, one of the few negative ones out there, Sadie’s take is trite. It’s also, if not an outright Le Pen analysis, very close to one. And then worst of all, there’s the bad writing. The part that had me rolling my eyes was the folderol around the “posh cafe.” Who talks like that? Not a hardboiled agent provocateur. 

That is … unless it’s a signal that Sadie really isn’t all that. That the freely dispensed superficial sophistries are a cover for some issues and limitations. And, indeed, while reviews talk about the character’s facade cracking over the course of the book, it’s clear early on that she is bad at her job (she’s freelance because the FBI fired her, after all). Problematic protagonists who are in way over their heads is spy and noir staple. But leaning in on heavy-handed philosophizing — Lacombe’s musings on the Neanderthals start to feel like the Invisible Committee riffing on The Clan of the Cave Bear—is not one of them.

Kushner has enthused about the novel Nada by the king of French noir Jean-Patrick Manchette, in which a female assassin wreaks havoc on a backwater town. Fatale is 90 pages long. Nada, a Manchette novel about a ragtag band of radicals kidnapping an American ambassador, is 197 pages long. Both have more life and bigger ideas, more lightly shared, than anything in Creation Lake, which clocks in at 404 pages. When it comes to novels of ideas, bigger isn’t necessarily better.

When I picked up Creation Lake at my local independent they handed me a promotional box of matches. Someone is clearly pushing for this book and it wouldn’t surprise me if it wins the Booker. If it does it’s not because of the quality of the book but because the judges felt she was due, like some fading actor getting a lifetime achievement award after an Oscarless career. Which is odd, given Kushner was born in 1968 and has more race to run. Either way, we’ll find out on Nov. 12.