Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake revolves around an anti-hero spy poised to take down an eco-commune
The American author discussed her novel on Bookends with Mattea Roach
From the Cuban Revolution, California prisons, to motorcycle racing, and most recently, an eco-commune in France, American writer Rachel Kushner tackles a wide range of unique settings and pressing issues in her fiction and nonfiction.
"She inhabits the lives of far-flung characters who find themselves swept up in social and political movements," said Mattea Roach in the introduction of their conversation on Bookends.
"For the women at the centre of her stories, identity is often fluid, a kind of performance act."
Kushner's latest novel, Creation Lake, which is nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize, takes it to the next level.
It tells the story of Sadie, an undercover agent tasked with sabotaging a young group of activists. But as the writings of a radical thinker named Bruno start to infiltrate her mind, Sadie starts to rethink her choices and the consequences of her transient life.
Kushner's previous work consists of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers and Telex From Cuba, the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K and the essay collection The Hard Crowd.
She joined Roach to discuss how Creation Lake fits into genre and writing the unraveling of an anti-hero.
Mattea Roach: Do you see your novel as a spy story, and what sort of vision did you have in mind putting it together?
Rachel Kushner: In terms of the vision that I had, for many years I knew that I would eventually write a novel set in a rural part of southwestern central France, among a group of young people who have decamped from Paris to try to find a way to live outside of the depredations, if you will, of capitalism in cities.
They want to try to figure out how to subsistence farm. They want to make meaningful connections to the local culture and sort of tap into a long agrarian history, which is part of French culture.
I have familiarity with this milieu. I have an understanding of what the struggles in these kinds of communal societies are, and I know the region really well. The thing that took me a long time to figure out about this novel was who would tell the story. I had always assumed it would be an American woman, somebody who arrives to this commune and can see it from outside.
So Sadie is somebody who works in the private sector. She speaks multiple languages. She has been hired by who she calls her "contacts." She doesn't really know who these people are, but assumes that they are investors in industrial farming in concert with somebody in the French government. And having somebody who is a privately contracted spy, who is surveilling and infiltrating a group of French activists, it seems naturally to lend itself to an acknowledgement or a borrowing of certain aspects of the noir genre.
MR: Bruno's this mentor to the activists in the book, who lives underground in a cave. We only encounter him through this series of emails that he writes to the activists that Sadie intercepts. Can you talk a bit more about Bruno and some of his ideas?
RK: Bruno is somebody who I conceived of as being very formed by what happened in Paris in May of 1968, when there was a sort of flash of hope and excitement about the fall of the French government, which failed. Many of those people moved to the countryside to renovate this idea that there was revolutionary possibility there.
Bruno is somebody who has actually decided, devastatingly, that capitalism is absolutely here to stay. This is a feeling that a lot of us have. I'm much more interested in philosophical questions of how we're meant to live and where we took our wrong turn. And why is it, as Bruno describes it, that currently we are careening off a cliff in a shiny, driverless car? And the question is, how do we exit this car?
I'm much more interested in philosophical questions of how we're meant to live and where we took our wrong turn.- Rachel Kushner
But Bruno has this kind of homespun philosophy that revolution is still possible, but in an interior manner — that he can "leave this world while staying in it." He has rejected civilization almost entirely and is living in an underground cavern on his own rural property. He was inspired by a real person who I know something about, who apparently does live underground but seems to be in regular e-mail communication with some French activists I know, and I loved the contradiction of that.
MR: Can you tell me a little bit more about Sadie? Because I know you've called her before a kind of devil, which I thought was such an interesting way to describe the main character of your novel.
RK: There is a literary precedent to a narrator who is an anti-hero. It's been interesting to see that people sometimes might struggle with the idea that this narrator isn't a good person. And moreover, more bizarrely, that she isn't me.
She's a cop and a narc who is bluntly resistant to a kind of sympathy that I myself possess. She is designed as sort of 180 degrees from me, whereas I would have a lot of sympathy for the project of trying to find a way to live without the incursions of the state, where people are trying to sort of collectivize things and find a way to live in harmony with nature, she sees no purpose in that at all.
But it's not that she's a reactionary or a conservative. She doesn't have morality because she's decided that she's not really an individual. And in fact, the need to reconfirm one's ego identity, one's ego formation, one's social identity in a group, to Sadie, that's a form of weakness, whereas that's primarily what the rest of us have as our sense of self.
Sadie is in an existential crisis without knowing it, and that's part of why she is both very insistent that she's a perfectionist and doesn't make mistakes, and that she can sense other people's weaknesses that they themselves cannot sense. But also, there's something underneath that is a lack, that results in her distinct vulnerability to the sermonizing of Bruno Lacombe.
She doesn't have morality because she's decided that she's not really an individual.- Rachel Kushner
Bruno has no idea that Sadie even exists. But for her, it's like he's her only friend, because she's paying such close attention to his emails, and she finds herself, over the course of the book, kind of agreeing with Bruno.
But maybe more than that, she's vulnerable to him, and she's moving through the landscape and seeing it through Bruno's eyes — almost as if the world is suddenly taking on colour for her.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.
