Spotlight on “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

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Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.

About Creation Lake

“Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.

Source: Publisher
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN13: 9781982116521
Publication Date: September 3, 2024

Praise for Creation Lake

“A profound and irresistible page-turner about a spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in rural France. The prose is thrilling, the ideas electrifying.”—The Booker Prize 2024 judges on Creation Lake

“An immersive novel about an agent provocateur embedded within a group of environmental activists in south-western France, and slowly becoming mesmerized by the group elder’s theories about Neanderthals. It’s seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall.”—Mick Herron, The Guardian

“Surprising and delectable… This ecstatic vision of the collective human experience shimmers in stark opposition to the corporate plan to extract and lock up the valley’s groundwater. A brain-spinning tale and searing look at our perilous estrangement from nature.”—Booklist, starred review

“An undercover agent embeds with radical French environmentalists in this scintillating story of activism and espionage from Kushner…Most of the narrative is dedicated to the activists’ philosophizing and Sadie’s gimlet-eyed observations, which Kushner magically weaves together…Readers will be captivated.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sadie is similar to Kushner’s earlier fictional protagonists—astringent, thrill-seeking, serious, worldly—but here the author has tapped into a more melancholy, contemplative mode that weaves neatly around a spy story… Kushner has captured the internal crisis of ideology that spy yarns often ignore, while creating an engaging tale in its own right. A deft, brainy take on the espionage novel.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn’t be this much fun.”—Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

“By writing in the unillusioned voice of an ex-FBI agent infiltrating a bunch of rural French subversives, Rachel Kushner has cover to say whatever she damn well pleases. And because Kushner has the most bracing intelligence in American fiction, she rips the skin off what many of us like to think we believe.”—David Hare

About Rachel Kushner, Author of Creation Lake

Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers (named a Top 100 Best Book of the 21st Century by The New York Times), and Telex from Cuba, as well as short story collection, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She won the Prix Médicis and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Source: Publisher
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN13: 9781982116521
Publication Date: September 3, 2024

You can find and follow Rachel Kushner on her website, and on Instagram.

Titles by Rachel Kushner

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