Rachel Kushner’s Covert Op Against Realism

The narrator of "Creation Lake" (Scribner), Rachel Kushner's new novel, is the pseudonymous Sadie Smith, a thirty-four-year-old American who specializes in infiltrating tight-knit groups of rebels, radicals, and subversives. She has penetrated a criminal biker gang and attempted to entrap eco-anarchists committed to animal liberation. Her current mission has landed her in France, where she is tasked with surveilling an anarchist commune called Le Moulin, in the southwestern region of Guyenne. The Moulinards farm; they raise their children collectively; and, though the government cannot yet prove it, they are suspected of sabotaging local infrastructure in order to cripple—or at least hobble—the capitalist state. Six months before the novel's action begins, five costly excavators that were being used to dig a "megabasin," a huge, plastic-lined reservoir intended to store water for the industrial production of corn, were found burned in a presumed act of arson. "Between Boulière and Tayssac I had seen this corn, vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon," Sadie observes. The Moulinards deplore such environmental degradation—one of their goals is to "rewild" the surrounding ecosystem—but Sadie is unbothered. She's a mercenary, unfreighted by qualm or scruple. She doesn't even know the identity of the shadowy "contacts" who have hired her—only that they are paying her well.

Chief among Sadie's assets are her command of languages and her "banal and conventional looks," which she tallies like a shopkeeper's list of dry goods: "symmetrical face, small straight nose, regular features, brown eyes, brown hair, clear skin." (Lest her marks miss the point, she has augmented these features with breast implants.) In preparation for her mission, she has already targeted a dopey filmmaker named Lucien, an old friend of the Moulinards' leader, Pascal Balmy. Sadie hopes that Lucien can vouch for her, but first she must get him to trust her himself. "It's the same, whether you're in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one," she reports. "They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth." That is not all they want. To endure Lucien's grim conversation and grimmer sex, Sadie remains aloof: "I suppressed my laughter, laughed only inwardly, bearing witness to his adolescent memories as if they were not a cliché, and instead, as if they mattered."

This is a knowing voice, mordant and jaded. Kushner loves to write in the first person, pressing the reader close to the wary women she takes as her protagonists. Romy Hall, the main narrator of Kushner's previous novel, "The Mars Room" (2018), is a former strip-club dancer serving two consecutive life sentences in a high-security California prison for killing her stalker. The heroine of Kushner's breakout book, "The Flamethrowers" (2013), a young artist and motorcycle racer nicknamed Reno, is thrust into the freewheeling New York art world of the nineteen-seventies, and, later, gets mixed up with aristocrats and Marxists in Italy. Prison, the art world, the militant French left: these are exotic, alien milieus, and Romy's and Reno's ability to survive in them depends, as does Sadie's, on how cannily they can deploy their powers of observation, holding themselves at a remove while seeming to blend in.

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Indeed, Sadie is eager to tell us just how much she sees that other people don't, and she is constantly interrupting the novel's action to do it. As the book opens, she is driving from Marseille to Guyenne to meet up with Pascal. Pulling over to relieve herself on a quiet hillside, she notices "a pair of women's Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level." This lurid sight, redolent of sexual violence, or at least of sexual commerce, prompts Sadie to hold forth on what she calls "the real Europe":

The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping. . . . The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called "Europe," a Texas-sized parcel of which is called France.

This riposte to the frothy clichés of French life is as trite, in its grizzled, hardboiled way, as the delusions that it claims to dispel. The "posh café" that Sadie has chosen as the object of her scorn is recognizable as Angelina, a famed tourist destination in an upscale shopping district—it stakes about as much of a claim to representing "the real Europe" as does "Emily in Paris." And what could it mean, anyway, to call one of these scenes "real" and the other not? How does Sadie think the cocoa for the hot chocolate gets where it's going? The realm of Parisian luxury is intimately connected to the anonymous transport of the highway, and a novelistic way of seeing allows for the acknowledgment of both realities; in fact, it mandates it. But Sadie views the truth as a contest between the duped and the clear-eyed. It is vitally important to her to prove that she is smarter-than, a point of vanity that sets her up to be the biggest fool of all.

To balance this cynic's vinegar, Kushner gives us a sage. On the book's first page, we meet Bruno Lacombe, mentor to the Moulinards. Bruno is an "anti-civver." Since moving to Guyenne, in the seventies, as part of the back-to-the-land movement, he has receded from all but the most rudimentary social life, spending long stints alone in a cave. He is skeptical of technological, political, and even evolutionary advancement—he holds the Neanderthals in high regard—though, curiously, he is fond of e-mail, which he uses to communicate with the Moulinards. Sadie has hacked his account in the hope of uncovering evidence of their disruptive plans. Instead, she finds extended ruminations on the condition of man, the nature of time, and other grand themes, which she transmits as a kind of reported speech:

Bruno said that transmigration, what some called metempsychosis, wasn't magic in the degraded sense of taking place outside physical laws or as conjured by people draped in wizards' cloaks. Transmigration, he said, was the entire story of people and their long history, archived as chains of information inside the bodies of every living person. No man was not the product of such a chain. Every human was a child of a child of a child of children of mysterious mothers who once lived, and whose secrets we carry. This was our genome, Bruno said. Science and technology are embattled terrain among those who reject capitalism, he acknowledged, but the new discoveries in the study of ancient DNA were stunning and consequential. They have to be dealt with, Bruno said.

"Creation Lake" is studded—you might say clogged—with such musings. What is Bruno actually proposing in these hundred and twenty-nine words? That we all come from somewhere, from someone. The inflated pedantry of his style, all those technical-sounding terms and incantatory clauses in the service of a simple idea, seems practically comic, but Kushner presents it earnestly, without a hint of irony. She has staged her novel as a kind of dialectic; if Sadie is all superficial knowingness, Bruno seems to represent actual knowledge, his mystical isolation offered up as a counterweight to her worldly glibness, and a salvation from it.

As a literary conceit, this is all well and good. As a literary device, it deadens the page. Between Bruno's philosophizing and Sadie's speechifying, your enjoyment of the novel may depend on your tolerance for being lectured. Mine, low to begin with, vanished as the book progressed, or, rather, failed to. Sadie's "real Europe" bit appears on page 29. More than a hundred pages later, she is back to riffing on the same theme, this time inspired by the sight of two road workers in coveralls, but she still has not met Pascal. Kushner heaps flashback upon flashback; minor characters flare promisingly to life—a creepy uncle of Lucien's, a disgruntled ex-Moulinard—before sputtering out, victims of their own inconsequence. Eventually, Sadie has a tryst with a Moulinard named René, who is straight out of central casting for terse French men who like to smoke and fuck. "Creation Lake" has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and I can hear the rebuttals from the novel's defenders: Kushner is not writing a spy novel—she is subverting the spy novel! She is the true secret agent, using the ruse of promised genre pleasures to smuggle in a discussion of ideas! But the notion that a book is playing with its genre is cold comfort when the play proves a slog. Stalling is not the same thing as suspense, and plot is an unfortunate thing to dispense with in a spy story, even—maybe especially—if it is only a pastiche of one.

A novel, of course, can survive, even thrive, without plot. What it cannot weather is indifference. "The Mars Room" and "The Flamethrowers" are riveting books, but it is not story alone that makes them so; it is their protagonists, those bruised women who come spectacularly alive on the page—who, with their ambitions, their vulnerabilities, their pride and confusion and painful regrets, seem fully human, and, yes, real. You want to see what Reno and Romy see, to feel what they feel. You care, and caring, in fiction, is the whole game.

In that sense, readers of novels are as much of a mark as people who fall for any other kind of scam, and Kushner knows it. When Sadie, referring to the persona that she puts on to lure Lucien, calls herself "a woman who didn't exist," she is telling the truth two times over. Can we really blame Lucien for falling in love with an imaginary character when we do it all the time? Throughout the novel, Kushner draws our attention to the trickery that is her trade; where she once encouraged our sympathetic intimacy with her fictions, she now prefers estrangement. To stress Sadie's artificiality, Kushner tells us nearly nothing of her "actual" life, save for the bizarrely specific detail that she was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in rhetoric at Berkeley, where she despised a cohort of "fake tough girls" for their "craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge." This could double as a description of Sadie. In some ways, she seems to be a classic unreliable narrator: the woman who claims to see through others can't truly see herself.

But, where the novel should open a gap between our perception and hers, it too often mirrors her withering, blinkered point of view. Take Pascal Balmy. Before she meets him, Sadie suspects that she will find him ridiculous; she knows that he is a wealthy Parisian—he purchased the land for Le Moulin with his inheritance—who apparently models himself on the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord. Balmy does prove to be slightly sinister and fully absurd, in the way of self-important cult leaders everywhere, and Le Moulin even more so. As an agricultural project, it is a failure; as a revolutionary one, it is a joke. When Sadie finally arrives at the commune, she immediately notices that society's ancient disparities have been magnified there. Women do the dishes, men do the thinking; the children are left to fend for themselves. "We are not the first group to discover that a division of labor between the genders reasserts itself when you try to live in a communal structure," Pascal tells her. This is funny, biting. But a leftist commune that falls short of its utopian ideals is as obvious a target for ridicule as a fancy Parisian café—and since Kushner gives us no reason to take the people who live there seriously, we don't.

It can seem, here and elsewhere, that Kushner has grown uneasy with the artifice that is the root of her art, so eager is she to dismiss the world that she has assiduously created and peopled. In one of his e-mails, Bruno discusses the celebrated cave paintings made by Homo sapiens, for which he has nothing but scorn. "The Homo sapiens was a copier," he tells the Moulinards. "Despite his virtuosity in drawing animals and scenes of hunting, he depicted what was already there." Neanderthals, with their abstract markings, their "dots, slants, cuts," were the true artists, the dreamers of fantastical dreams. So Kushner is staging a disparagement of realism, the mode that she has worked in so expertly, and, at the same time, situating it at the very core of our humanness. Bruno is right: a weakness it may be, but Homo sapiens cannot live on abstraction alone. Throughout the book, Bruno is totally disembodied, like the Wizard of Oz hidden safely behind his curtain. Sadie never does meet him, though she tries. His very immateriality seems to heighten his guru-like power over her, even as it shrinks his consequence to us.

Sometimes, though, Kushner lets us glimpse the man behind the inert myth, and, when she does, it is wonderful. In the middle of the novel, Bruno begins to describe a memory from his childhood, during the Second World War. He came from Paris, where his parents were involved with the Communist Party, and had an older brother, Maxime; his maternal grandparents were Jews from Odesa by the name of Kouchnir. In the summer of 1942, when rumors spread that families were being rounded up to be deported, their parents sent Maxime, then twelve, to Burgundy, and Bruno, five, to a farm in the Corrèze. Only later did he learn that his parents had been in the Resistance; in any case, he never saw them or his brother again. One day, the Germans came to the village where he was living. The old woman caring for Bruno hid with him in the hayloft of a barn. After the Germans left, Bruno and the village boys went gallivanting about the woods, and found a dead German soldier and near him his helmet, "which lay on its own like a giant walnut shell, empty and discarded." Bruno put the helmet on. A few hours later, his head began to itch; the child had caught the dead Nazi's lice.

This is an astonishing moment, eerie and reverberant with unspoken meaning. Bruno doesn't let it stay unspoken for long: the lice, he insists, represent the "transmigration of life, from one being to the next, from past to future." But we don't need the moment parsed for us, flattened into the symbolic. It is enough to see the empty helmet, and the body lying next to it, to feel the boy's wonder, his curiosity, and then the agony of the lice crawling on his scalp. That is the kind of transmigration that fiction can accomplish: the transfer of experience from an invented person to an actual one, so that what began in the imagination becomes, finally, real.