Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room) envelops her readers in an absorbing tale of espionage, philosophy, intrigue, and chaos with her noir fourth novel, Creation Lake.

An unnamed narrator opens these pages with extended quotations from the e-mails of a man named Bruno Lacombe, which she is reading without his knowledge. Bruno's ideas will form an important thread throughout the novel, although he never appears in the flesh; the epistolary sections offer a perspective on events, a worldview, in juxtaposition to the narrator's. She begins by reading his e-mails as part of her job, but their meaning will shift. And Bruno's corporeal absence allows for some question as to his true form.

This narrator, presently using the alias Sadie Smith, is an American woman living in France. A former FBI spy, she was fired after a case she worked as an undercover agent did not bring the trial result the agency desired. Now she performs similar work for shadowy private interests: she takes on a character and infiltrates a group, instigating as well as observing its actions. In the Guyenne region of France, she is to penetrate an organization of anarchist environmental and anti-civilization activists called Le Moulin and learn of their involvement in a recent act of sabotage. The assignment to observe and investigate becomes an assignment to provoke further action, and she may yet be asked for more.

Creation Lake has layers. It is partly a spy novel. "Sadie" gains entry to the Moulinards through her fiancé, Lucien, a wealthy, privileged young man she easily seduced and moved in with following a carefully planned "cold bump" that Lucien thinks was an accidental encounter. She moves through the community she's been assigned to, playing one character off the other, with readers privy to her inner commentary about both the assigned mission and the personalities of her new acquaintances. Along with her sexual relationship with Lucien (enacted with carefully concealed distaste), she carries on another affair that is more pleasurable but no more honest. She can be funny, cutting, and disarmingly self-critical. Despite holding all the cards--at least in her own view--"Sadie" is not precisely a highly organized personality.

Creation Lake is also in part an exploration of philosophies, as Bruno preaches the virtues and qualities of the Neanderthal and other early relatives and forebears of Homo sapiens. An enigmatic figure, he lives in a cave and extols the virtues of primitivism by e-mail. Kushner's not-necessarily-reliable narrator brings a certain amount of mystery herself: amoral, even nihilistic, she seemingly cares not a bit about the principles at question in her work, but only about her paycheck and a few simple pleasures. Unmoored by the FBI, she has no leader or cause to follow, barely pausing at collateral violence. Importantly, her role with the Moulinards is that of a sympathetic outsider hired to translate their writings. Rather than a true convert, she is able to ask questions, showing curiosity and a friendly skepticism. This allows her to fully explore the Moulinards' beliefs, although she is unimpressed by their devotion to principle.

None of these characters is heroic or even especially virtuous; the narrator points out the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the activists. "Charisma does not originate inside the person called 'charismatic.' It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist." On the other hand, she may find herself more susceptible to the philosophies of the unseen Bruno than she was equipped for. Bruno apparently writes these e-mails for one audience--the Moulinards--but they will perhaps have their greatest effect on the audience he is apparently unaware of.

With punchy short chapters and bursts of action, the plot builds tension to a boiling point while resisting any convention or formula of the spy novel genre, which it reinvents as much as it inhabits. Kushner's pacing is inexorable, ratcheting up tensions to propel readers to a surprising ending. Spare, even stark, Creation Lake considers the past and the future of humankind without sentiment, letting the narrator's unblinking observations stand alone. She is hardworking and apathetic, drinking a bit too much and going through the motions of a job that she has no particularly strong feelings about.

If Kushner's expansive plot considers no less than the very origin and fate of humanity, "Sadie" considers only her next destination. As focused as she can be on the job at hand, her approach to life is profoundly blurred. Gritty and hard-edged, this is a novel of both cynicism and belief, with a mysterious narrator at its center, adrift but anchoring its plot. There is something dark at work throughout, but Kushner keeps a sense of fun, pleasure, and unexpected humor as well. "Deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random." Taut and propulsive, Creation Lake leaves its readers with plenty to think about once its pages close. --Julia Kastner

Rachel Kushner (photo: Gabby Laurent)

Rachel Kushner is the author of three acclaimed novels, Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, and The Mars Room, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K, and The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. Creation Lake (Scribner, September 3, 2024) is a captivating novel about an American woman operating as an independent spy in France who finds herself questioning her own worldview.

Where did this novel begin for you?

First was the idea of a commune of young Parisians decamping to a remote part of southwestern France, where they struggle to farm on rocky soil, and are watched by the police. This is a milieu that, how shall I put it, is not at all unfamiliar to me, and I always thought would make a great novel.

Next was the area itself, based on real places I know well, that are rich with ancient caves, with traces of life going back half a million years. For a minute I toyed with writing a novel set in prehistoric times. The dialogue would be challenging! It became a kind of joke, a self-taunt, to write cave people into fiction. I ended up setting the book in modern times (roughly 2013), but with one of the characters thinking kind of lavishly about the past.

So I had a setting: rural France, a fictional place based on areas I know intimately. I had a conflict: a group of activists who are on a collision course with French authorities. I had some ideas and themes about nomadism and cave dwellers and subversion.

But who would tell the story, and why?

Then it came to me: Several years back, a young environmental activist I didn't know personally, but who was connected to people I do know, was entrapped by a woman working undercover for the FBI. He ended up charged with arson and sabotage and got 20 years in federal prison. He served almost nine years before his lawyers were able to prove the entrapment and successfully overturn his conviction. The case, and the idea of this FBI informant, got under my skin and I thought, what kind of person ends up becoming an agent provocateur? Who is this sort of woman, and how does she think? Later, a somewhat similar situation unfolded involving some people I know personally: a guy in their political milieu, who presented himself as this leftist activist, was actually a U.K. undercover cop, surveilling my friends. When he was exposed, publicly, it turned out that he'd been having sexual relationships with women in leftist movements around Europe. It blew up into a major scandal. He was outed and had to disappear into the private sector, spying on people for multinational corporations and the like (he's probably still doing that now). The U.K. police have now been sued by several of the women that this undercover cop had relationships with. And this undercover cop himself has also sued the police, for "failing to protect him from falling in love."

I decided to write a novel from the perspective of one of these sorts of spies--invented, not based on either case that I know about. My character has already been kicked into the private sector--where there are no rules, no oversight, and she doesn't even quite know who her bosses are. She's a spy and a narc, a woman up to no good, if also caught up in forces that are larger than she is (as we all are).

Do you think of this as a spy novel? What are your influences in that genre? 

Not exactly, but it is infused with certain elements of noir, or my own version of noir, which is perhaps a broad category and mostly a mood, which might include spy novels and crime novels, thrillers, heists, assassination plots, international intrigue... but I don't submit to the genre in the way that a true noir is expected to. I'm too in love with characters, the fun of dialogue, scenes ripe for comedy, and bigger questions about life, to write a straight spy novel. That said, I am a huge fan of the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette and inhaled all of his novels over a summer while trying to first conceive of this book, so his greasy prints are probably all over it, if in a kind of oblique way, because he's inimitable in the way his blazing dark humor verges on slapstick, while his protagonists are dead serious about weapons, and late-'60s Citroën models, and how to shoot to kill. Often, their plans go haywire, and what's meant to be a tight, taut job ends up a full-blown fiasco. But I think that through reading him, I probably gave myself a permission that was new to me, to make things happen--to put plans in people's heads, and guns in their hands, and to send in unwitting political stooges for a showdown.

How important are Bruno's beliefs to this story?

Bruno is driven by the dilemma of what future we can believe in, when we know that no revolution is coming, and that capitalism is here to stay. His solution is to "leave this world": to reject civilization and renovate entirely his own consciousness, and what it means to live and to thrive, without waiting for the collapse of the status quo, because he knows, deeply and terribly, that this collapse is not coming. He's focused on the ancient past, and speculates on life before the written-down, in search of a time before society took "a wrong turn." Many leftist critiques of capitalism tend to identify that wrong turn at the dawn of agriculture. For Bruno, it's much earlier. He's down on the Homo sapiens, altogether! He imagines that once upon a time a rich mélange of different genetic types of humans roamed Europe and Asia. The Neanderthal, long-maligned for having gone extinct, becomes Bruno's "beautiful loser." Surely the story isn't simply that the poor "Thal" (as Bruno thinks of him) "couldn't hack it." So what did happen, and what was lost, when that line of humans dwindled to nothing and disappeared? And did they leave any signs for us, for how we might organize life? Bruno's beliefs become increasingly important to the narrator and narc, as the plot, and book, move toward conclusion. And as the story's master manipulator, everything comes down to her and what she's got up her sleeve.

What makes the narrator a compelling protagonist? 

She is capable, cunning, dissimulating, overconfident, blunt, blandly beautiful, and a heavy drinker. The novel is entirely from her perspective, and she is free to share with the reader what she keeps hidden from everyone else around her. She was a really good outlet for the crueler (and cruder) edges of my sense of humor. It was like an amazing drug to inhabit her as my alter ego: writing this book in her voice was the most fun I've ever had, doing anything.

How is Creation Lake different from your previous novels?

Literary novels, even very fine ones, come at some point in their narrative development to rely on some manner of coincidence. It happens in life, but in a novel it's cheap. In a novel whose protagonist is a spy, nothing is a coincidence, and the writer has no need of such a crutch, because her protagonist is an agent of destruction who has everything rigged (or so she believes). That was a new euphoria for me. Also, very short chapters, blunt and brief little salvos meant to be spring-loaded. I wanted to feel vaulted by these short chapters, and hopefully the reader does too. --Julia Kastner