Rachel Kushner

"Creation Lake is a novel about a freelance agent, a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and bold opinions and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "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. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"- making him believe the encounter was accidental. And like everyone she chooses to interact with, Lucien is useful to her, used by her. Sadie operates on 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 lives in a vast network of underground caves on his daughter's land and 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 before civilization. Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those whom 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, propulsive, and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, keen insights, and unforgettable pleasure. From Rachel Kushner on the title: My character Bruno refers to "a deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation" - meaning all of human history, the whole struggle in which chains of civilizations try to figure out how to live. He believes he can hear these voices underground. To me, "Creation Lake" suggests intrigue. Creation of what? In Sadie's case, a persona, a feint, a manipulation. But also in her case, the creation possibly of her own soul"--

A Novel

Creation Lake

Grace McCarter

The underground world was lost to us. The industrial uses of the earth, the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not count Bruno said. Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. They think, I'll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

Linguists try to chart what they call “glotto-chronologies.” They picture language like a tree, with a trunk. The first language, at the base of the trunk, being simple and common, what some call “nostratic.” This is a fantasy. But who can refute them? They cannot escape the chains of their telos, the sad idea that they are the logical outcome, the advanced form of human speech, and that what came before must have been simple and crude. 

They never imagine that if language is a tree, they must look not at its trunk, but at its roots, which, like a tree's roots, might form an upside-down chandelier of extravagant complexity, reaching and spreading deep into the dark beyond. But most people are unable to grasp how far down the physical world goes. And they would not know that voices are stored in its depths, unless they were to hear those voices. 

This steep connector switchbacked down to the D43 past huge walls of limestone. As I walked, the high sun illuminated uncanny colors in the limestone, colors so vibrant and bright they looked artificial. Some areas were lavender, but patterned with lichen that was gold-bright like ground turmeric. Other lichens were creamy white and stretched along the rock face like embroidery. I passed, on these switchbacks, limestone cliffs that were striped in lemon yellow. Aren't rocks supposed to be gray? 

I enjoyed the way the sun emptied my thoughts and flattened my feelings to a lizard-like drip of the minutes as they passed. I had come to suspect that the woman in Marseilles, the tannest of the tanners at the private swim club, who tanned even during a wind storm, had been onto something. Submitting to the sun and letting it cook my thoughts was soothing.

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