In Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake,” a commune of French activists in the countryside may be planning to disrupt a government initiative that would destroy of their way of life.
The novelist comes at this group from an oblique angle. We mostly see them through the perspective of the cynical American narrator, Sadie, a disgraced FBI agent sent by private backers to infiltrate and destroy the group. Willing to push morality aside, Sadie is known to go to great lengths to achieve the goals of her assignments.
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But while she’s worming her way into the group and hacking into their emails, she falls under the spell of Bruno Lascombe, an aging revolutionary with radical ideas – about Neanderthals, about retreating from society and living in caves to listen to the past. The result is a noir-ish but meditative spy novel about greed, morals and climate change; its short chapters propel the action with a healthy dose of sardonic humor.
Kushner, author of “The Flamethrowers” and “The Mars Room,” spoke recently by video from her Los Angeles home about the novel, which has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Where did Sadie’s distinctive voice come from?
Sadie was actually the final element. I wanted to set a novel in rural France, a region I’m rather familiar with, and set it among young people who’ve decamped from Paris to build their own communal structure and who find themselves on a collision course with the French state.
Then I started thinking about Bruno, who would be a shadowy mentor and who has gone through all of the paces of ultra-left after 1968 and then moved to the countryside before literally moving underground and deciding that there’s some way of renovating consciousness rather than waiting for revolution to come.
But I needed a narrator to tell their stories. I’m always interested in the outsider’s perspective and it still took me a while to figure out that the narrator was a woman who arrived on the scene for the purpose of causing harm to these people.
I was partly inspired by some real-life cases, including a woman working undercover for the FBI surveilling green anarchists; she entrapped one person who served nine years of a 20-year sentence in federal prison before his case was overturned. And there was an undercover agent from the UK police surveilling leftist groups in Germany, England and France, who was pretty sloppy and slept with a lot of different women in these groups. When he was discovered by one group – he had about nine different passports in the glove box of his van – he started to cry and said, “I’m really with you guys” but like Sadie he retreated into the private world of surveillance consulting.
Q. Was it hard to leave that community you’d created to write through Sadie’s disdainful perspective?
When you have a first-person narrator, that person has almost a total monopoly on the book so the challenge becomes how to let other perspectives of the world leak in.
I am rendering a world through the perspective of somebody whose views are often 180 degrees from what might be my own and that gets you to hold up to the light mysterious facets of your own psychology. And so there’s a kind of exaggeration by taking somebody who I think is not like me and making her see these people in an ungenerous way. I’m pushing to an extreme and putting pressure on the parts of me that might do so as well.
By making her a betrayer and making clear to the reader they are only seeing through her lens, they can build their own method of sorting the world and see it in a way that’s not always mediated by her caustic tone.
Q. She seems to be not so much an unreliable narrator – we see the way the others are suspicious of her – but unreliable to herself. She’s got her own blinders on so tightly.
It could be that she’s unreliable exactly because she’s unreliable to herself. But she starts to change over the course of the novel and loses her sense of control, that sense that she’s the dissimulator, that she always has a read on everybody else and can smell in them forms of weakness that they themselves cannot, that she doesn’t make mistakes. It seemed natural that some of that would have to crack at a certain point. And then it’s like multiple drum rhythms happening where the writer can let the reader know that things are starting to crack before the narrator herself acknowledges such cracks.
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Q. You withhold elements of Sadie’s backstory, telling us mostly about her past cases. Did you want her to feel elusive?
I wanted her backstory only to be prior scenes of dissimulation where she had set out to ruin the lives of other people, just as she has set out now to ruin the lives of these people here. When you think of the traditional psychological novel structure, they include these scenes meant to account for why the character is the damaged person that they are. I’m not really interested in why Sadie arrived at the idea of being a betrayer because I don’t know if there is one simple clean answer.
I’m more interested in how she moves through the world, and that can be better revealed through those stories than they could through, “She is from a damaged home” or whatever it might be.
She does return a few times to those earlier scenes as if they’re the primal scenes that structure her psyche. Maybe she returns to them because there is guilt there and a sense that she is testifying to herself that she did the right thing, that this is the way things had to be. She hardens her myths each time she returns and I think we all do this to some degree. It’s not clear to me that memory itself can stand apart from a refashioning version of our history. Each time we recall something, we add, we reduce and we reform the shape of what we think occurred.
Q. By contrast, Bruno’s story is driven by his background, and he has strange beliefs and passions that fascinate her.
His thinking about existing, still-secret strains of humans that manage to remain uncataloged and unknown is partly based on a Soviet scholar of cryptozoology, but partly based on me – I spent my younger childhood in Eugene, Oregon and did a lot of backpacking as a kid. I went to a weird, very unstructured public school and we did wilderness survival every spring semester and the idea of a Sasquatch out in those woods always really moved me and I would feel his proximity to us and his need to remain hidden, which put him into a state of incredible loneliness and also constant running. These things come back to you when you’re writing.
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