Seeing in the Half-Light

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk reviews Rachel Kushner’s divisive new novel, “Creation Lake”—much of the commentary around which feels “personal.”

By Lisa Locascio NighthawkSeptember 19, 2024

• Fiction

AT THE L.A. launch of Rachel Kushner’s new novel Creation Lake, an audience member took relentless close-up photographs and videos of the author’s legs as she spoke with her friend Kim Gordon, unsettling those watching from the rows behind. What looked like a brazen act of creepshottery, though, turned out to be a proud artist capturing his work in action. “I designed her shoes!” he was heard to exclaim, sharing the videos with a friend after the event. Midway through Kushner and Gordon’s conversation, the author Gary Indiana twisted around in his seat and pronounced to no one in particular that he was “so fucking bored.”

This kind of amplified behavior is characteristic of the hot and bothered feeling Rachel Kushner has seemed to provoke of late. It is exhaustingly familiar for a powerful woman to catch strays and unwelcome assessments from angry men. In Kushner’s case, it feels personal. With her thrilled, upspoken delivery, deep sense of artistic authority—Kushner defined her novel as “life as it really is, secretly, but with a hallucinogenic envelope around it” on that night in Los Angeles—and her seeming imperviousness to the slings and arrows of trend and correction, the author strikes a nerve. In her latest work, she dares to have a sense of humor and reveal a glistening vulnerability about creative work. Perhaps it is predictable that someone would get mad.

¤

A woman with shadowy motives and an unknowable character navigates a perilous environment where she must survive by dint of her wits and will alone, often via collaboration, and sometimes assignation, with problematic men: this is the plot of every Rachel Kushner novel, and we love her for it. Kushner’s work has earned her an writerly celebrity that feels as if it belongs to an earlier era—the 1990s with her pal Gordon, maybe, or the ’70s, with her recent quirk of wearing large, tinted glasses to read from her book—complete with glamorous author photos and pronouncements from various corners that she writes “like a man.” Okay, maybe that’s just an approving comment a faculty member in my PhD program once made; the restiveness surrounding Creation Lake has suggested that, lately at least, Kushner doesn’t write enough like a man.

Kushner’s novels gleam darkly in the popular memory. They brim with pleasures as different, as era-defining and divisive, as albums by a beloved rock band: there’s The Mars Room (2018), a gutting story about poverty and incarceration set in hopeless, fogged-in corners of California; Telex from Cuba (2008), a polyphonic exploration of that nation on the brink of its revolution narrated by neurotic American occupiers; or her well-loved The Flamethrowers (2013), in which the remote, sexy artist Reno sets off on a quest into the 1970s New York City art world and a dying vision of aristocratic Italy. These books are engaging, smart, and highly enjoyable to read. That Kushner is one of the most morally and politically astute novelists currently working endows her delicious fictions with an added allure of urgency. Kushner has never shied away from claiming her mantle as a writer alive to the challenges and possibilities of the novel as social commentary. “I’m a student of Dostoyevsky and a believer in the idea that one character can become a conduit through which a history can flow,” she said in a 2017 interview.

Across her body of work, which also includes a haunting and lively essay collection, The Hard Crowd (2021); a short story collection, The Strange Case of Rachel K (2015); and a novella, The Mayor of Leipzig (2021), Kushner has cultivated an intense cool that seeps into her characters, whether they are serving life sentences or nursing delusions of true love. The novels in particular unspool so organically, are so rich with surprise and detail, that they seem almost unbidden—that Kushner is an amanuensis for a story commanding her to tell it. But to give in to the luxurious fantasy of effortlessness is to erase the act of will and the bulk of labor behind the text. Make no mistake: this fiction emanates from ferocious twin powers of conviction and determination. As Bruno Lacombe, the truly underground soixante-huitard philosopher who is one of the protagonists of Creation Lake, writes: “I see in the light, he said. I see in the half-light. I see in the dark. And it is imperative that I embrace this capacity. That I give in to it. That I insistently see.”

The reader never learns the true name of Kushner’s other protagonist. An American polyglot and former graduate student now employed as a secret operative advancing the interests of the powerful, she is known to us only by her alias: Sadie Smith. The book takes place in the summer of 2013, a setting established by the omnipresence of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” which billows from every café, beach, and dinner party at which Sadie finds herself. In the undisclosed number of years since an operation involving animal rights activists went sideways—“I don’t blame myself. I blame the Feds and their obsession with scruffy kids”—Sadie has worked exclusively in the private sector. Her job is to exist as a projection—to slip into people’s lives and make them forget they know nothing about her.

Sadie is guided by a hyperpragmatic set of observations about late capitalism, offered with the same dry wit whether she is describing the pretensions of the cultural elite or the environmental consequences of the industrial project the activists she embeds with are suspected of foiling. Her easy manner and mainstream beauty grant her entry wherever she needs to go. With a learned aptitude for maneuvers like the “cold bump” (a seemingly random meeting that establishes a relationship with a target), Sadie can deftly extract what her employers require. At first, her skills are portrayed as the natural talents of a thrillingly amoral person. But as the novel unfolds, the reader begins to understand what Sadie’s highly compensated manipulations cost her, and what they leave her craving.

Creation Lake has a sharper sense of humor than its predecessors. In it, Kushner’s fiction seems to have gained a thrilling self-awareness, expressed through in-jokes that presume a readerly understanding (in a repeating gag, Sadie refers to a beer left unrefrigerated in the summer heat as a “hot one”) and images that resist analysis (a borrowed bedroom covered in cartoon baby stickers called, like one section of the book, “Les Babies”). We’ll get it, Kushner seems to think; gratifyingly, she trusts us to keep up.

Rich with secrets and dense with vibe, you could say that all of Kushner’s novels are spy novels, exposés from someone on the inside. So, what happens when she writes an actual spy novel? Everything you might expect—espionage, intrigue, heart-racing action sequences—and something you might not: an authentic ethical awakening. Creation Lake is the closest to an ars poetica that Kushner has ever given us, her ravening, greedy, ill-mannered horde of readers. And one thing’s for certain: neither admirers nor detractors appear able to look away.

¤

The characters in Creation Lake—Sadie Smith first among them—are archetypes, trump cards unfolding in service of the plot. Kushner lays them out like a tarot spread: the spy, the philosopher, the untrustworthy lover, the hated husband. As much as, or more than, they are realized people, they are images that flick by us, attracting our attention and then making us doubt our instincts.

True to the genre conventions with which Kushner is toying, some of the people we meet in this novel are red herrings, characters we think might gain importance but do not. Others are social forces personified: the universally disliked government minister haplessly assigned to be the fall guy in Sadie’s assignment; Lucien, the self-important Parisian filmmaker to whom Sadie is assigned to play sexually available girlfriend; and Pascal Balmy, the even more self-important commune leader dedicated to a return to a traditional farming lifestyle, who has a tired intellectual justification for the fact that all of the people caring for his commune’s children are women. There is a well-dressed man in a showy car whom Sadie nicknames Lemon Incest, and a handful of discontent would-be revolutionaries who, in their lack of glamour, show the wages—and the satisfactions, and the dignity—of a life dedicated to revolt.

Sadie’s vision is tinted with the systems in which she moves, for whom she works; she observes other women’s bodies and assesses them against the illusory comfort of an idealized perfect body (her own, created with expensive surgery), criticizing, with feigned dispassion, sagging breasts and sun-damaged skin. Hers is also a desiring eye. She wants—for the purposes of her job, needs—to be the clear-eyed all-seer, the cartomancer, bereft of illusion. No human behavior is authentic because authenticity does not exist, she insists: “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic.’ It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” (That Sadie is herself enormously charismatic, even lovable, makes this a sly joke by the book’s end.) It’s not just that she sees through the fantasies others have about themselves; Sadie’s job requires that she foster no illusions about herself either.

But as the story progresses, its images congregate and congeal into something less certain, more atavistic and unknowable. In Marseilles with her loathed boyfriend-job Lucien and his film crew, Sadie takes to watching a “woman who out-thinned and out-tanned the rest,” who sunbathes every day at a private beach club, no matter the conditions:

She lay face-up on the decking, her fake breasts glistening in the cold light like twin copper vaults. Her body fell into shadow as explosions of surf burst over the seawall and onto the jetty. Her eyes were shut tight against the wind, her hands anchoring the corners of her towel as if to prevent it from carrying her away, or as if that had already happened, and she was mid-flight.

There is a connection between Sadie’s seemingly dispassionate takes on female beauty and this desiccated concentrate of feminine ideal, but Kushner doesn’t linger on what ties them together. The only people who sense something off about Sadie’s innocent American act are grotesquely described men in late middle age; one is a minor character from The Flamethrowers, making a cameo in the south of France. Is Sadie as vapidly focused on the currency of physical beauty as she would have us think, or is Kushner intentionally describing these men in the sharply judgmental terms normally reserved for women? The real-life French Marxist Guy Debord looked, by the end of his life, like “a dead goldfish floating in a dirty bowl,” in Sadie’s estimation; the “hideous eyeballs” of Lucien’s uncle “roved over me like the points of two pool cues, like he could probe me with them.” Men are not only ugly and sexually threatening; they can also be flatly lust-worthy—take, for example, René, who has “white-blue eyes like a wolf’s, which filled with light when he looked up. He looked at me with total indifference,” Sadie observes. There it is: a female gaze.

Most captivating is a boy Sadie sees from a distance, who carries within him the violent chaos of youth and change. When she learns that this boy fathered a child at 11 years old, Sadie names him Franck, after a young boy in a documentary whose confident tales of sexual conquest encapsulate the novel’s stonily unhinged vision of the world. Sadie tracks down the boy from the documentary’s Facebook: “Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable,” she observes, with no little regret. Sadie excels in her line of work because she extracts stories almost without trying. Working as a spy gives her something to do with these unwinding one-sided intimacies.

Readers of this novel receive constant downloads of assimilated information: theories of Neanderthal culture and society; a short history of the Cagot people, an untouchable class held separate from the rest of the population of France for over 1,000 years; insights on the varieties of bad food and drink available in provincial supermarkets and gas stations. Sadie is a compelling contrarian, living on mass-produced baguettes from the supermarket and whatever she is served in the various settings she penetrates, from a private beach club to an anarchist commune and high-speed train. What she’s really hungry for is information. She evinces an almost believable lack of interest in the specifics of her daily life, single-mindedly focused on the job for which she’s been hired. For much of the novel, her only admitted pleasure seems to come from instructing the reader about the world beneath the one we think we know—the world as it really is, secretly, sans hallucinogenic envelope.

Sadie recognizes that world as disposable and doomed. Occasionally, she seems like a self-parody of the author, an irresistibly urbane figure whose sangfroid renders the whole world in transparent hoarfrost. But she is also a nuanced and emotionally complex commentary on the consequences of a lifetime spent working with stories. In no other character of literature have I so sharply experienced the incredible loneliness of the authorial perch.

“I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth,” she sniffs, sounding very sad. Her occupation as a spy further renders Sadie an apt foil for the writer: it’s her job to lurk on the sidelines and watch things unfold. Her perspective provides a compelling hose through which Kushner can run a steady stream of observations and tart opinions. If Sadie seems all too convinced of the invincibility of her position—well, that’s part of the point.

¤

Most unhappy graduate students transition into middle management, university administration, or teaching high school. Becoming a corporate spy is a less common pivot. Who hurt Sadie? The reader can’t help wondering. But Kushner is too good to assign Sadie a rote trauma plot. Instead, from the first page of Creation Lake, Kushner forces Sadie into a philosophical exchange with Bruno Lacombe, an octogenarian ideologue who lives in a cave and is preoccupied with the idea that Neanderthal culture was superior to the world created by the Homo sapiens that supplanted it. All of Kushner’s heroines have had a performed confidence that seems impenetrable. But there are chinks in Sadie’s armor, apertures through which she finds herself drawn by Bruno’s vision of a different world.

Sadie becomes acquainted with Bruno’s ideas by hacking into his email and reading the messages he sends to the Moulinards, the primitivist commune she has been assigned to infiltrate. These emails narrate how, as the sole survivor of a family decimated by the Holocaust, Bruno overcame a young life as a petty criminal to become a teacher and then, following the death of his child (a detail Bruno leaves out, but which Sadie knows from her research), found himself drawn to a cave on his property in late midlife.

Spontaneous archaeological synchronicities while exploring his cave have rendered Bruno a hedge paleoanthropologist, and he now believes that the Neanderthal was humankind’s more valiant and sympathetic brother. His missives offer provocative theses—among them that Neanderthals smoked tobacco and fished with their bare hands—to advance the idea that this other ancestor, whose DNA many modern humans carry, might have shown the way to a better world. Even further—that the “Thal” (as Bruno calls them) remnants in our genome might be teachers within the contemporary human, calling us to right our course.

Bruno functions, it could be said, on pure vibes. “I do not set up models,” Bruno writes to the Moulinards. “What I do is live. And because of the way I have lived, I know what is possible.” His experience of extended time spent underground, Bruno writes, in total and profound darkness rich with colorful hallucinations and conversations with an ancient collective consciousness, triggered a profound epiphany.

Calling Homo sapiens “an interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with,” Bruno writes: “Currently […] we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?” In the midst of a romantic idyll with Bruno’s work, Sadie—by now taking lonesome poetic countryside walks and pondering the meaning of the word “neire,” which describes a particular walnut, a particular grape, and the blackest black, the black of cave darkness—has her doubts. “But if it was all of us on planet Earth inside this shiny, driverless car, then what would we be exiting, besides reality?” she asks. “What would we tumble into, if not a void?”

The void is precisely what Bruno is advocating for:

I hear people, [Bruno] said, whose voices are eternal in this underground world, which is all planes of time on a single plane.

Here on earth is another earth, he said. A different reality, no less real. It has different rules.

Seeking to defend herself against epiphany, Sadie describes this passage as “Bruno went off the rails.” But our icy narrator’s facade is melting. Sadie begins to nudge and stumble out of the certainty of her worldview—not into the light but into, as Bruno describes,

absolute dark, [where] you turn inward. It is in true dark that one’s mental scenes are most full of light and color and movement, as if the dark of a cave were the secret pathway to our own inner world, the same path taken by our hominin brothers and sisters, who went down into the earth where no light leaked in order to see.

Sounding vulnerable and Springsteenesque, Sadie admits that she misses the United States, that she longs for “our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.” In Sadie’s life, there is plenty of violence but no freedom for stupidity. “I miss bear claws,” she tells us. “I miss donut shop coffee.”

¤

The end of Creation Lake features some of the lightest writing Kushner has ever published, more akin to the searching, open voice she uses in her nonfiction than that of her heavily atmospheric fiction. Sadie doesn’t call her ethical awakening an ethical awakening—she’s still too hip for that. But she has been confronted with an alignment between Bruno’s ideas and her own notion of a person’s “salt” or essential quality:

The human core of inner salt […] comes from the deepest part. Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete.

In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew:

Life goes on a while. Then it ends.

There is no fairness.

Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. […]

A gift or a curse, that my salt is right here, with me all the time?

A gift.

Sadie has not been a good person. She has done bad things at the bidding of bad people. There might have been a narrative satisfaction in her punishment, or a loud realization of her errors. Kushner’s book is wiser than to indulge the imagined boundaries between right and wrong and past and present. Any tarot reader worth their price will tell you that the cards’ real purpose is to trigger the intimate reactions, specific to each querent, that make cartomancy a powerfully reflective technique of divination. The true reader does not force a lesson. She observes.

Throughout the novel, Sadie sees, and then gains information that changes her vision, again and again, until she has completed the journey from the confident Fool, setting out on her journey full of confidence and enthusiasm, to the embodied, ominously joyous World, laid open, splayed like a patient upon a table. When you know every story, there is nowhere, and no need, to hide.

At the end, Sadie misses Bruno, who has changed his email password. She looks at the sea. She reads a book. She lies in the dark and lets the images she has collected flash in front of her, stripped now of the necessity of interpretation. Bruno wrote of his own transformation that “he could not abandon his own capacity for sight […] Even if he wanted to.”

But Sadie can. The seer who created this world enters a period of pure rest, a pivot that feels surprising and familiar at the same time, more than a little elegiac, and deeply satisfying. The story has been told; the teller goes into repose. It’s a quietly profound way to close a thriller. A happy ending—maybe the one thing Kushner hasn’t shown herself capable of, before now.