Wanna-be Revolutionaries and Their Foes: Notes on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake
Cover art for the book Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – Fair Use
Almost all novels, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today’s mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political or not. Some, like Gore Vidal’s Burr and Lincoln, are more overtly political than others. As literary critics have long noted, novels tend to evade the conscious control of writers, and sooner or later politics and power struggles rear their beautiful or ugly heads. Fictional characters move beyond the author’s blueprint.
Rachel Kushner’s previous novels—The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room and Telex from Cuba—are about power; those who wielded it and those who are seriously messed up by it. in her new novel, Creation Lake, which takes place in the present day in a part of France far from tourists and tourism— and which can seem like a Third World country— she traces a group of women and men who belong to a subculture, and who might be called environmentalists, anarchists and anti-capitalists. They can be found around the world.
By placing her story at the periphery, Kushner hopes to unlock secrets that lie at the centers of power and to understand the motives of characters who are idealists, nihilists, intellectuals, dreamers and more.
In the December 2024 issue of Harper’s in an article titled “In the Rockets’ Red Glare” Kushner describes her explorations in the subculture of hot rodders and their hot rods. She finds them surprisingly appealing because they go against the American grain and against America’s dominant car culture. But as the title of the article suggests they’re also patriotic Americans.
Cars roar across the pages of Creation Lake; there’s a Skoda, a Citroen or two and a Chrysler Sebring. They say something about the individuals who drive them and who are in turn driven by them. The person who tells this tale of conspiracy, paranoia, intrigue and betrayal is not one of the wanna be revolutionaries, but an agent provocateur from California named Sadie Smith who once was employed by the FBI and by government agencies.
Because she has made a mess of things, as agent provocateurs often do, she now works for global capitalists and their cronies and is paid well to fuck things up. Because she has axes to grind, she qualifies as an untrustworthy narrator. I was often unconvinced of her veracity. It’s best not to believe everything she says. She writes for example about “the average French person,” though it’s likely that no such person exists except in the mind of Marine Le Pen and her followers.
I was initially drawn to Creation Lake because I have traveled as an American outsider in parts of the region Kushner describes, and because I have followed the antics of a French underground organization that published in 2007 a manifesto titled The Coming Insurrection. Its members were linked to the Tarnac Nine, a group of defendants arrested and charged with terrorism. Some of the characters in Creation Lake seem to be cut from the same and similar clandestine cloth.
In December 2024 I went to see Kushner speak in San Francisco and heard her describe two of her main characters: one a “post revolutionary”; and the other as a “counter revolutionary.” Sadie Smith fits the profile of the counter revolutionary, and Bruno Lacombe the post revolutionary, though he might say that he’s more of a genuine revolutionary now than he was in ’68.
I was also drawn to Creation Lake because I have long been an admirer of Frederick Engels’ classic, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which explores the tangled genesis and evolution of what might be called humanity’s most toxic unholy trinity. Engels concluded that every advance in human history was also a step backward. Big losses have accompanied important gains. That’s what Bruno would say.
Creation Lake is clearly a novel of ideas. It’s also an action-packed thriller that maps the essential provocative role that the agent provocateur plays in the protests that are described in the novel, and that culminates in the death of a government minister and the mass arrests of demonstrators. Kushner weaves together a large cast of characters. She also maps the complex dialectical workings of fate, free will and chance: what is determined, what is freely chosen and what is due to happenstance.
As an agent provocateur and as an unreliable narrator Sally Smith is not endearing. She lies, manipulates, dissembles and fucks things up big time. But she is definitely a complex character. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, she’s “only a pawn in their game,” but as a pawn she exploits people ruthlessly. Pawns can win or lose a game.
Near the end of the novel Sally hands a gun, a P38, to an American radical/ criminal adrift in France. He’s named Burdmoore. She urges him to assassinate a minor French official. He declines the offer and says, “You want me to use this thing?” He adds “You think I’m seriously going to run at this guy, in front of all these people with cops bearing down and fucking shoot him? Are you nuts?”
She is probably out of her mind. Burdmoore keeps the gun as a souvenir and calls Sally “some crazy chick.” Indeed it takes a certain madness to become an agent provocateur, to sow the seeds of destruction, betray confidences and destroy intimate connections.
If you were in Chicago in ’68, in Seattle in 1999 during the meetings of the WTO or if you have been the target of illegal surveillance then this book is definitely for you.
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