Creation Lake

Just because Rachel Kushner leaves me feeling intellectually challenged doesn't mean I don't thoroughly enjoy her elucidation of various unexpected and unfamiliar topics.  These would include anthropology, French history and Polynesian navigation in Creation Lake, a peculiar but utterly compelling novel about a commune of left-wing activists trying to prevent the engineering of a mega basin.  Corporate interests want to irrigate factory-farmed corn crops in a rural area of southwestern France that Kushner dubs the Guyenne, displacing both the people and the cows that have populated it for centuries.

Sadie, the novel's clear-eyed narrator, comes off at first blush (although she never would blush) like a stone-cold bitch once employed by the American government to entrap domestic terrorists, collateral damage be damned.  I employ the sexist slur purposefully because Kushner's feminist agenda quickly emerges:  if a man were to use seduction unsuccessfully in service of his undercover work, surely he wouldn't be judged as harshly as this reader judged Sadie.  She views both men and the world through an occasionally comic but always withering lens:

It’s the same, whether you’re in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one. They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth. And if they are my age, which Lucien is—we are both thirty-four—their younger boyhood, the innocent years, are the 1980s, and their teendom, the goodbye to innocence, is the 1990s, and whether in Europe or the US, it’s similar music and more or less the same movies that they want to trot out and reminisce over, from an era I personally consider culturally stagnant . . . With Lucien and boys like him—who will forever remain mere boys—there is no war nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation.

At the same time, Sadie also has breast implants because they serve her well as a tool of her trade.  She contains multitudes.

But the novel has a much bigger theme on its mind:  evolution, which of course encompasses the establishment and dominance of the patriarchy that women continue to confront on a daily basis.  Using her gender and her Americanness, Sadie easily infiltrates the commune, which calls itself Le Moulin.  While seeking evidence of destructive tactics, she hacks into their continuing e-mail correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, the rag-tag group's charismatic mentor.  By the end of the book, Sadie has fallen under his spectral spell, or to use one of Kushner's guiding metaphors, he has become her "north star" with knowledge he himself has acquired in the utter darkness of the same network of caves where early man once drew.  However, she does not let her increasing fascination get in the way of executing her murderous assignment, although another American does, with a contemptuous hubris that recalls Harvey Weinstein.

Bruno's guru-like appeal is evident early on in a discussion of his post-World War II childhood when, displaced from his family, members of the Resistance who have been killed by the Nazis, he is thrilled to discover the helmet and body of a dead German soldier, from which the adolescent boy catches lice, a tiny metaphor that carries well more than their combined body weight throughout the novel.  He describes this incident as a "screen memory."

I regard my childhood encounter with this enemy helmet, he said, as a stutter or shift in the axis of my existence, one that has been critical to who I am, and to what I have come to believe.

It reminded me very much of the importance I attribute to visiting a Holocaust museum in Paris with my father when I was a little younger than Bruno, although upon further elaboration a screen memory turns out to be something quite different.  Bruno explains that it actually "screens" the emotions he tamped down about the traumatic loss of his family, leaving me to question exactly what was behind mine.  Perhaps my mother's repeated hospitalizations which forced us to leave France, a place I loved. 

There's also an enjoyably "meta" aspect to Creation Lake which regularly sent me to Wikipedia to determine how much, if anything that Bruno writes about, is based in reality. Some is, some isn't.  Guy Debord, a Marxist radical and Bruno's nemesis, exists; Boris Nevsky, a Soviet anthropologist does not.  Although Kushner's description of the Cagots, a persecuted minority in France whose origins date back to 1000 BC, is accurate, she embellishes their history with mass public beheadings to give her narrative an added class frisson.  

It's almost as if Kushner is explicitly acknowledging the parallel between what both she and Sadie do extraordinarily well:  make-up shit that gets you where you need to go.

Sadie finds peace; Kushner landed on the short list for the Booker Prize.  Well-done wimmin!