Review: Eco-Espionage
Lux editor Cora Currier on Rachel Kushner’s new novel
Rachel Kushner’s new literary spy novel Creation Lake is another piece of evidence for my unscientific theory that there are more novels about ecoterrorists than there are actually existing ecoterrorists. It’s easy to see why the figure is so tempting to contemporary writers. It offers a built-in plot with the frisson of potential violence, and the righteous idealism seems to inspire equal parts admiration and condescension, like they’re doing something we’d all do if we had the courage, or if we were a bit stupider.
Creation Lake concerns a commune of back to the landers in rural France called the Moulinards and a mysterious philosopher-guru, Bruno, who has inspired the group with his anarchist ramblings. (Anahid Nersessian’s NYRB review detangles all Kushner’s allusions and inspirations.) Is Bruno inciting the Moulinards to sabotage at nearby industrial sites, or worse? Our narrator is “Sadie Smith,” the alias of a freelance American spy hired by someone (identity undisclosed) to find out the Moulinards’ plans and escalate things if necessary. Sadie, who used to work for the Feds, is quite the agent provocateur. She is very attractive (she says), reads Céline and loves Antonioni and can pose as a grad student deeply invested in translating French anarchist texts. (In other words, she is like no other informant I’ve encountered in my years reporting on such things). She’s hard-boiled. She likes to drink, likes sex with proletarian manly men (a shop worker, a biker), is a harsh judge of other women (their bodies, their intellects, the way they handle a stick-shift). We don’t know where she’s from, what her childhood was like, how she got into this line of work. But we do get to know her through her misgivings and her mistakes and her increasing interest in what Bruno has to say.
Is Sadie for real? And if she is, is Kushner? has been the gist of the more critical reviews. Brandon Taylor hated Sadie so much he found the book “downright hostile.” Taylor writes that it’s much harder to write “a world-historical individual, someone who actively and violently changes the world in pursuit of revolutionary principles,” than to write the “cold cynicism” of those who would stop them. Fair enough, but I disagree with his conflation of Sadie’s politics with the novel’s.
With Sadie and all her ridiculousness, Kushner side-steps both the pitfalls of sanctimony and the thriller plot-line that drove Birnam Wood (to take another ecosabotage example) to its violent, cheesy, made-for-TV ending. At first, Creation Lake’s depiction of sincere leftists grated on me as much as it did Taylor. The women stuck with child care, the communal meals that “hovered in the genre of enchilada even though this is France”, the tediousness of manarchism: all cliché even if true. Emailed manifestos are a handy literary device for getting a lot of philosophical-political content into a novel, but it has not been my experience of politically committed anarchists that they are actually very in thrall to manifestos and their authors. But the Moulinards tire of Bruno even as he sucks Sadie in; they sense there is other work to do.
The question of sincerity is the meta-level engine of Kushner’s plot. The first three quarters of the novel are deceptively placid, then suddenly everything rushes towards conclusion like someone pulled the plug. It all goes swirling down in a mess of guns, milk, and tumbling logs. I won’t add spoilers, but the idealists aren’t punished for their earnestness. The contrivance of the plot works because the plot’s very clumsiness is Sadie’s fault — she contrived it. An informant is the ultimate unreliable narrator; since we see the leftists through her, they come out complicated, but ultimately, their politics come out unscathed. Sadie insists that at their core people have no politics, but a hard and pure substance she calls salt. When at the end she ponders her emptiness, I think we’re meant to imagine what else could fill her.