Rachel Kushner's new espionage thriller may be her coolest book yet

Rachel Kushner is one tough customer. She disdains sentimentality and traditional storytelling, instead challenging readers to keep up with her and not to flinch.

In acclaimed novels like The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, Kushner has written about political extremists, motorcycle daredevils and artists living on cigarettes and turpentine fumes. Given a literary track record studded with broken glass, it’s surprising that Kushner has taken so long to try her hand at one of the bleakest genres of them all.

Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir. Existential dread and exhaustion are its signature moods; double-crossing, seduction and sudden death its plot devices. Orson Welles fans may find themselves humming the iconic theme music from The Third Man as they read Kushner’s latest novel: She’s Welles’ partner-in-grime in terms of her stylized depictions of the world as a spiritual and moral vacuum.

The main character of Creation Lake is a hard-drinking, good-looking, 34-year-old American woman called Sadie Smith — at least that’s her name for the time being. Sadie has been known by lots of names — aliases — in her work as an undercover agent, at first for the FBI; more recently, for anonymous private clients. That’s all we know of Sadie’s backstory: Like many fictional spies, she arrives on the page scrubbed of a personal past.

Sadie’s current assignment requires infiltrating a radical farming collective in a remote region of France. Local water supplies there are being diverted into planned “megabasins” for the use of agricultural corporations. Some of the construction equipment of those corporations has been sabotaged and the “anarchists” living on that collective are the prime suspects.

Deploying her self-described “bland” good looks and a breast augmentation, Sadie initiates what’s known in the spy trade as a “cold bump” — a seemingly random encounter with a filmmaker named Lucien who’s an old friend of the co-op’s leader. Soon enough, she and Lucien are living together and Sadie wields her status as his girlfriend to insinuate herself into the anarchist group.

But, seductive as Sadie is, she meets her match in an intellectual seducer of sorts: an elderly philosopher named Bruno who advocates pre-industrial — even pre-historic — modes of living and serves as a guru to the anarchists. For months, Sadie has been monitoring Bruno’s emails back and forth with the group, hoping to find incriminating sabotage plans.

Even as she dismisses him as a “lunatic,” Sadie becomes intrigued by Bruno’s rejection of modern life and his decision to retreat underground long ago and live in a network of caves beneath his farm. “We are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car [Bruno writes in one of his emails], and the question is: How do we exit this car?” The idea of making an exit from her own “car” — her own vacant life of disguises — takes possession of Sadie.

You don’t read Kushner for the “relatability” of her characters or even, particularly, for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines. Here, for instance, are snippets of an extended passage where Sadie makes a pit stop on her drive from Paris to the secluded region where the collective is located. Pulling into the parking lot of an abandoned inn Sadie tells us:

The air was damp and warm and close, like human breath. The lot was crisscrossed with patterned ruts from truck tires. …

It felt like a place of aftermath, where something had happened.

I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.

This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café …

The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. …

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A girl or woman fallen on hard times … had left her underwear in these woods. Big deal. Her world is full of disposability.

Like Bruno-the-philosopher, Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times. The only thing that isn’t disposable in her novels is her own singular voice as a writer.