Review: Anthony Domestico on Rachel Kushner

A spy runs up against the limits of time

Rachel Kushner’s first three novels varied dramatically in manner. The Mars Room (2018) was restrained and The Flamethrowers (2013) brilliantly stylized, with Telex from Cuba (2008) somewhere in between. They also occupied different generic territories, The Flamethrowers a group portrait of artists in (mostly) 1970s New York City, The Mars Room a prison novel set in California, Telex from Cuba historical fiction involving expats with the United Fruit Company in 1950s Cuba. In each, characters were caught up in systems beyond their control—a fact that created an air of worldliness, with Kushner’s artists and prisoners and Americans abroad pretending or achieving a kind of pure passivity. “It seemed a form of intelligence to claim not to care what happened to oneself,” she writes in Telex from Cuba.

Fitting for works so immersed in history, Kushner’s novels propose alternative views of time. “There are two planes of time,” declares the narrator of The Mars Room, “the time of waiting for the bus, and the time when the bus finally pops into view.” In The Flamethrowers, after a young female artist is advised not to rush into her career, she thinks, “You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Be a conduit.” In Telex from Cuba, we read that “impatience [is] a kind of hope—making the effort to fill time with something.” How we experience time, how we narrate and endure it: these are some of the central concerns of Kushner’s fiction.

Kushner’s latest, Creation Lake, is a spy novel. That seems appropriate. What profession—or, rather, what profession’s fictional representation—has an odder relationship to time? From James Bond, we know that the spy’s life proceeds with great velocity: every day another drink, another woman, another danger to be dispatched. From George Smiley, we know that the spy’s life unfolds with great slowness: an endless succession of bad coffees, bureaucratic morasses, and tangled plots to be waited out. For the spy, things move too fast or not at all. “It was not his night for understanding time,” Smiley thinks in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It never is, really.

Set in 2013, Creation Lake is narrated by an American woman currently known as Sadie Smith. (We never learn her actual name or much of her personal history.) Sadie has been hired—by whom, it’s unclear—to infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical collective based in rural France and attempting to prevent the construction of an industrial reservoir in the Guyenne region. (Sadie got fired as a spook for the American government and now works for shadowy corporate interests.) Handsome enough to attract but not so much as to stand out, Sadie feels contempt for everyone and everything she meets. Europe is trashy; men are patsies; women are pathetic. She mocks the well read for their irony—“the more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use”—and the uneducated for their unsophistication. When your job depends upon winning intimacy only to betray it, scorn and the distance it creates are useful.

Kushner long has been fascinated by artifice. “She’d gauzed her person in persona,” one character thinks of another in Telex from Cuba, “but he sensed the person slipping through, person and persona in an elaborate tangle.” A spy’s existence requires an even more elaborate tangle, and Sadie’s game in Creation Lake is intricate. First, she seduces an “effete bourgeois” filmmaker named Lucien. He introduces her to his friend, Pascal Balmy, the privileged radical who heads Le Moulin. (If it seems odd for a collective to have a head, that’s only the first of Le Moulin’s ideological contradictions.) She offers to translate the group’s manifesto, “a kind of handbook for insurrection,” into English. Her final mission, revealed belatedly to both Sadie and the reader: convince the radicals to assassinate a government functionary.

These stratagems take time, and Sadie occupies herself with alcohol (“I am a better driver after a few drinks,” she unconvincingly claims) and extracurricular sex (with Lucien away filming a noir, she sleeps with a Moulinard). These vices suggest that Sadie isn’t as skilled a snoop as she believes. So too does her interest in the correspondence of the group’s guru, Bruno Lacombe. A waning 1960s radical (he was close to Guy Debord), Bruno now lives in a cave in the French countryside from which he occasionally emerges to email Pascal and other disciples his thoughts on political action and Neanderthals. The topics are related, at least to Bruno’s mind. Neanderthals, whom he lovingly dubs Thals, “hunted in teams [and] lived collaboratively”; they didn’t “hoard supplies, or engage in a growth-at-any-cost mindset.” They were, in other words, radical collectivists avant la lettre, even avant l’humain, offering us a model for how we might live.

Sadie hacks Bruno’s email account for intel on what Le Moulin might do. After it becomes clear that the missives don’t offer much operational detail, she keeps reading. For long stretches, her narration alternates with Bruno’s letters, and how much you enjoy Creation Lake depends upon how into political-mystical ponderings—the Thals were abstract artists whereas Homo sapiens copied nature; we all possess some percentage of Thal in our genome—you are. As Bruno’s ruminations proliferate, Sadie’s plotting begins to falter. She drinks more, takes risks, and waxes philosophical herself. Much of the novel passes slowly; the last hundred or so pages speed up.

Bruno brings to Creation Lake Kushner’s most far-reaching reflections yet on the malleable nature of time. Dwelling in his cave, he taps into “the atemporal bandwidth of the underground world.” He starts hearing the deep past—previous generations of the French people; previous species of the hominid family—and channels “the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.” He hasn’t just left capitalism behind. He’s left “calendar time” behind. Maybe this is the solution to the ravages of history: abandon history altogether.

At one point, Bruno criticizes Christians and communists alike: “In both cases … the waiting is the thing, and the commitment to waiting is bound up with a refusal to acknowledge that what you wait for is not coming.” What if we refused to wait for the future, rejecting religious and political eschatology and instead embracing time’s “deeper passages”? “I am convinced,” says Bruno, “that the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence.” Sadie’s work with Le Moulin wraps up; there’s a violent protest, a getaway car, and a deus ex machina involving a collapsing pile of logs—the bookcase from Howards End transported to Guyenne. Sadie is left wondering, with Bruno, if she can restore some kernel of her lost essence; if she has any essence to return to; if she can, finally, come in from the cold.

Of course, spies can’t live in the what-might-have-been. They operate in the what-is and the what-will-come-to-be. Thankfully, novels can occupy different kinds of temporality. Creation Lake offers both the dreaminess of the counterfactual and the chastening solidity of the real. It’s another impressive addition to Kushner’s already rich fictional inventory of time and its textures.

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Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period. He has written for Book Post on Yiyun Li, Eleanor Catton, Marilynne Robinson, Sigrid Nunez, and Gary Snyder, among others.

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