Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s best book to date

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• Title: Creation Lake
• Author: Rachel Kushner
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Scribner
• Pages: 416

In all Rachel Kushner’s major novels to date, a compelling female protagonist finds herself inside a hermetic world within the larger world. In The Flamethrowers it was the New York art scene of the 1970s, in The Mars Room, a women’s prison, and in Telex from Cuba it was an expat American enclave in prerevolutionary Cuba.

She’s chosen not to break that mould in her newest, and, to my mind, best book to date, Creation Lake, about an American female undercover operative who, using the alias Sadie Smith, is tasked with penetrating a radical farming co-operative, Le Moulin, in rural France. The Moulinards are suspected of having vandalized industrial projects related to the building of high-speed rail and the diverting of local water sources, and the presumption is that there’s more sabotage to come.

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When the novel begins, Sadie has already laid substantial groundwork for her mission by becoming the fiancée of Lucien Dubois, a filmmaker connected to the movement. And Lucien isn’t even Sadie’s prime target. That would be Lucien’s childhood friend and the Moulinards’ leader, Pascal Balmy. Pascal fancies himself the heir apparent of the (real) Marxist filmmaker and provocateur Guy Debord, and even sports the latter’s trademark short bangs to show his devotion.

While Lucien is busy in Marseille shooting a movie, Sadie heads down to the commune armed with the keys to Lucien’s family’s nearby derelict estate. From there, she’ll try to gain the trust of Pascal and his inner circle (composed mainly of Paris transplants).

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In Pascal she finds a familiar type: the radical who comes from wealth and deigns to know what’s best for the local peasants, and whose lives he romanticizes. This while sleeping with the group’s women and somehow managing to never get his own hands dirty.

Pascal and the rest of the Moulinards take their cues, Sadie has learned, from a man named Bruno Lacombe, their de facto spiritual leader. A 1968 Paris radical, Bruno retreated decades ago to the country, where, after the death of his youngest daughter, he went, quite literally, underground: to a deep cave on his property where he now sleeps, and claims to be able to hear, and commune with, voices of ancient generations.

Bruno has given up virtually all human contact. He communicates with the Moulinards exclusively via e-mails, which Sadie is intercepting, assuming they’ll contain directives for future subversive activities. Instead, she finds that Bruno is using them to lay out a kind of grand philosophy based on his fervent belief in the superiority of Neanderthals over arrogant homo sapiens.

At 34, Sadie is as jaded, emotionally detached and cynical as Sam Spade (with whom she shares a pair of initials). She’s a gun for hire. A lone wolf in the game purely for the money. Unlike Sam Spade though, she’s unbothered by ethics or notions of justice.

And would Sam Spade – had he been a woman – ever have gotten enormous breast implants in service to his profession? Seems doubtful. But Sadie has, and she makes it clear that the latter were instrumental in grabbing Lucien’s attention during their initial “cold bump” (i.e., planned encounter meant to seem coincidental).

Like past Kushner protagonists, Sadie possesses characteristics typically associated with men – such as a need for speed. (She believes she’s “a better driver after a few drinks, more focused,” and critiques other people’s clutch use.) She’s comfortable, too, with a certain level of violence and chaos. Alone in Lucien’s country pile, she tosses back warm beers and never washes a dish, knowing she’ll be gone soon anyway.

Of her background we know almost nothing, save for the fact that she once lived in California. And that her last government gig ended badly after her entrapment of a young male target. As a consequence, she now works in the private sector in Europe, which, being fluent in several languages, she prefers (“no supervising officers, no logbooks, and no rules”).

Most authors would give backstory reasons (an abusive or unloving childhood etc.) to explain Sadie’s behaviour. Kushner, however, is content to let her remain a black box, despite our first-person access to her thoughts and opinions, of which she has many. (The 1980s and 90s culture that Lucien reveres, for example, she deems “culturally stagnant.”)

Creation Lake repeatedly plays with the scaffolding and tropes of the thriller genre to build our expectations, then thwart them. At first, we play along in the manner we think we should, by worrying, for instance, about whether Sadie’s cover will be blown. And yet that worry is never shared by Sadie herself, who remains stone-cold, almost sociopathically fearless.

The best novels – and this is one – rely as much, if not more, on what’s unsaid as what’s said. To wit: We eventually become so attuned to Sadie that her very lack of reaction to Bruno’s philosophy is enough to signal what we take to be a profound shift in her. Producing a novel of emotional intelligence out of a character effectively devoid of emotion, as Kushner has done, feels like a kind alchemic performance; one that could only be accomplished by a writer coolly and confidently perched at the top of her game.