Creation Lake: Rachel Kushner Goes Underground

Rachel Kushner's novels have always been fascinated by people living at the edge of the systems they're part of, and Creation Lake may be her sharpest take on that idea yet.

The narrator is Sadie Smythe, a former FBI agent working as a freelance operative for a shadowy private intelligence firm. Her assignment is to infiltrate a group of radical environmental activists in rural France, a commune living in a farmhouse and plotting against the agribusiness around them. Sadie is a professional liar, fluent in the language of belonging and entirely unmoored herself. She's cynical and funny, and at times oddly moving.

Then the book takes a turn. Sadie becomes absorbed in the writing of Bruno Lacombe, a reclusive thinker who lives in the caves nearby and is preoccupied with Neanderthals. Through his words, the novel opens into a long meditation on what we mean by "human," and on whether the modern mind, with its surveillance, its ideology and its need to be clever, is as much a cage as a triumph.

What makes this book so good is how it holds those ideas together. It's a spy novel and a philosophical one, written with Kushner's precise, propulsive prose. The plotting gives you momentum, and the big questions sit beneath it without ever feeling lectured at.

Creation Lake was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and it's easy to see why. It's a book that rewards slow reading, and it's just as good for sinking into over a rainy weekend.

PAIR IT WITH Brian Eno's Ambient 4: On Land. It's murky, subterranean, and full of strange natural textures, which suits the book's turn from Sadie's undercover work into Bruno's caves and deep time. It's a good record for reading to, as well.

Find your copy at Waxpaper.