I'm Right And You're Wrong (And Also Stupid)
A Closer Look at "Creation Lake"
👋 This is another in a series of monthly posts investigating books that have influenced my writing. In case you missed them, you can read some of the previous ones here:
There is a type of novel that concerns a character, a set of characters, what have you, and the world they inhabit. The specifics aren’t always relevant except to say that they’re always unique. The novel may purport to focus on one or several points of change, but the chief concern of the reader is the wellbeing of character. It is a superset of the “summer of change” novel or the “anti-romance” novel or close to 90% of the non-airport fiction being published today. They’re typically but not always realist novels of the humanist or naturalist variety, meaning that they are concerned with reaffirming the beauty of life or reaffirming the beauty of nature or reaffirming the beauty of living in beautiful nature and often include sentences like, “This life, there is so much of it.”
There’s another type of novel that concerns an idea, a set of ideas, what have you, and how they speak to a theme. The ideas can be anything, but good “novels of ideas” will ensure that these disparate ideas all somehow correlate. And the best “novels of ideas” will ensure that this correlation is unexpected in obscure specificity. They might feature a man who teaches a Hitler Studies seminar and his wife, who works with the elderly and takes mysterious pills, who live in a town undergoing an airborne toxic event. And all of these disparate events might coalesce to form a thesis around how the anxieties of death sublimate into American suburban consumerism.
Over 100,000 years ago, as Homo sapiens emerged from Africa into Europe, they encountered their genetic cousins the Neanderthal and Denisovan for the first time, alongside whom they would coexist until their extinction. The experience of the Homo Sapien was one of conquest: the superior being reigned supreme. But what of the Neanderthal or Denisovan? Were they frightened? Did they understand what was happening? What would it have been like to live alongside your evolutionary replacement, watching your introgressive obviation play out in real-time? This tension is central to Creation Lake, the latest novel by Rachel Kushner, what it means to live in the brief period of time after your means of obsoletion have been introduced but before you have gone extinct.
In more concrete terms, the book concerns Sadie Smith, a spy-for-hire tasked with destabilizing Le Moulin, an anti-state eco-anarchist commune in rural France fighting the rapid corporatization of the French agricultural industry. Their cause du jour: the displacement of water from underground cave networks into privately owned above-ground plastic “mega-basins” which will, in all likelihood, exacerbate regional droughts while also poisoning the water.
Kushner interpolates the shuffled chronology of Smith’s exploits with emails she intercepts written to Le Moulin by Bruno Lacombe, the commune’s hidden ideologue leader who has sworn off modern conveniences to live in a cave, a life more closely resembling the Neanderthals whom he reveres. This epistolary interjection allows Lacombe’s belief system to emerge, a philosophy which essentially boils down to lamenting the extinction of the Neanderthal. That they — and not us — should have been the ones to survive.
Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.
Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.
And so we arrive to the project of the novel. Consider the Neanderthal. Consider the Denisovan. Consider a time when 30% of French citizens were actively involved in agriculture. Consider the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, and May ‘68, and the change these revolutionaries were able to effect. Imagine a world where things happen.
Now consider the Hominin turnover. Consider that only 3% of French citizens do the farming in their country today. Consider Le Moulin and other “revolutionary” groups modelled after an aesthetic rather than a cause. Consider the Schengen Zone, European multi-national enterprises, and the McDonald’s Big Mac. And in this constellation, consider the through-line: your extinction happening right in front of you. A world where the happenings only appear to transpire.
Let these contradictory forces linger with the forces they supplant, together, competing, and focus on the tension as it all plays out.
And it is that consideration which is most important. Kushner does not arrive to a conclusion, e.g. what to do in response to this, but focuses instead on the tension itself. It is the difference between the philosophical novel and the polemic. While both raise questions, only one is satisfied leaving it at that.
Here is Kushner from a 2021 interview with Heidi Julavits for City Arts & Lectures:
Art and the novel, they don’t [have a pretty particular political position and through-line], not in the same way. They aren’t about a message. They’re about moral doubt and moral complexity.
When asked by Julavits, “Do you resist novels that have messages?” Kushner responded, “I can’t think of a really good one that does have a message.”
The novel was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And it was famous for another reason, at least in the circles of the chronically online, which was how it was reviewed. At least, how one specific person reviewed it.
Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?
Brandon Taylor, the literary influencer with over 100,000 followers and a Man Booker shortlisting of his own (for his 2020 novel, Real Life) was, well, unimpressed. Writing for the London Review of Books, he took aim at Sadie Smith’s descriptive abilities.
Once begun, the espionage proves far more interesting than the deadened narration and ‘clever’ observations that comprise much of the Sadie sections.
And at Sadie Smith more generally.
I mentioned to a friend that I was having a hard time with Sadie as a narrator because she seemed stupid and unaware that she was stupid…
And at Rachel Kushner, for refusing to render the counter-capitalist subversives with empathy and compassion.
The main idea of Creation Lake is that the work the Moulinards are doing – trying to grow their own food, trying to build homes and barns and live on their own terms – is not really work because they can leave it at any point and do something else, meaning, probably, an email job in Paris… That’s the life they’ve chosen, and the novel’s unwillingness to make this the site of collision feels, again, like contempt.
And at Rachel Kusher, for not having written a book closer aligned to Émile Zola’s Germinal, which renders its counter-capitalist subversives with empathy and compassion.
I kept remembering the care with which Zola describes every part of the winches and levers that lower the miners into the shaft and bring them back again, and the way he unfolds the internal landscape of the coalface itself, allowing his readers to see the veins glinting in the dark. I thought of Zola and wanted to weep as I read Kushner struggling to describe a car going up a hill, or to advance her book beyond the momentary delights of Neanderthals having faces like Joan Crawford. It’s like, stand up, sister! Use your human mind!
This becomes the crux of Taylor’s criticism: he is disappointed that Rachel Kushner did not write an entirely different novel, one which centers characters and, through narrative imbued with naturalist and humanist sensibilities, makes the reader feel for their pain. Instead of all this blathering on about “Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology.”
The effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of factoids about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology was not that of encountering a great mind at work. Rather, it was as though someone had assembled some facts, given their sheaf of papers a shuffle and put them all into a novel so that some unsuspecting critic would hail it as ‘discursive’. This shoddy pseudo-thought is a blight.
Literary criticism, as in, actual literary criticism, is hard to find today. Sure, 500-2,000 word blocks of text get printed and circulated with that moniker, but those chunks of effusive praise are largely checkboxes in marketing strategy documents. Every summer features 25 “books of the summer,” a title bestowed by an author or critic who, surely by coincidence, has personal connections to the book’s author.
And so, credit where it is due, I respect and encourage the spirit of Taylor’s open disdain. But for one of the loudest properly critical reviews in recent memory to also be so fundamentally uninterested in the project of the novel it purports to critique is disappointing, least of all because the novel is not perfect. There are plenty of very valid issues to raise while meeting it on its terms.
For instance, does its ending deliver on the philosophical promise it presents? Or does it cop-out by giving its stoic narrative force, the backbone example of contemporary disaffection, a humanist glimpse of hope? There’s something very interesting about a novel that devotes its entirety to such a nihilist perspective. There’s something less interesting about a novel that ends with a hopeful turn.
The framework of a “novel of ideas” is predicated upon those ideas being tightly bound, fixed on a question that may not have an answer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a gargantuan novel concerned with addiction in its many forms and, once cracked, the reader understands that enormous passages about tennis are not, in fact, digressive at all. Don DeLillo’s Underworld is about the sublimation of collective guilt into moral decay in American culture. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is about historical reckoning, particularly how Britain’s colonial past is inexorable from his multicultural present.
Like these novels, Creation Lake doesn’t do substantive work to ground its characters emotionally, and intentionally so. Does one feel for Hal Incandenza the way they feel for, say, Connell Waldron? Does one’s heart ache the same way? Probably not. When you set down Normal People, are you haunted by the confrontation of some cultural aspect of contemporary living? Again, unlikely. These novels set out to accomplish different things, and should be judged on their ability to do so.
In a marketplace saturated by humanist narratives, it is inevitable that novels of ideas will be misread, held up to a Zolaesque rubric they are not built to survive. Which is liberating in a sense. Write what you want. It’s likely to be misread no matter what it is.
I am exceptionally late to the “did you see what Brandon Taylor wrote about Rachel Kushner” party. But now that the smoke has cleared and I’ve finally had a chance to read Creation Lake, I’m happy to stir it up again.
-JSR
P.S. The photographs, taken with my trusty Olympus XA, are from a 2023 trip to a friend’s house in suburban Paris. Not quite Kushner’s “Guyenne,” but close.