Home Sick

Two narrative tracks run parallel in Creation Lake. In one, we follow, nonchronologically, Sadie’s move from the United States to France and her attempt to infiltrate and subvert the activist group. The other consists of the long emails of a philosopher-sage figure named Bruno Lacombe who I imagined throughout as Murray Bookchin.

Initially, Lacombe comes across as a bore, speculating wildly about whether Neanderthals — he affectionately calls them “Thals” — had depression or art. But his rants are compelling, partly because they showcase his curiosity — a counter to Sadie’s own nihilism. Living in an underground cave, he speculates that the surface and the sky are the terrain of fighter jets and war, that real thinking is to be found in the subterranean depths. Lacombe becomes an anchor for Sadie, who reads his emails even after the activists have lost interest in the wisdom they contain.

Sadie’s seductive charisma drives the second narrative line in which she uses her feminine wiles to gain entry into the commune. Men, in Sadie’s view, very often mistake approving nods and intonations of “that’s interesting” for conversation. Recognizing this, Sadie softens suspicions by appealing to the desires of the men around her. “They want you to talk to them about their precious youth,” she observes in one of her contempt-fueled monologues.

Lucien is completely unaware of the low esteem in which Sadie holds him. This provides the novel with some of its most biting observations.

In Marseille, as we lay in the hotel bed, my back to him, pretending I was asleep, he said into my hair. “When I’m inside you it’s like I’m home.”

I shivered in disgust. Sensing my shiver as if it were a tremble of love, he squeezed me and whispered, “Sadie.”

Everything about this set piece is brutal. The dynamic between the two characters is caught entirely in the image of a man speaking to a woman’s hair — her ears closed to what he is saying — and equating sexual intimacy with the idea of home, from which the woman has gone all the way to Europe to escape. That the name he calls her is not her own makes the interaction even more cutting.

In moments like this, Sadie’s attempts to position herself as a negative space against which the foibles and hypocrisies of her targets are illuminated also puts her in stark relief. Within Kushner’s spy caper, a microdrama of personal breakdown, in which a woman desperately attempts to avoid asking any questions of her life, quietly plays out. Much like the private dicks of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, Sadie is psychologically opaque, sardonic, and unidealistic. Nevertheless, she does seem to desire a life of excitement, free from the humdrum rhythms of work and family.

Salting

Watching a documentary in which a nine-year-old Italian boy speaks to the camera with the machismo of a grown man about “making love” to an age-mate, Sadie wonders what life he could be living now. The boy’s precociousness must, Sadie speculates, have set him up for a life of extremes. Had he been killed in a bank robbery? Or perhaps become the kind of leftist activist she gets paid to hunt down and entrap? Scouring the internet, Sadie discovers something altogether more terrifying: a provincial small life, unremarkable in every sense. “Franck,” the boy, “had thirty-one Facebook friends. His interests and hobbies included Nescafé, Burger King, and a Facebook group called I Love My Daughter. Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable. . . . Grown-up Franck is driving an Amazon delivery van right now, in his Lamborghini baseball cap.”

A settled life and domesticity of any kind are evoked as objects entirely repellent to the narrator. Sadie’s recurring fantasy, her “sole fantasy of motherhood,” repeated throughout the novel and in its final pages, is that she might raise a child who she found in a dumpster. But this child would never become a real person and would instead remain in “blurry focus.” A real child would run the risk of growing up to be a mediocrity like Franck or a dupe like Lucien, we’re led to speculate.

For Sadie, a person’s core — what she calls “salt” in late-night alcohol-fueled monologues — is unchangeable; it provides the underlying motivations for all their actions. This predisposes her to a deep suspicion of the leftist activists she has infiltrated. For them, constructing a new community is a way of creating a new form of life, transforming the soul as a precondition for transforming the world. But the real motivations for human action are “not politics. There are no politics inside of people,” only salts — deep desires that latch onto political movements and empty ciphers like herself.

Midway through Creation Lake, Sadie mocks Fredric Jameson’s dictum, repeated to the point of meaninglessness, that it’s “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That something is hard to imagine “does not mean it is correct,” Sadie insists. It is more likely evidence that “capitalism might be more insidious than the blue-green miracle of planet earth and its swaddling of life-giving ether.” This possibility — that progress has been defeated, that hope is lost — is one that the leftists Sadie shadows are unable to countenance.

Only Lacombe, holed up in his cave, having abandoned the world, is capable of looking clear-eyed at the present. This is a quality Sadie respects, and the voice of Lacombe — sensitive and curious about the world despite defeat — is the novel’s most authoritative. Between the bitterness and airy speculation of the Moulinards and the bleakness of Sadie’s outlook, the pull of Lacombe’s worldview becomes ever more alluring.

At first this idea struck me as lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.

In the final act of the novel, Sadie narrates her own Pyrrhic victory. Believing she has convinced the most credulous of the Moulinards to engage in an act of domestic terrorism, Sadie shows up with several guns she hopes to distribute at a protest scheduled to coincide with the appearance of Platon. Handing a gun to Burdmoore, a monolingual American living with the Moulinards, she encounters skepticism rather than compliance:

Burdmoore: “You want me to use this thing? On this guy Paul Platon?”

Something was off. . .

Burdmoore: “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?”

Sadie: “What?”

Burdmoore: “Do you think I’m seriously going to run at this guy, in front of all these people, with cops bearing down, and fucking shoot him? Are you nuts?”

Burdmoore: “I’ll keep it as a souvenir. It’ll remind me of that time some crazy chick came to Le Moulin and tried to stir up a bunch of shit and no one went for it.”

Platon’s death, when it does take place, is entirely an accident; the only role Sadie plays in his demise is as witness. Charm, charisma, and its seductive powers prove in Creation Lake’s final act to be impotent. What makes Sadie so ineffective is unclear, although the increase in the rate at which she is drinking and her growing carelessness in the novel’s final act suggest that we are not witnessing her at the height of her powers.

Initially, Sadie’s strength comes from her ability to tap into the desires of her marks. But that relies on an asymmetry: they project their desires onto her, and she molds herself into an object capable of fulfilling their fantasies. As Sadie’s handlers offer her greater sums of money for more daring espionage, her desperation leads her to show her hand. Lured by cash, she becomes as pathetic as her victims.