Rachel Kushner’s Spy Games

A young woman arrives at a run-down house in the French countryside. The house, at the end of a drive lined with poplar trees, belongs to her wealthy boyfriend. She has spent the last week loitering around a swimming pool and making trips to the beach, while he prepared to shoot a movie, a task that will keep him away for the next several weeks. He understands her to be “a former grad student who had lost her way”—a type of woman familiar in fiction, highly educated yet troubled by a deep uncertainty about who she is or where she is going. She appears to be the secondary character in her own life, primed for a bout of well-appointed ennui.

Yet her first impressions of the house make clear that she is a completely different kind of person than we might assume. She prizes the “long private driveway” not for its tree-lined beauty but because the sound of gravel will warn her of visitors, and she selects a room with a view not so she can admire the landscape but so that she can surveil “the entire valley” below: “It helped that I had high-powered binoculars with US-military-grade night vision,” she notes. This woman, the narrator of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, in fact operates with a steely purpose that she has chosen to keep to herself.

Kushner’s fiction is full of similarly tough women, who do not take personally other people’s low expectations of them. Reno, the protagonist of her celebrated 2013 novel, The Flamethrowers, sits through dinners at the homes of art-world luminaries in 1970s New York, on the arm of her rich boy-friend, Sandro, rarely speaking a word; her hosts don’t know that she just set a land speed record with the fastest car in the world, and she doesn’t much care if they do. Her friend Giddle, who works as a waitress in a diner, is actually engaged in a long-term piece of performance art, playing the part of “girl working in a diner” in order to better understand her subject. Giddle got the idea from a waitress in Hoboken, who turned out to have her own private purpose; she was a sociologist doing fieldwork and explains, “I infiltrate to study this world.”

Youngish women have a tendency to become semi-invisible, or to put it a different way, the men around them don’t tend to see them beyond their barest outlines—a fact that Kushner’s characters turn to their advantage. The narrator of Creation Lake simply takes this notion to an extreme: A spy working under the name Sadie Smith, she sets out to infiltrate the Moulinards, a group of radical eco-activists in the south of France. Her approach to spying mirrors the approach to reporting that Joan Didion describes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: of making herself so “unobtrusive” that her subjects “forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” Once Sadie’s targets (including the boyfriend, Lucien) have accepted her presence, they make few efforts to find out more about her, and they happily talk all about themselves.

The acquisition of secret knowledge is one of the central pleasures of the spy novel, and Kushner works several unusual varieties of such knowledge into the novel’s propulsive plot. There is typical tradecraft: the checking of encrypted messages, the building of a plausible backstory. Then there’s the less typical, gendered knowledge that only Sadie has in the novel—her awareness of exactly how the Moulinards expect a woman in her position to act, and her uncanny ability to calibrate her performance. But perhaps most gripping is Sadie’s clandestine induction into the debates that consume the group—conversations about the environment, yes, but also about partisans, rebellions, handfishing, caves, activist strategy, and the nature of humanity itself, from its earliest origins to the present. These conversations bear directly on the characters’ most consequential decisions, combining high-stakes action with the thrill of intellectual discovery. As in a Graham Greene or John le Carré novel, in Creation Lake the point of spying is not just to find out what is happening but how to pick one’s way through a world of ideas.

Traditional spy thrillers often fall short in their limited ability to imagine women as more than sex objects, particularly in casting female spies as honeytraps. But Sadie chooses this role for herself, believing it is the surest way to get close to the Moulinards. She used to work undercover in the FBI, which never asked her to cross such a line, but—having been fired for other questionable conduct—she’s now freelancing for a shadowy set of unnamed “contacts” in Europe and relatively free to break the rules.

Lucien is not an important target in himself. He is valuable to Sadie because his childhood friend Pascal Balmy is the leader of the activist group at Le Moulin. Pascal owns the 11-hectare estate where the group practices rewilding, organic farming, and communal living. Sadie’s contacts also suspect that the Moulinards are behind a recent arson attack on a (very evil-sounding) Big Ag project. Her brief is to find out their plans, and learn more about their reclusive mentor, Bruno Lacombe, who lives in a cave and emerges only to send philosophical emails to his flock. Sadie knows the Moulinards are wary of interlopers, as they have been burned in the past. She needs an introduction from someone they truly trust: hence, her seduction of Lucien.

The first part of the novel is a wry commentary on this precision-engineered love affair—which Lucien experiences as the affirmation of everything in him that is good and deserving of love, and Sadie experiences as a set of awkward rituals requiring the complete minimization of her true self. Of course, this is largely because she’s performing a role; she is not attracted to him in the slightest, nor does she fall into the cliché of developing feelings for him mid-assignment. But she’s able to play her part so well because women are so used to reading about love and watching it on-screen from the male perspective: Lucien “conceived of reality as stage-directed in black and white,” Sadie remarks, almost pityingly. And later: “It felt right to him that he would fall in love with a stranger he encountered while playing pinball in an empty bar on a weekday afternoon, a mysterious woman with a cute American accent.” Having everything go his way so often has left him with a form of defenselessness.

He might also be more suspicious of Sadie if he were not so accustomed to falling in love with love itself, rather than with a substantial person. Even Sadie is surprised by how quickly he is satisfied by her paper-thin backstory. She tells him she has been supporting herself by walking dogs for rich families in Paris. “What else would a person need to know?” she jokes to herself. “As it turns out, hardly anything.”

Sadie points this out not to decry the male gaze or make an argument for gender equality; what makes these scenes so fun is her delight at Lucien’s slights and oversights. “We’d been together only a few months, and he knew nothing about me,” she thinks with pleasure. “He was in a couple with a woman who didn’t exist.” Beauty can even have the effect of making a person somewhat anonymous (“Symmetrical face, small straight nose, regular features, brown eyes, brown hair, clear skin: these are not identifying descriptors”). Her tone is relentlessly cool and analytical, punctuated by eye rolls, even when describing the most unpleasant part of her job: sex with Lucien. For plausibility’s sake, she submits to arduous foreplay followed by the “grand theatric of me wanting and begging for ‘the real thing’” on a semiregular basis:

And then there was the “Oh yes,” portion of this scripted sequence, after he put it in, my reaction meant to make him feel like he’d been holding out on me, delaying the declaration that it was Christmas, and “Oh God!” it was Christmas, and he was piling into me.

This is the opposite of conventional spy sex, where the spy spends a reckless night with a femme fatale. Sadie has to put herself at a distance from the whole act through irony. Kushner, too, draws a clear line between the closely observed, hyper-articulate espionage novel she is writing and a more hard-boiled, macho style, when Sadie reads aloud from the novel Lucien is adapting for film. (Sample: “So many memories. From before. Her smell. Her hair. Her skin. He reached under his pillow. He touched what was there. The gun. She’d left it. For him.”) “This book,” she remarks, “is written in short. Very short. Sentences. Pieces of thought. Phrases. Some, just a word. A single word.”

Creation Lake is also an evolution in style from some of Kushner’s earlier writing, particularly The Flamethrowers, which got some of its dangerous tinge from noirish turns of phrase. (“That was how I thought of them, before I knew who any of them were. The people with the gun.”) Where The Flamethrowers was saturated with neon and motor oil and rebellion (“It plays out as if on Imax,” Dwight Garner wrote in 2013), Creation Lake is notably more low-key. Kushner has a distinct feel for the rural French setting, but she doesn’t make it a larger-than-life character like 1970s New York. The novel gets its sharp edges from Sadie’s extreme self-assurance: the unnerving confidence with which she announces her own “mysterious sex appeal”; or claims that she is a better driver after several glasses of wine; or that Italian food is largely mediocre, but no one dares to say so; or that mosquitoes only bite people of weak character.

These little provocations appear to offer glimpses of the real Sadie—as if she is allowing herself a few outbursts of genuine conviction, amid a job that requires otherwise constant dissimulation. And Sadie does at times seek to preserve some sense of a true self; she relishes “all the little habits one develops on a job, habits that are temporary and yet answer to something real.” But even her supposedly unguarded opinions are sometimes part of the act. As she observes when attempting to win over the Moulinards, “having a few contrary opinions, within limits, was the persona of authenticity by which they were coming to know me.” If she has a consistent trait, it is this slipperiness, and the stimulation she seems to draw from it: the compulsion to mix true and false together, the need to keep whirring intelligence in motion, constantly occupied with new information and its meaning.

Although the Moulinards are accused of committing sabotage, surprisingly little of the book bears on the politics of environmental destruction or preservation. None of this is really in question. The Moulinards engage in the kinds of acts recommended by Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline—destroying the infrastructure of environmental harm—and the locals largely approve. Their enemy is a set of corporations that plan to drain the region’s groundwater and store it for their personal use in megabasins—a project that would drastically disrupt the area’s ecosystem. Even Sadie acknowledges the devastating effects: Driving through an area where the construction has already begun, she sees fields “sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon,” surrounded by guards and boiling dust clouds. (The grim scene does not deter her from her mission.)

The real divide among the environmentalists is philosophical. Which is more important to the good life: action or reflection? On one side, there is the group’s leader, Pascal, who lives in the world, surrounded by his followers, and believes in tried and tested subversion tactics to shape it. On the other, there is the older Bruno, who is weary of the world and has retreated even from like-minded people, choosing to communicate sporadically and only in writing. His vision of the good life is more mystical; in order to understand why we are here, he proposes, we have to understand the entirety of human history, going all the way back to the Neanderthals and their extinction at the hands of the more aggressive Homo sapiens—a subject he often ponders in his own cave, a Lascaux-like setting whose walls bear the marks of early human painting.

Action may seem the practical choice. Yet Pascal’s “handbook for insurrection,” titled Zones of Incivility, is frustratingly vague and pro forma. Under the chapter headings “form communes,” “create territories,” and “employ silence,” he enumerates a broad set of principles, without ever getting into specifics. Vagueness is admittedly a valuable tactic for staying out of jail when the point of your group is to carry out civil disobedience and sabotage. Still, there’s something phony about Pascal: his rejection of two veteran activists, simply because they’re old and uncool; his expulsion of a woman who was too outspoken in meetings (“By Pascal’s rules, everything must be an invisible ‘we,’” she complains to Sadie); his excuses for the strangely retro division of labor at Le Moulin, where the women do all the childcare and cooking, while “the labor of thinking, reading, and writing fell to men.”

Bruno, the Moulinards’ aging mentor, is the soul of the novel, with his winding, sometimes controversial musings on prehistoric man, the discovery of fire, and cave life. The conceit is that Sadie has direct access to these thoughts, because she has hacked into his email account. The novel opens with her summary of his email-essay on Neanderthals and the likelihood that they experienced depression—a move immediately signaling that the scope of the book is much wider than the story of a spy undermining an environmental group; Bruno is considering the fate of humanity as part of a millions-of-years-long history.

There’s a beauty in his imaginings of the Neanderthal’s inner life, how the “Thal’s” predisposition to “anhedonic brooding” may have given him the drive to make “art for art’s sake.” Ditto in his descriptions of his own semi-feral boyhood, as he describes watching a pine marten catch a fish, and from that observation learning to catch fish with his bare hands in an ice-cold stream. And his account of practical life underground: of how to keep a fire in a cave, how to direct the smoke, how to move around in darkness, by touch alone. Bruno has a stake in protecting the region’s groundwater that no one else has: Because he lives in the caves, he knows intimately the underground lakes that would disappear and the spring-fed lavoirs that would dry up. “For nine-tenths of human time on earth people went underground,” he argues. On a foundational level, the Big Ag project is wrong. Now that their diggers have started, he can feel tremors in the walls of the cave.

It would be easy to dismiss Bruno as a crackpot; he protests that he’s not an “anti-civver” or a “primitivist.” He talks about tuning in to “cave frequency” and losing oneself in “monophony” that turns into “polyphony” spanning “moments, eras, epochs, eons.” But Sadie can’t stop reading his emails, checking them daily even after she realizes they aren’t relevant to her assignment; Bruno may be the only character with an authentic, unwieldy emotional life, the authenticity Sadie talks about crafting for herself but never truly inhabits. “Bruno was some kind of lunatic,” she thinks at one point. “I could not help but see his discussions of cave frequency as a naked expression of grief.” His embrace of the irrational and unknown, and his sense of wonder at the past, cut through the cynicism of her own perspective, and the self-control of the rest of the novel.

Part of the appeal of the Bruno sections is the way they play with delightful nonsense, mixing riffs on obscure history (the persecution of the Cagot people in France in the Middle Ages) with wholly invented episodes (I could not find any evidence that there was ever a glorious Cagot uprising in 1594). That we learn all of this illicitly, by snooping on him, adds to the feeling of gaining secret knowledge. Bruno’s sermonlike emails give the world of this novel its own lore, an expanded sense of human history and all it might contain.

As deeply as Sadie reads about the fate of the Cagots, or about Bruno’s friendship with Guy Debord, she cannot stay indefinitely in the world of ideas. Her contacts expect her to escalate tensions within the group, and ultimately to commit highly illegal acts. For all Creation Lake’s philosophical expansiveness, Kushner plots the final third of the novel with ever-tightening precision, right down to the details of which numbered road will serve as an escape route.

By this point in the book, there’s no doubt of Sadie’s ability to pull off her plan. But there might be reason to wonder how someone of such intelligence, with such fluency in complex ideas and a clear affinity for the people who live by them, can bring herself to go ahead with it. The novel’s boldest move, perhaps, is ensuring that we don’t know enough about the person going by “Sadie” to get close to the answer, and the answer, anyway, is not really the point. Kushner gives us an intricate portrait of this woman’s thoughts throughout the operation, and some of her professional backstory (successful infiltration of a biker gang; nearly career-ending op with a West Coast environmental group), and this is the level on which she is knowable. But Kushner withholds anything resembling a backstory: no place or date of birth, no family, no friends.

There’s no temptation to explain Sadie’s actions as a part of what the critic Parul Sehgal has called the “trauma plot”: the idea that characters, frequently women, are motivated largely by some terrible moment in their past. Kushner gives no indication of what Sadie has ever suffered, or not. All we have is the evidence of her lethal competence. It leaves a refreshing motivation: that she did it because she could.