The American woman watches people standing in line and waiting to pay at the cash register. It’s a highway travel center in France and the woman observes customers walk in and out. She’s at the same time bored and fascinated. People buy dried truffles or lavender oil or glass jars of something resembling cat food. Except it’s not cat food but terrine, a combination of jellied meats that French people eat “as if it were not cat food,” says Sadie Smith, the mysterious narrator of Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel Creation Lake.
On Thursday, April 3, the acclaimed author of Telex From Cuba, The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room read excerpts from her new novel and spoke with singer Kim Gordon at the opening event of Mission Creek Festival at Hancher Auditorium.
In Creation Lake, we follow Smith, a woman who was dismissed from a government agency under obscure circumstances and now finds herself on a mission: to infiltrate a leftist group in rural France with the ultimate goal of dismantling it. She is in it for one reason alone: money. She’s getting paid by the large agricultural conglomerates. What she cannot know is that she will fall under the spell of Bruno, an 80-year old man and leader of the activist group — man who presses his ear against the rocks in a cave to hear the voices of primitive men who lived millennia ago.
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award and the Booker Prize, Creation Lake is meant to be “an ideas novel that is not boring,” said Kushner, when describing the intentionality behind the propulsive short chapters and the thriller-like feeling of the plot.
In front of a practically full auditorium, the author spoke of the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette and how his short suspense novels had been an influence for this book. “Reading Manchette made me write a more active protagonist,” said Kushner. “This was a departure from my previous novels, where the characters are affected by what happens to them in the world. They are more reactive.”
At some point in the novel, Bruno distills the current state of the planet in one sentence: “We are headed toward extinction in a shiny driverless car and the question is: how do we exit the car?” Kushner noted that she does not have an answer to her character’s rhetorical question because as an artist she’s more interested in exploring, in finding the right kind of questions. The reader, as Bruno, is left to wonder not only if there is a way to exit the vehicle but if humanity, as a whole in 2025, even wishes to get out of the car.
