It’s odd that anyone would consider lengthy speculative discussion of Neanderthals a failing in a novel. Rachel Kushner’s new book, Creation Lake, seems to befuddle about half its audience thanks to its genre nonconformity. I’m not sure why. 

Generically, it’s a defective epistolary novel. Every few pages the narrator, an American spy who goes by Sadie Smith, relates the contents of emails from an old French radical named Bruno Lacombe, which she can read thanks to some not terribly sophisticated hacking (he uses “a wanadoo.fr account whose password I guessed correctly on my eleventh try”). These long passages of free indirect discourse convey a lot of good sense about what’s gone wrong for humans since the Neolithic Age. Bruno writes in answer to polite queries from a group of anarchists, the Moulinards, who have decamped to la France profonde. Their leader is a younger man named Pascal Balmy. Officially, Sadie is there to translate a tract of his with the hilarious title Zones of Incivility. In truth, she’s working for unknown employers to smoke out the Moulinards, who are suspected of ecoterrorist sabotage.

It isn’t hard to guess who Bruno and Pascal stand for, approximately, if you know a little about the French communization scene. It also doesn’t matter if you don’t. Bruno’s opinions on Neanderthals are uncannily like those of an old Italian radical I know, with the difference that my friend is a confirmed urbanite, to the extent of having been an Indiano Metropolitano in 1977. Since I don’t believe Kushner was aware of him while writing the book, my assumption is that ex-militant anthropological conjecture is more or less the same everywhere and can be extrapolated from basic axioms: among them, that small bands of hunter-gatherers were and are far happier than civilization-dwellers and that Homo sapiens sapiens has been a genocidal species pretty much from the beginning. Curious, then, that one of the monuments of this strain of thought, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan (1983), puts the downfall as late as Sumer, only a bit over five thousand years ago (the late David Graeber was to propose a more evidence-based version of this chronology in The Dawn of Everything). Other people think the shit hit the fan long before that. Part of the fun of Kushner’s book is following its author down the rabbit hole, sometimes rather literally, since Bruno lives in a cave. We are meant to suspect that Bruno might simply be off his rocker.

Creation Lake will be called a “novel of ideas.” This is a bad way of understanding it. Sadie and Pascal and the caveman Lacombe are not the personified philosophies of Malraux’s La Condition Humaine. (At least one prominent reviewer seems to wish they were.) They spool out, rather, as distinct but fluid forms of life, ways of doing, techniques. Pascal talks a lot, and much of what he says, as Sadie notes, sounds like bullshit, but the bullshit is key to the way he exercises soft control over his crew of hippies, Parisian intellectuals, working-class hunks, and Sadie herself. This is an experimental novel in the sense that it thinks about ethics while leaving principles in suspension. Sadie affects to have no moral compass at all, but she has an acute sense of how to and how not to do things. 

There are moments when the book thematizes its notions of practice. Bruno, in what might be an extract from his final email, explains the method of etak, the Polynesian (or properly Micronesian) art of navigation. The principle of etak “was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations.” This pretense of immobility was “a special form of cognition, a skill that was crucial to getting somewhere.” Sadie has her own notion of immobility, too. She refers a few times to what she calls “the salt,” “this essence that was deep inside of people,” the essence that accounts for a person’s sense of reality. The salt is what says that Pascal is full of shit. But salt is a lure, too. Pascal is not entirely full of shit, just as the novel is not entirely a deflation of communist desire. It would be trash if it were. The immovability of the capitalist world accounts for a lot of Sadie’s salt, and her capitalist reality principle is ersatz know-how that ultimately leaves her in the lurch. She believes in the immutability of essence because her mode of existence is a refutation of the same. Her essence is to be without essence, and her immobility is that of never staying put long enough for the island to come to her.

We don’t learn much about who “Sadie” is. What difference would it make? She’s fond of performing her absence of origins for the reader. To those she’s infiltrating, she claims to have grown up in a town called Priest Valley, California—a real place, but an uninhabited one. The lie is superfluous. Somebody, after all, might Google Priest Valley and discover the truth (the book seems to be set around 2013, given that Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” is playing a lot). It would be safer to claim to come from a big city. One presumes that the function of the lie is to ratify a fictionality that pleases Sadie. It is, in other words, literature. And the novel as a whole is, among other things, an allegory of fiction as such.

The form in which a story can be told about radical subjectivity is of course a story of betrayal. To get to Pascal, Sadie efficiently seduces his best friend, Lucien, a filmmaker, in Paris, and then follows him to Marseille. It’s possible that this character plus Bruno’s surname make a distributed nod to Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien, a movie about a collaborator with the German occupation. Sadie is defined by and defines herself by deception, which is to say that, more or less inevitably, she’s deceiving herself. The fact that a person can establish a difference between what she feels herself to be and how she appears is the phenomenon that we call negativity and constitutes us as subjects. If we could not recognize ourselves as being misrecognized, we wouldn’t have any projects, any plots. Sadie’s insistence on deception, to the point of self-deception (deluding herself into believing that she’s deluding others), is a dialectic of mutual recognition that finds its confirmation not in being recognized by the other as what she is but in being correctly recognized as what she is not. Hence the satisfaction she finds in the banality and script-like repetition of her sexual encounters with Lucien, who repulses her: “In such a scene between new lovers, a moment repeated everywhere all the time with no originality to it—none—Lucien surely felt that something singular and novel was taking place.” (Note that word “novel.”) Every encounter is for her ideally such a drama of non-origin.

Sadie—a dropout, we learn, from the UC Berkeley rhetoric PhD— is not only a textual creature but is compelled to stage her textuality/sexuality (sorry) as a series of scenes in which she enjoys being read properly by being read wrongly. She’s sometimes wrong about this, too. Near the end of the book, for example, Sadie tries to manipulate the dilapidated New York radical Burdmoore (who also shows up, younger, in Kushner’s earlier novel The Flamethrowers) into committing a suicidal assassination. After she hands him a Walther P38, Burdmoore drops the act: 

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

He pockets the gun: 

“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.”

Sadie is in fact rather bad at her job. In a flashback scene, she fails to sell fake Picasso drawings to a pair of collectors who see right through her. Near the end, just prior to Burdmoore’s about-face, it turns out that Lucien has been cheating on her, not that she cares; at the same time, somebody else is getting close to blowing her cover with a Freedom of Information Act file dump. By this point none of it matters. The game is up.

Sadie’s pleasure in staging misreadings is the only stable core of her character’s “motivation,” to use a word that I hate. And it happens again and again, as it’s happening in these paragraphs. She conceives of herself as a de Manian textual machine or allegory of her own unreadability. It’s a mistake to believe that the temporalization of these textual effects as diegesis is not very centrally connected to how we live and feel. Although there’s a restlessness in Kushner’s protagonist that’s akin to Genet’s ecstasy of betrayal, the book narrates something that Genet never does: an “arc,” or a transition from one (false) consciousness to another. By the end of the novel Sadie is no longer the same. For one, she has, a bit mawkishly, reverse-adopted the unseen Bruno as surrogate father. (“Bruno,” she murmurs to the night sky, “Bruno, I feel that way too.”) Loose ends get tied up. Yet the structure of textuality remains as it ever is, iterative and always-already doing its thing.

This accounts for the clash of generic (temporal) conventions—this “novel” is a “thriller” and certain things I’m telling you about it are “spoilers”—against the anachronic sprawl of ideas as forms of life, which is one of the most interesting aspects of what’s happening here and, again, seems to annoy some reviewers to no end, inasmuch as parts of the book do indeed feel like clicking through Wikipedia links. (But where is Bruno getting his factoids from, anyway?) Another way to put it is that this novel is a conflict between narrative and writing. Textuality is an infection, but Pascal draws a radical form of life out of thin air with words. By writing to us, as narrator, Sadie preserves her only partly-invisible difference from that form of life—she nurses her negativity.

In one of the most astounding sequences in the book, Bruno reveals that, as a boy during World War II (unaware that the rest of his family was being murdered in the Holocaust), he picked up and wore the helmet of a dead German soldier. The helmet turns out to be infested with lice. This transfer of lice from flesh to flesh, dead to living, takes on, for him, cosmic significance. Like lice, “spirit travels, he said, from the dead for centuries, for millennia, into the living. Each of us inherits code, blueprints, a set of instructions—call it what you want—from those who came before us, all the way back into the deepest sediments of time.” He means DNA, most literally. The “lake of our creation” in the book’s title is what Bruno senses in the darkest reaches of his cave. But the transmission he describes is conspicuously textual. Bruno starts the anecdote by saying that “this memory could be considered a screen memory, in the Freudian sense—a recollection that functioned to cover his own trauma, to obscure it behind a different incident, one that was less significant.” This (self-)deception mirrors Sadie’s, as Bruno’s reported words—which Sadie translates for us—mirror the first-person stream into which they trickle. Bruno’s emails are a complimentary script that attends and undermines the mechanism of the narrative. There is even a suggestion, when Sadie finally tries to root him out of his hole, that Bruno may not exist at all, or at any rate might not live in his famous cave, in which case he would be a purely textual phenomenon even within the fictional apparatus.

The story of the dead German’s lice is meant to be an origin myth. This is what a screen memory provides. Sadie, for her part, latches onto another one. Learning from her intelligence dossier that Bruno’s young daughter was killed in an accident decades ago, she is wont to interpret various moments in his emails as references to this trauma—references that Pascal and the Moulinards can’t decode, thus proving her superior hermeneutic chops. The lesson of the lice, however, is precisely that of the abyssal regress of “code, blueprints, a set of instructions” into inconceivable time. There is no backstop in the form of a punctual trauma. Besides, why should the story of the dead daughter, which Sadie knew, take precedence over the story of the lice, which she didn’t? And why should she assume that Pascal doesn’t catch the hints, when she has no evidence of this either way (given that she obviously cannot ask about emails she isn’t supposed to be reading)? Bruno stages the abyss of origins, Sadie stages her origin in origin’s absence, and this disjunctive synthesis just is the book.

Because my sensibilities are modernist, I always somewhat resent that novels have plots. As Creation Lake accelerates towards its conclusion, the locking into gear of a narrative machinery—action and consequence, concealment and revelation; machinery that much of the book’s first two-thirds have kept at bay, or kept in latency by lovingly building a milieu of concrete details, zones of affective uncertainty, observations on the thisness of an out-of-the-way corner of Europe and on things in general (Sadie is hopelessly addicted to the clever aperçu, delivered, necessarily, to no one but the reader)—finds its counterpart or compensation in a hardening of the ethical consistency of the book’s characters, which nevertheless undermines itself: Bruno takes a stand against violence (the Moulinards don’t respond), then disavows his primitivism altogether; Burdmoore apparently throws himself into the desperate assassination plan; Sadie triggers the betrayal that, until then, had been merely potential. But the crackdown that finally disperses Le Moulin is instead due to happenstance: in a macabre bit of slapstick, a visiting “deputy minister for rural coherence” gets crushed under a pile of logs.

Another spoiler: Sadie gets away. The book ends in a bucolic mode with its protagonist lying low in a Catalan beach town during the off-season. She’s still observing: “Nights, I lay on my veranda, my star deck, and looked up. Days, I looked at the sea. Or I read. Or I walked.” She floats high in salt-rich Mediterranean water (the “salt” of essence, then, is now external). Until this point, the conflict in the novel has consisted in the fact that Sadie wants her unrecognized recognizing to be recognized, perforce by the reader, who doesn’t exist in a novel’s diegetic economy, much as you can’t very well write back to someone whose emails you’re hacking. A spy or voyeur is someone whose gaze isn’t returned, as the sea and sky can’t return it, and as Bruno will never know his secret acolyte. But we do, more or less.

***

Image: Gustave Courbet, Grotto of Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne (1864)