Rachel Kushner’s latest, Creation Lake, is a brilliantly provocative mix—part sardonic espionage novel, part philosophic commentary on human prehistory, part exploration of the evolution of French activist movements from the 1960s through end-stage capitalism. Her narrator, code named Sadie, is a sensual, cynical undercover agent privately contracted to surveil and infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical eco-activist collective in Southwestern France. Her point of entry? Bruno Lacombe, their mentor, who is exploring life in caves, positing via email a theory that the Neanderthal would have been a better path forward than Homo sapiens. It is a thrillingly original, eerily prescient novel. She was in Southern California, I was in Northern California, for our leisurely late-summer email conversation.
*
Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and ongoing conflicts affected your life, your work, the writing of and launch of your new novel?
Rachel Kushner: Life’s streams meet a person where they are, in their own current, and I’m into middle age and bewitched and pleased by the world and determined to make art and puff on joy (I don’t smoke). The pandemic affected people so differently and to be honest I don’t think of it much; if I do, it is out of deep concern for kids who were stuck in bad situations while their schools were closed, and I wonder about the future impact from that. My own child did fine, because he was born into a middle-class family that could weather the pandemic without any real hitches; he mostly went fishing in the lakes of our manmade creation: the reservoir system northeast of here, in the San Gabriel Mountains.
There are other things to say, such as about how disaster capitalism sprang into action and the pandemic accelerated certain dystopic features of contemporary life, but also that there was a thrilling mass movement in the summer of 2020. But where we are and where we are going isn’t clear to me. The war, which I believe you refer to, if that is even the right word for it—seems horribly one-sided, and to have no strategy or goal beyond more war, maybe permanent war. But this question reminds me that I tend to plumb ideas that are under what’s topical, perhaps harder to hear, and yet, to me, resonant and relevant. In this case, who we are, where we have come from, where we are going, how to live with grace and in harmony, and questions of nature, of betrayal and nihilism and truth. But there is, alas, a topical component: some of what I wrote about in the novel has kind of erupted, with farmers and protestors battling police in rural France.
JC: What drew you to take on the spy thriller as a shape for this novel?
For a moment I felt defeated, until I recognized certain possibilities that were right there in front of me, and exploited them.RK: It was a process—the novel’s shape or nod to genre was not at all the first thing that sparked what became the book. I had a world—young people who had decamped from Paris to live communally in a remote outpost—and a conflict—their collision course with the French state—and I had this idea for an elder of theirs, who has rejected civilization as the only recourse, as he sees it, to the modern world and its self-elimination, but I didn’t have someone who could report on these, who had occasion to be in this world, and access to the elder, Bruno. I worked for three years, thinking, trying things out, and honestly nothing was really working.
And then I started over, one day, with a sentence that became the first line of the novel: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.” And suddenly I knew that while this was my elder, Bruno, who is against civilization, his ideas were being conveyed to the reader by someone else, someone who is not sympathetic to those ideas, and might even ridicule them. Very quickly I started to see this woman, and to understand that she’s working in the shadowy world of privately contracted surveillance, and that she would attempt to entrap the young people. Her past became, for me, a series of her prior dissimulations. Her personal autobiography, a set of guises. It was so much fun.
JC: Did you have particular books in mind as models? And, no spoiler intended, did you always intend Creation Lake to end this way?
RK: For the spy aspect, I was definitely influenced by the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, even if I don’t consider my novel to belong within the genre, although I did borrow certain aspects. Manchette is the master of the full-blown fiasco as denouement. He is a high bar. I aimed for my own version of such. How it would shake out wasn’t entirely clear to me until I got there. In truth, I’d had an idea that things would end quite differently for my narrator. It was going to be, in effect, a much meaner book, and then again, a more “moral” book, where bad deeds would be punished. It’s less mean, and also, less moralizing. The ending was really pleasurable when I got there. It brought me an intense and rare feeling, almost hallucinogenic. To arrive at the end of a novel is to arrive at a destination I could never have seen without having written the thing. To finish is to “traverse the fantasy,” as they say in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In terms of pace and rhythm, Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God was strangely critical. I kept looking at the first few pages. His chapters are really short, like a page and half, and indelible. I wanted to produce an effect like that book had on me, and make chapters that would be kind of spring-loaded. Cormac’s tone is absurdist—the novel is about a hillbilly necrophiliac—but it’s elegiac, too. It also takes place in caves. I haven’t unraveled the link, there.
There were lots of books that inflected what I was doing, but in terms of an espionage novel featuring a homespun philosopher living in a cave, there weren’t any models, although maybe DeLillo’s The Names was there on the horizon as a novel by a mentor that deals with very deep history and its eruption to the surface of a contemporary realm. Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq came out while I was writing Creation Lake, and here I was trying to write a novel with key scenes concerning the struggles of French farmers, and Houellebecq had just published a rather hilarious novel that dealt to some degree with this subject. For a moment I felt defeated, until I recognized certain possibilities that were right there in front of me, and exploited them.
JC: What’s the process through which you settled on your title?
RK: The title came sort of late, but immediately seemed right. It’s from outside the book, rather than inside it. Some titles are a small piece of the whole that stands for the whole, in this case no. In truth it auditioned itself in the car, while driving with my husband, who long ago was friends with this Los Angeles band called the Movies that should have been famous but wasn’t. They have a song called Creation Lake. But the song has no relation to this book. I took only those two words and they suddenly seemed perfect for the world of this novel.
Creation: the great mystery of origins, of how it all began, the obsession with some sense of an origin, and the nagging idea that somewhere along the way, we took a wrong turn, and when? How far back? And Lake: water, the blessed and elemental substance of life, which no grim technological “progress” can replace. And lake as primordial reserve, the original water. The deep secret of life on planet earth, a reserve that plenishes and replenishes. Creation here could also refer to Sadie and her guises and fictions. And Bruno and his mythmaking. As a title, for me it had vitality, it could travel. I still love it.
JC: Your narrator’s “secret agent” name is Sadie. She’s working for an anonymous client, after messing up a government agency contract. Her mission: to infiltrate Le Moulin, a radical group led by Pascal Balmy intending to sabotage a corporate water project. Her voice is knowing, ironic, in control. How did you develop this character?
RK: She came to me as I wrote the first page of the book. After that first line about Neanderthals and depression, I realized, as I mentioned above, that someone was conveying Bruno’s ideas—an intermediary. At first I was borrowing permission from the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil, and the narrator’s tone, a woman as intermediary of a shadowy man: “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness.” So mysterious. I love the double valence in that film, of the woman who speaks, and the man (a fictional creation of Marker’s, an alter ego) whose letters she conveys. I decided I was going to write Bruno as someone who could only communicate through the intermediary of a woman.
But very quickly I realized the woman would pull back and editorialize, and say, Wait a minute, Neanderthals? She meant harm, it became clear to me, and a few pages in, I understood that she would go in to surveil and disrupt the world inside this novel, and that many if not most of her views would be 180 degrees from my own. I did borrow some features from a couple of scenarios I’d seen take place in real life, in cases where undercover agents were spying on leftists and ended up entrapping them, or otherwise taking certain liberties, and experiencing blowback, then disappearing into the private sector. I even had a glimpse of the prosecution’s discovery in one of those cases, had seen people I knew being photographed secretly in profile as they walked down a city street, and I had wondered, stunned, What kind of person would do this sort of thing? Sadie—or so she claims is her name—is my answer.
JC: Sadie has entered into an affair with an unsuspecting Lucien Dubois, after an encounter at a bar in Paris, where he thinks he’s meeting her randomly, not by her careful planning. As Creation Lake begins, she is driving to his family’s manor in a wooded area of the Guyenne Valley and settling in with a hilltop vantage from which she can see the entire valley. Why is she with Lucien? Because he can connect her to Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin. The Guyenne, where Le Moulin is based, is known for caves holding evidence of early humans, including prehistoric paintings, and also massive reservoirs of water. How did you establish this setting for Creation Lake?
RK: The Guyenne is a name I dusted off and borrowed that for several hundred years was the name of a province of southwestern France and included some regions I know quite well, and where I spend part of every summer. There are caves all over southwestern France, and the area where we go has a lot of them, some famous ones with art, but mostly just caves with a barred grate that some farmer might have a key to, or that are covered by a metal lid and on public land, if you know how and where to find them. I don’t go into those caves.
My son is a caving expert and the last two summers guided French children into them at a summer camp in the department Lot. But I know the look and feel and natural elements of the above-ground world of the Guyenne, as I depicted it. The rivers. The social atmosphere. The difficulty of farming. The physical beauty. The environment of these rural agricultural fairs and the old farmers on their antique tractors. Also the almost American-style insanity of a European tractor pull. I kind of invented this idea that the pitched battle would be over water, and these “megabasins,” which I’d seen referred to on French news sites. But I didn’t anticipate what a real issue this would become, in the world outside my novel. But I often think of the world as merely the final outer dimension of novels, the substance that holds them in place, like the floor on which a sculpture sits, as if reality merely exists to support fiction.
JC: Part of Sadie’s back story is that she is from Priest Valley. It’s a wink of a location, a signpost, a deserted place she glimpsed once on a drive past and stashed away as an origin story. It’s also part of the scenery of her most recent operation, when a federal agency employed her to involve a young animal liberation activist in an act of sabotage, pursuing her higher-ups’ “drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists.” Her mission fails, she’s looking for work, moves into the private sector in Europe. Priest Valley echoes throughout the book. What does it represent for you?
RK: There’s a place on highway 198 called that and it’s very beautiful. It’s green. It’s relatively remote. It’s just what you might imagine when you hear those words, Priest Valley, but no one lives there any longer, there’s just one collapsed building. And few use that route, which is a connector between the central Salinas Valley and the coast. The figure of the priest is kind of essential in this book. I was thinking a lot about social environments and this tripartite structure, from the French scholar Georges Dumézil, of “priest, peasant, and warrior.” There are various priests in the book: Pascal, Bruno, and maybe Jean Violaine.
Even ancient man, as a romanticized figure, is a kind of priest. If clad only in animal skins, still we look to him as if he’s in the vestments of wisdom, as if he’s closer to the source, the root of us. There are also some peasants, both historic and present-day. A warrior, who steps up, to Sadie’s glee, in the form of Burdmoore, the American. Priest and Valley together as a phrase, to my ear, is an Edenic place that has the beauty of unharmed nature and the ascetic clarity of monks. And if priests are attended by peasants and warriors, then you have life in the round, or least a novel in the round.
JC: Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin are a radical farming collective of climate activists who are not unwilling to use violence as a tactic. In recent years in western France groups like Soulèvements de la Terre (SLT or “Earth Uprisings”) have been involved in violent protests about giant water reservoirs that would privatize water resources. Not unlike Le Moulin’s sabotaging of earth-moving equipment at the site of a massive industrial reservoir being built not far from their headquarters, to irrigate the megabasins for corporate owned farms (“I had seen this corn,” Sadie muses, “vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon”). (Great description; I’ve driven past those Nebraska “cornfields.”) Did SLT and others like it in France and now in the rest of Europe inspire Le Moulin? What research was involved in developing this element of your narrative?
RK: To me there’s a quite clear distinction between violence and the sabotage of property. I don’t believe it’s possible to commit an act of violence against property. And I see no evidence, as I look over my narrator’s shoulder at the people she’s surveilling, of a willingness on their part to use violence. They are coy and do not admit anything to her. They do seem comfortable with sabotage as a tactic, but that doesn’t seem so extreme to me. When Sadie suggests violence, in keeping with her mission as an agent provocateur, she only suggests it to one person, one of the Moulinards, whose reaction I would not want to give away, should someone be reading me for plot (hard to imagine, but then again, why not?). She early on deduces that Pascal has rather romantic ideas about militancy and violence, and very likely no close-up experience of it. The strange thing about physical violence is how different it is in person, as it’s happening, from what one might imagine about it. That’s my own experience of it, at least, that it’s horrible and traumatic. My narrator, meanwhile, is someone who suggests she has an intimate capacity for it.
I often think of the world as merely the final outer dimension of novels, the substance that holds them in place.In any case, I’m so glad you mentioned Les Soulèvements de la terre, which were only kind of getting organized around the time I was completing this novel but now seem to be a movement with serious momentum. That all was happening as I was finishing my novel, in 2022, or at least SLT was not really yet on my own radar then. So it was kind of strange how this unfolded, that some of the battles over these megabasins in a novel seem kind of similar to what’s happened in actual France.
I had chosen the megabasin as a flashpoint issue in the region where my characters were based for reasons of personal familiarity with farming in places where the rivers are relied upon for irrigation, and climate crisis has made that a challenge, meanwhile everyone is suddenly growing corn, which requires huge amounts of water, because it’s the only way to really make a living, or that seems to be the case in some regions, like the Dordogne. And any monocrop has a kind of post-human energy, the sense it is replacing crops that are about life and sustaining it, with crops that are only about profit and sustaining it.
After I finished my book, I kept finding stuff online about these pitched battles taking place in rural areas over the issue of water and megabasins. It was to some degree a coincidence, or maybe Bruno’s second sight was loaned to me to get a very small peek at the future? Being underground, he has a better understanding than I ever did, about water, and how it sluices down into the earth and is filtered and stored there rather ingeniously.
But the question of resistance, and collective action, and these kind of battles with the state and movements like Les Soulèvements de la terre, there’s a long history of this in France. I looked at the ZAD, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the movement in the Susa Valley to prevent the construction of a high-speed rail line, and the book of oral histories that Verso published about these movements, The ZAD and noTAV. But also, spending time in rural France, one is aware of the history of the Larzac, which was occupied in the 1970s by hippies and farmers and clergy to stop the building of a military base. There’s also Tarnac, which Sadie mentions as another commune, but in the Corrèze, which was raided in 2008, initiating a long court case against some of its members, creating quite a saga, before all the charges were eventually dropped.
JC: We know Bruno Lacombe’s voice only through Sadie’s secret reading of his emails to Le Moulin. It’s a steady beat in your narrative, beginning with Bruno’s origin theories, his “fanatical belief” in the Neanderthals (“Thals,” as he dubs them), a failed species who had very large brains, were good at math, did not enjoy crowds, had strong stomachs and sturdy bones, and, he believes, might have been superior to Homo sapiens. He sees the Neanderthal traces in DNA as a precious heirloom from “before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.” Bruno, the former 1968 radical relocated to the quiet countryside, represents the thinker behind the activists. How did you build this character, his quirks, theories, interpretations of the past?
RK: It’s hard for me to say at this point how Bruno evolved, before the collapse of my methods into a single character. He started as someone who had retreated to the countryside in the 1970s, in the wake of the failures of mass movements in the late 1960s to spark large-scale revolt. Maybe the rural populations are the heart of an authentic French radicalism, was the idea. Not just Bruno’s but a generation’s.
The peasant revolts in southwestern France make for bracing history. And these same places were active strongholds of the Resistance movement against the Nazis. The caves have played a role, for many hundreds of years, in various forms of retreat and resistance. Bruno I saw as someone who no longer believes in revolution and instead is trying to revolutionize consciousness, to change it. A lot of the book is about this so I’m hesitant to summarize it. But he came to me almost unbidden, after the first glimpse of him, deep in his cave, tuning in to the voices of ancient people as one might listen to shortwave radio (I used to be into shortwave radio, once upon a time). I felt he was real and I started to mark out his style of letter writing, even as the obnoxious Sadie is interrupting here and there to pull back and question his assertions.
I guess it even started as a kind of joke to say that the wrong turn Man took wasn’t the agricultural revolution, but much earlier, like 25 thousand years earlier, when there were various strains of human in Europe and Asia (and Africa too, where it turns out Neanderthals migrated), and the Homo sapiens somehow came to dominate with his appetite for large crowds, his efficient method of hunting game, his insistence on making art about it, and his rude vanquishing of everybody else, or so it would seem.
Once Bruno started expressing his ideas on things, it all took on a life of its own. It didn’t at all seem like a joke to me. He’s a man who has seen a lot, has been through wild hopes and bitter disappointments, had his entire family murdered by the Nazis, was an orphan who washed up on the streets of Paris, took to a life of crime, then of reading, then of radical politics, later lost a child. He has seen the world plunged into chaos, and he holds onto his own tenderness toward people, his own utopian values, as his main achievement in life.
I admire gentle people. I think tenderness is one of most holy and rare qualities. In terms of Bruno’s retreat from civilization, I was vaguely inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Camatte, but only in the most surface way, and not at all for the hue and style of Bruno’s ideas, which don’t have a source outside me. Some of his early biographical history is inspired by Jean-Michel Mension, who was a close associate of Guy Debord and wrote a memoir that I find really mysterious, even as it is simple and short. A Soviet scholar named Boris Porshnev, who wrote about seventeenth-century French peasant revolts and was cited by Michel Foucault on this subject, also later wrote two studies of “crypto-zoology,” cataloguing sitings of various strains of “Sasquatch” and what he believes are Neanderthals still living in his time (the 1960s is when he wrote about them) was kind of inspiring.
I mean, I have the books and have thumbed them, and I find it fascinating that Porshnev wrote a legitimate work of history about peasant uprisings and then plunged into crypto-zoology, a rather wild world of bold speculation, complete with drawings, charts and graphs. But really Bruno is not based on anyone. He’s his own man.
JC: What are you working on now/next?
RK: I just wrote an eleven-thousand-word article on the world of nostalgia drag racing and hot-rodding culture in America. It took several months of reporting plus all summer to write and was incredibly pleasurable from start to finish. In terms of fiction, I have two different ideas I’m mulling, but I need to get back into a more private headspace to pursue them. I also want to get a bit of hindsight on my own novel, assess what I’ve done before starting something new. Even as part of me thinks it’s better to just keep going, run, don’t look back, keep on running and let others sort out what you’ve made.
__________________________________
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
