Tempering the death drive

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, which is currently on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize, is a mesmeric, cool and deeply intelligent exploration of (among other things) early man’s relationship to time and space. It is huge in scope, finely mapped by Kushner, who – sentence by sentence – steers us exactly where she wants us; a novel about navigation.

The book initially calls to mind Kushner’s essay “Girl on a Motorcycle” (see The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020; TLS, April 2, 2021) in which the author wrote about participating in the (illegal) Cabo 1000 motorcycle race in 1993, when she was twenty-four. In the essay she recounts the moment when a motorcyclist (whom she knows) pulls out in front of her on the highway. He is doing 30mph and she is doing 130mph. She comes off the road: “and then I am up in the air over the bike, separated from it, high above the instruments and handlebars, and then there’s a quick and violent descent to a brutal, thudding impact, which must have been my head”. An ambulance arrives, driving over the segments of her broken bike, crushing them; then a pick-up truck comes and takes those parts away. She describes this as her bike being “stolen”. One is tempted to read this story of derailment and theft as something Kushner works against in her fiction. Frequently, in her plots, the familiar (like the other bike rider whom she knows) appears unexpectedly in a way that is derailing, threatening to send the story flying off the road. Kushner does not deny us the sensation of flight, but she tends to land us surely; and not only that, she makes sure to leave us better than she found us – enriched, unrobbed.

The first-person narrator of Creation Lake is an undercover operative. She speaks, she tells us, French, Italian, Spanish and German:

I’m fluent in all those languages, although I speak them with a strong American accent. (People think fluency is about having a good accent. It isn’t. Fluency is about how well you understand the language, and how well you are able to speak it. Having a good accent is nothing. It’s a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent.)

In other words, Kushner’s narrator knows a thing or two. She knows how to manipulate people with the intelligence she holds on them; she can manipulate them with her knowledge of what their ego suffered in accepting the consolation prize. This ability to manipulate extends to herself: drinking and stealing focus her senses. She has an American passport showing her false identity, “Sadie”. She has military-grade night-vision googles, a satellite router, guns. She is attractive, and explains:

The dumb luck of good looks is akin to the fact that it may very well rain on the sea in times of drought, and will not rain where it is needed, on a farmer’s crops: grace is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent …

Sadie has no backstory, or at least none that goes back further than her time as a graduate student, when, she remembers, the women in her department were “fake tough girls who were not tough at all”. Sadie is not a fake tough girl. At the beginning of Creation Lake she remembers her first mark, an intimidating biker with whom she faked a relationship, his chopper fitted “with ape hangers that he can barely reach, and which he pretends are not making his arms tired”.

Sadie has access to other peoples’ email accounts, most importantly that of Bruno Lacombe. Bruno is an experienced “anti-civver” (he has sworn off civilization) who has been writing emails in answer to questions posed to him by a younger man, Pascal, the leader of a commune, Le Moulin, that Sadie has infiltrated through another fake relationship, in a region of France referred to here as Guyenne (the name of an old province in the southwest). Both Bruno and Pascal are heavily influenced by Guy Debord (Bruno knew him in the 1950s, when Bruno was a teenage vagrant on the Left Bank), particularly his thesis that we are all “made imbecilic by the corporate contours of … daily life”. Bruno, Pascal and Le Moulin are all inspired to throw off capitalism for an “authentic” life, albeit by different routes. Bruno believes that something more profound than simply class-based organization is required to save mankind, a creature that has put its death drive “in the driver’s seat”.

Sadie is searching Bruno’s emails for evidence of Le Moulin’s plans to cause disruption to prospective water-storage “mega-basins” and other invasive state-sponsored agriculture in Guyenne. If no such plans exist, or if they are nascent, she is not above helping them along. She has a history of entrapment on behalf of her employers (once the Fed, now private contractors). Our judgement on this is not sought. Life, like grace, in Creation Lake “is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent”. Kushner seems to ask why people go to art for moral clarity (as might be revealed, say, in the slowly unfolding trauma plot of a narrator’s childhood – absent here), rather than for the interesting present realness of mankind. Strangely, brilliantly, even as we are refused Sadie’s backstory, even as she takes on new personas, absorbs into herself whatever others throw at her and uses it back against them, it is Sadie’s authenticity that comes through as purely as the “salt” she identifies at her core. This authenticity is a question of voice and of perception, of clarity of thinking. Creation Lake contains many aspects of a classic noir (grittiness, moral compromise), but it is also set in a part of France where we learn that the colour black (noir) has long been used to symbolize wisdom.

Initially Sadie thinks Bruno’s emails are some kind of madness, possibly brought on by grief over his dead daughter, killed years ago. He is mostly caught up in writing about the difference between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, finding (controversially) the former to be superior, prelapsarian, true artists. Their small genetic legacy in us is “a precious keepsake, an heirloom”, and Bruno believes that mankind’s much-needed reformation of consciousness is locked up with them. He traces them, finding an entrance to a cave on his property, and spends his time exploring a mesmeric, cool, deep, spring-filled underground world where he can hear, he believes, the voices, and feel the intelligence, of past generations through tectonic vibrations; where he sees star maps on the walls; where he fishes with his hands.

Slowly, through the emails, Bruno’s hands come down on Sadie and take hold. She begins to read his missives differently; not as madness. It feels, eventually, as though he has been speaking directly to her all along, as if, in his deep cave wisdom, where he feels he exists outside of time, he has known that she is spying on him. Sadie begins to find herself unable to tolerate certain aspects of her life – not through a sudden moment of reawakening, but through small, incremental shifts to the tiller.

Kushner’s first book, Telex from Cuba (2008), was set among an expat community in 1950s Cuba; The Flamethrowers (TLS, June 7, 2013) spanned both Italian fascism and futurism, and the New York art scene of the 1970s; and the Booker-shortlisted The Mars Room (TLS, July 20, 2018) described a women’s prison in California. Creation Lake gives us Europe. Not a Europe of the tourist’s imagination, but a real Europe of car factories, supermarkets, agricultural fairs, seedy politicians, truck stops, the close breath of past war, the Cagots (a persecuted Basque/Occitan minority) and private beaches that keep out North Africans while white women turn themselves dark brown sunbathing. In all of Kushner’s work there is a Dickensian breadth of social material, along with a seductive, magpie-like collection of bright stories, characters, places, both real and invented.

The real Europe of Creation Lake is typified by the tale of a local thirteen-year-old boy who is first seen by Sadie leaping gloriously from a tree into a deep river. She learns that, when he was eleven, this boy impregnated his teacher. His parents agreed not to press charges against the teacher so long as they could keep the baby and bring it up. Later she watches a sweet interaction between the boy and his son/brother. There is nothing right about any of this, nothing right about much of the real Europe. Sadie sees it all, not entirely impassively, but as if the simple fact of morally chaotic truth is bigger than her.

In 2013, in an interview with the Paris Review, Kushner praised the first-person narrator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives:

[He] is almost like water. He doesn’t have much of a “voice” … I had been looking to find a first person who came across like thought, who could be drowned out and overrun in the way that we as people can be overrun by others. Having a point of view doesn’t mean you’re always in control or couching everything in running commentary. That’s fiction.

This way of understanding Sadie, as a narrator like water, disturbed, occasionally overrun yet always present, both essential and translucent, fits. Kushner is a writer who does not build a picture through an accumulation of detail (though the detail is deft, dense), nor even of feeling. Her project is more sophisticated. It is more like capturing the frequencies of vibrations through rock, water, us, and how they move through and past us.

Towards the end of Creation Lake Bruno writes in his emails of a sailor-warrior from the Polynesian Islands who could map swathes of the oceans in ways that Captain Cook, with his instruments and “strait-jacket” of longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates, did not understand. This process requires the sailor to resist seeing himself and his destination from above (as with conventional maps). Instead he understands himself as the still point. All landmasses, stars, events, come towards him. He does not seek, strive or change what he encounters by forcing it into a grid, but is sought, and he routes and maps accordingly, understanding his position in time and space very differently from us. He is journeying at rest; he is the centre. It is a peaceful way to reorientate oneself. This idea of an individual being discovered by the stars, by the land, is certainly a less lonely proposition than the “corporate contours of daily life”, and perhaps it is also an antidote to the death drive.

Roz Dineen’s debut novel, Briefly Very Beautiful, appeared in June

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