Radical politics, mixed-up heroines and the threat of violence are staple ingredients in the fiction of Rachel Kushner, who began to be spoken of as one of the century’s great American novelists with her second book, The Flamethrowers (2013), about a biker in the art world of 70s New York and Italy during the “years of lead”. But even though her third novel, The Mars Room, set among women serving life in a California prison, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, I’m not convinced she’s truly on the radar of most readers this side of the Atlantic, where we’re warier of the vast, chiselled, ideas-packed tales ambitious American writers are less likely to shy away from.
Her hugely enjoyable new novel, Creation Lake, already longlisted for this year’s Booker, ought to put her firmly on the map. An espionage drama pulsating with twisty revelation and drip-fed backstory, dealing with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, it adds a killer plot and expert pacing to the reach and sophistication of her previous work, as well as vital fun. The American narrator, 34-year-old Sadie, is another memorable Kushner heroine, a polyglot ex-postgrad blessed (she tells us) with a knockout figure and plain face – all the more handy for her role as a spy for hire in the wake of being booted out by the FBI after a bungled bid to entrap an animal rights activist.
We join her in Guyenne, south-west France, where she’s now being paid to track the founders of a radical farming co-op, Le Moulin, suspected of disrupting a government-approved scheme to turn local fields into a corn-based monoculture. A shadowy paymaster, never named, has tasked Sadie with finding evidence of their foul play – and if she can’t, to generate it herself by whatever means available.
The opening pages cut between Sadie’s journey to Guyenne and her illicit reading of hacked correspondence between the Moulinards and their elderly guru, Bruno, a cave-dwelling former soixante-huitard who regularly surfaces to tap out emails on his daughter’s computer, unspooling eccentric theories about the fate of the Neanderthals – for him, a much-misunderstood species from whom we can learn a lot, not least their recognition (apparently) of the subversive potential of sleep.
As Sadie beds into the commune, disguised as a translator, much of the early intrigue lies in how Bruno’s thoughts – an out-there mishmash of speculation and fact pertaining to the real-life persecution of the local Cagot people – are not just silly but seductive, even as they are sieved through Sadie’s wry summary. The drama deepens when she gets closer to Le Moulin’s leader, Pascal, a wealthy Parisian ex-confrère of Guy Debord, as the novel starts distributing our attention among an impressively wide range of settlers. We see how the commune’s dangerously lax norms permit murky goings-on – an 11-year-old father gets a key role in the story – and the constant needle among its diverse population of rural folk and young intellectuals down from the capital, as well as factory workers licking their wounds after failed strike action. There’s also a serial felon from New York, previously seen in The Flamethrowers, whom Sadie’s keen to arm when things hot up; and there’s even a thinly disguised cameo for Michel Houellebecq, or “Michel Thomas”, perfectly captured as he rocks up at the action’s peak to research an “agronomy novel” (2019’s Serotonin, the closest Kushner comes to giving her novel any kind of time stamp).
