Technology, as we now commonly think of it, involves the transformation of raw materials into finished products within industry and manufacturing. But the word shares an ancient Greek root with techne, which means “art” or “craft.” Aristotle, for one, thought of the poem as a techne because it was an aesthetic artifact, and novels can be so considered, too, as they transform an author’s lived, imagined, and read experiences into a different kind of narrative. Rachel Kushner’s singular and enthralling novel Creation Lake is perhaps the finest fictional consideration of techne and technology—and of the contemporary economic, legal, and social structures that serve to distance us from ourselves as human beings—in recent years.
On its surface, the novel recounts the fascinating saga of a spy operating under the assumed name Sadie Smith (she has used other identities before) who becomes absorbed in subversive ideas while on a job. Once, she worked as an FBI agent, but she was terminated after a court ruled that she had entrapped a young man, seducing him into crimes as an animal rights activist that he wouldn’t have committed otherwise.
This could be the setup for a traditional piece of gritty noir, but as she has in novels such as Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, Kushner interweaves revolutionary politics with radical and land philosophy. The latter of those books was narrated by Reno, an introspective artist who falls in with dissidents and artists involved in self-invention, but Creation Lake is centered by a seemingly apolitical protagonist. Sadie has erased her past, becoming completely estranged from who she once was. Hired by shadowy interests, she is on a mission to infiltrate a French eco-activist commune where urban intellectuals are immersed in return-to-the-land farming and aim to sabotage government plans to build enormous water-storage “megabasins” that would serve corporate interests. These rebels follow a mentor, Bruno Lacombe, and so she obsessively combs through Bruno’s emails to the group, while also conducting rigorous surveillance and inventing clever covers and false identities.
Sadie gets involved with a French filmmaker, Lucien Dubois, who can offer access to Pascal Balmy, leader of the commune. Her cynicism comes into sharp relief as she shrewdly manipulates Lucien. When he shares personal stories, she tells us, “I suppressed my laughter, laughed only inwardly, bearing witness to his adolescent memories as if they were not a cliché, and instead, as if they mattered.” Asked where she is from, Sadie mentions a California town with no population; its name, Priest Valley, evokes Robert Bresson for the intellectuals and cinephiles among whom she moves.
Sadie’s intrapsychic tension grounds the novel’s intellectual concerns. She nearly obliterates her personal experiences to become a machine of sorts, but her actions mirror an artist’s mining of lived reality. Kushner paints the character as an instrument of the system who slowly discovers her humanity, once at a distance from the power structures. This reversal is facilitated by her reading of Bruno’s correspondence, which insists that there are other ways to live. These writings urge a return to the undocumented but sophisticated culture of Neanderthals, so often denigrated in terms of cognition and technology but, in his thinking, superior to that of Homo sapiens.
For much of the novel, Sadie remains enigmatic, but eventually, in a haunting, dissociative passage, it becomes clear that there still exists a more authentic self that has been buried beneath the brutality she undertakes. Lying alone in bed in an empty house where violence has occurred, she says Bruno’s name out loud and realizes, “The act of speaking, of hearing a voice, my own, in this empty house, pulled some kind of stopper. It let something into the room, some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above, from up near the ceiling of this room.”
Sadie’s expat existence calls up feelings of disconnection, even as she grows increasingly attentive to the world around her: wild grasses, the salt-rich sea, cormorants. Her cultural loneliness is suggested slantwise, through other characters. Lucien, for instance, says he feels at “home” during sex when he is inside her, even as she feels a profound alienation. In treating her body as a tool, she turns sex into something purely transactional, void of desire. Sadie’s talent for exploiting the frailties of others leads inevitably to her own trapped state. Yet if this might suggest a purely interior reading, the book builds to a striking confrontation between activists and the system.
Kushner’s fiction, while often deeply politically aware, is also foundationally interested in art and transformation, the processes via which we think and become. Through its narrative design, Creation Lake ingeniously evokes the ethics of land preservation as well as corporate technology’s role in transforming earth’s resources into things that only further alienate us. Nineteenth-century Luddites broke automated machines whose owners were destroying textile workers’ ability to eke out a living. Many deploy the term mockingly today, but for those who understand this planet as their home, not merely a series of extraction sites, the Luddite transgressions were necessary choices. Bruno’s communiqués ask his followers to go outside, look up at the stars, and find Polaris. “To look up and see stars,” he—and by extension, Kushner—insists, “is to look inward and see ourselves.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
