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** ½ rounded up

For better or worse, we all are now reviewing Rachel Kushner’s hotly anticipated new novel in the shadow of Brandon Taylor’s vicious takedown in the London Review of Books (), which ends its first paragraph with the wickedly unkind zinger:

Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?

Told in first person by an American spy-for-hire, pseudonymously monikered Sadie Smith, we hear the inner thoughts of a woman who infiltrates small leftists grouplets, incites them to take perilous actions that would undermine their own safety, and then vanishes while her victims face the very real and serious consequences of state repression.

I did not feel quite as offended as Taylor. Creation Lake has moments of humour and slyness that were enjoyable to read. The world Sadie Smith enters is on the face of it quite interesting. However, I felt the writing largely flat and the depiction of leftist circles boring. The manipulated are largely washed up 60s radicals, disoriented and sad but hardly a foil to our cynical and nihilistic protagonist. There is nothing to cheer for here, just a bitterness permeating everyone. Kushner also constantly takes the reader on these odd tangents about neanderthals and early humans, which Taylor correctly points out, felt like plotting by Wikipedia entry.

I had high hopes for CREATION LAKE. It was my pick to win when the longlist was announced (based on gut rather than anything I had heard of the text). Now I don’t see it making the shortlist, nor does it deserve to do so.

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