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I enjoyed "Creation Lake" well enough but even after several weeks I’m not sure how I feel about it. I can understand the rave reviews on GR and elsewhere. I’m far less sympathetic with the London Review of Books write-up (“a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile�� �� don’t sugarcoat it, dude, tell us what you really think). I’m somewhere in-between, leaning toward the first group. I enjoyed the intellectual pleasure of trying to puzzle out what Kushner was trying to do, and yes, reading to find out what would happen to the protagonist. But all this wasn’t enough to put me in the camp of the 5-star givers.

There’s some wonderful stuff in the book: Ideas to ponder, evocative passages about the “Europe�� of the mind and the Europe of reality, wry commentary on litigious societies and political movements, on identity and authenticity�� And there is a story of intrigue and suspense running through the book -- the secret mission, will her cover be blown? will there be violence? -- but the story comes in second to the the sardonic, slightly misanthropic musings of the protagonist and the odd emails of a man who's forever offstage like a man-behind-the-curtain.

What it came down to for me in the end is that “Creation Lake�� was too much head and very little heart. It was fun to deconstruct but it lacked humanity.

That’s my take, anyway. (Come to think of it, perhaps “totalising cynicism�� isn’t entirely off base, though I'm not certain what it means.)

A few remarks:

The very first words in the book are: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.��

Interesting opening. Not quite “Call me Ishmael,�� but it does what it’s supposed to. You're going to want to read further. The oddness of it -- I defy anyone to read it without thinking "huh?" -- throws the reader to feel off-balance. Who is saying this? Is it meant seriously or as a joke of some kind?

The words were written by Bruno Lacombe’s. Sadie's hacked into his account in search of clues about what the commune might be planning. It seems that Bruno holds a special place in the hearts and minds of some members of the commune. They speak of him, Sadie tells us, with the same reverence they might about ‘Hegel' or ‘Marx��. Sometimes Bruno's emails seem reasonable, even insightful, sometimes they seem insane.

Oh, and he lives in a cave. And hears voices.

The main character, through whose eyes we see everything, calls herself Sadie Smith but she acknowledges that’s not her real name. She tells us a little bit about her past -- biker gangs and such -- but we can’t be certain any of it is true. She is a spy/provocateur, sent to France to infiltrate a commune of activists and look “for proof they had committed sabotage and were planning more of it.�� The narrative consists primarily of Sadie's interactions with the communards, her opinions about this and that, and emails she's intercepted. The tension in the book lies in the question whether she'll be caught, what the communards may or may not do, what Sadie is instructed to do. and whether she does it.

Here, then, is the epistemological dilemma we are meant to navigate in "Creation Lake": Bruno, a person of questionable sanity, writes emails that are secretly read by a woman who, by her own admission, lies, disguises her identity, withholds information, manipulates and betrays people, has innocent people arrested, and appears to be entirely amoral. She doesn't care about people (“You people are not real to me. No one is.��). She doesn’t know who hired her and doesn’t seem to care.

So where do we plant our feet in this uncertain ground? The reader has to wrestle with, or put aside entirely, the questions about whether Sadie’s lying and if Bruno is insane. And, I suppose, what Kushner is getting at.

Certain themes come up several times in “Creation Lake,�� among them the question of (as Sadie puts it) “the truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type.�� She describes this central “truth�� as “a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.�� Interesting ideas, save that they're coming from a person who hides her true identity and seems to lack any core herself. What’s more, it’s four a.m. as she writes this, and she’s “staring at an actual mountain of salt.��

There are other things to ponder, if the reader is so inclined. For example, Sadie frequently speaks of how she uses sex to manipulate people (I’ll pass on the bench scene.) Standard spy novel material, but then Sadie recalls a film she's seen in which a prostitute talks about her job and the roles she has played with her clients, how she dreams of dead people. The day after the interview was filmed, the prostitute killed herself. Does Kushner intend us to see a connection here, or is this reader seeing things where they aren’t? Other constructs like this (if they're real and not my imagination) are scattered like literary Easter eggs throughout the novel.

Then there’s Bruno with his big ideas, his ancient voices in the dark, and a fixation on the development of the human species. It’s possible �� even likely �� that he makes legitimate points about humanity and genetic lineages, but he’ll also write that thing about Neanderthals and smoking and addiction, and how they “were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers.�� What is the reader supposed to make of all this? And what are we to think of his digressions about Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo tardissimus, Cathars, and Cagots (powerful stuff, this: I hadn't heard of them before), and dead Nazi soldiers? What ties them together?

Bruno struck me as the most sympathetic character in the book. He has an actual past. He has suffered the loss of a child and aches at her absence. But there's something more to his story. As a child during the Second World War he came upon the corpse of a Nazi soldier. He took the soldier's helmet as his own and got lice. "These lice were real, Bruno said, but he had come to understand that they were also a metaphor: they stood for the transmigration of life, from one being to the next, from past to future." In time, Bruno will use "lice" to describe the sky filled with satellites that keep us from seeing the stars. Sounds right enough to me. “Currently," he writes, "we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?��

Reading "Creation lake," I wondered whether there is an overarching point to the novel, something that unites the juxtapositions of sanity and madness, identity and performance, reality and myth, humanity and the nameless entities that control our lives from behind curtains. I can't answer that.

In short, “Creation Lake�� (the title means nothing, Kushner acknowledged in an interview: it’s the name of a song performed by an LA band; her husband’s friend is one of the musicians) piqued my curiosity, had me seeking patterns and meanings, and at times truly entertained me. But not enough.

My gratitude to Simon & Schuster and Edelweis for providing an digital ARC in return for an honest review.


PS: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the humor in “Creation Lake.”“My rule,�� Sadie says, “is that the older the Frenchman, and the more rural his location, the higher his pants will be belted. Jean Violaine’s were up at his sternum.�� Sadie, a man tells her, looks “ready for Sunday dinner with the in-laws, in your little silk blouse and your fitted silk skirt. Tasteful, but sexy enough to pique the interest of the father-in-law, which is a French daughter-in-law’s filial duty.�� A middle aged man watching two teenaged girls walk by has a “native fluency in Jailbait.�� Sadie describes meeting a man “at a bar near the Place des Vosges, playing pinball in a fedora like he thought he was in a French new-wave film from 1963.�� Fun stuff.