Whether you enjoy Creation Lake or find it odious depends, I think, entirely on how credulous and interesting you find Sadie Smith, Kushner's unnamed and unmoored protagonist who glides through various left-wing subcultures and treatises with (excepting Bruno Lacombe, a sort of reclusive sage) equal parts indifference and disdain.

If you suspect Sadie to be mostly an authorial insert, whose chief role in the narrative is meant to voice Kushner's own (fatalistic, but with room for majesty and grandeur) commentary on the flaws and foibles of modern leftism, I think it is hard to enjoy this book. This was Brandon Taylor's perspective:

I mentioned to a friend that I was having a hard time with Sadie as a narrator because she seemed stupid and unaware that she was stupid, and my friend suggested that perhaps Kushner had done this on purpose, as a commentary on the ‘sharp woman’ archetype that has predominated in the fiction of the last decade. Perhaps. I replied that I couldn’t decide if the book was a smart person’s idea of a stupid book or a stupid person’s idea of a smart book. But I’ve come to think that the larger problem with Sadie is the difficulty presented by a character who reminds you on every page that nothing matters and nothing is real, and that the people she is scamming are phonies too, that everything is empty and hollow and that she’s smarter than everyone else because she knows the game is a game and is playing to win, but only for mercenary reasons. It brings me back to the question, why did you write this? What are you exploring here?

I think this is an uncharitable and uninteresting way to read the book. I do not think Kushner could be more explicit about Sadie's own shortcomings without fully sacrificing the first-person perspective: Sadie, in her own words, admits that she is an alcoholic, references only missions that she has failed to complete, and routinely fails to fulfill her plans. Indeed, it was hard not to read this book — to descend further into the psyche of Le Moulin, Sadie, and Bruno — and not be relentlessly reminded of Disco Elysium, a terrific and faceted work that ostensibly uses the trappings of genre to explore a very broken character through a leftist lens.

This is not to say that all of the book's flaws can be justified as authorial intent. Few characters besides Sadie and Bruno elevate themselves to more than one-line caricature (we've got the Houellebecq pastiche! we've got the Debord pastiche!); I enjoyed the long, didactic passages of Bruno's missives, but I think it's fair to criticize the novel less as something with concrete narrative propulsion and more as Kushner ambling slowly through a theme park of various topics (in a manner that is somewhat reminiscent of Cusk).

Still, this novel is rewarding. The prose is rich and sharp enough to warrant my renewed investment in The Flamethrowers; the tangents, even if they never quite cohere into something more elevated than "bourgeois cosplaying is silly, but the underlying beauty of leftist struggle remains", are compelling and crisp. I will be thinking about this book for some time to come.

★★★★

Highlights

Pleasure augers survival.

“Sir, we hoe a row,” he told the police. “We plant potatoes. We don’t use pesticides. We nurture pollinators. But here is how the state does things: They have a deer population that’s getting out of control, so what do they do? They bring in lynx. When farmers get upset about the lynx, the government reintroduces wolves. The wolves kill livestock, so the state makes it legal to shoot them. Hunting accidents increase, so they build a new clinic, whose medical staff creates a housing shortage, necessitating new developments. The expanding population attracts rodents, and so they introduce snakes. And so far, no one knows what to do about the snakes.”