Creation Lake

Disagreeing with the Booker Committee

In his recent review of the novel “Creation Lake,” by Rachel Kushner, the reviewer Dwight Garner says “has ecological terrorism grown tired as a fictional subject? Probably.” I couldn’t agree with him more based on this novel, at least if “Creation Lake” is an example of a novel about ecological terrorism.

It’s actually a novel about many more things, some of which seem to be complete distractions and totally irrelevant to the plot. The plot simply stated is that a young woman named Sadie Smith (a pseudonym) has been hired by an unnamed employer to thwart the goal of a commune in rural France. The commune’s goal appears to be to upset plans for something called a “megabasin,” a plan to divert water for big agriculture to the detriment of the rural farmer.

Sadie‘s job is to infiltrate the commune and then to set them up to be arrested in the course of a protest at a rural fair. The protest seems aimed at the fairly tame goal of dumping a lot of milk at the fair, but Sadie‘s goal is to spur them onto criminal activity, including murder.

We learn early in the novel that the reason Sadie is working for a private employer is because when she worked for the FBI in the United States, she similarly entrapped a young idealistic man into buying 500 pounds of fertilizer to build a bomb. When he was arrested and charged, he escaped conviction based on the defensive of entrapment, and she was fired by the FBI.

The major problem with this novel besides its many digressions is that its main character is completely unlikable. The reviewer Dwight Garner thinks that she is an example of “hard rain.” In my opinion, she was a moneygrubbing opportunist who entrapped people using sex for her own goals, with no sympathy for the people she manipulated. Sadie Smith lacks any moral compass.

One of the key characters is a man named Bruno, an aging ecologist now living underground in a cave who sends emails to the commune leader named Pascal espousing his philosophies and theories. Sadie intercepts the emails to see if she can figure out what Pascal is up to. Unfortunately, Pascal doesn’t answer the emails. Bruno sends a longwinded theory about whether the Neanderthals were actually smarter than has been thought and the significance of paintings on cave walls. This seemed totally irrelevant to what the commune was trying to accomplish. It establishes Bruno as a big thinker, but not someone that Pascal and his commune would want to follow.

Garner refers to one of the set pieces involving the helmet of a dead German and soldier that Bruno finds in a field when he’s been sent to the countryside of France to wait out the second world war. He puts it on his head and the lice that were in the helmet transfer to his scalp. The cure for the lice is worse than the lice itself, and Bruno is in some ways never the same. It’s a horrifying and arresting scene. Maybe it shows why Bruno is obsessed with going down rabbit holes. He says the lice are a metaphor “for the transmigration of life, from one being to the next, from past to future.” But what does this have to do with the commune or Sadie’s mission?

There is another set piece about how the Polynesians were able to travel along distances by using the stars and the water as navigational tools. I asked myself what Neanderthals, the Polynesians or traveling by water have to do with the story. I confess I could not find a connection.

Contrast this with “There are Rivers in the Sky,” by Elif Shafak. The novel is set in 4 time periods with stories united by water – the filthy Thames in Victorian London, the Tigris in Nineveh, a modern-day scientist working on proving each drop of water contains remnants of everywhere it has been. There is also a plot line about the Epic of Gilgamesh. They are all integral to the central conceit of the book and part of the enjoyment is seeing how they link up.

Midway through “Creation Lake,” however, there is a set piece that at first seemed random, but I concluded acts as an apt metaphor for the narrator herself. Sadie comes across an old documentary about a nine-year-old French boy who had sex with a nine-year-old girl.

Franck leans  on one elbow and chews gum with rhythmic and casual machismo, as he recounts a recent sexual pursuit.

"We began to kiss each other," he says. Chew, chew. "And we touched each other’s bodies. I asked her if she wanted to make love.”

Asked what she said, Franck replied:

"She had never, you know, been with somebody. Been with a man, I mean. But she wanted to try it, with me. I was her first. Afterward, she told me she had never felt anything like this before. We were both very happy."

Chew, chew. Leans, to get more comfortable on his propped elbow. Lets out a sensuous and long sigh.

"We made love," chew, chew, “and then we went outside to play. We were playing together, simple fun, a boy and a girl, just as we had played before we had started to kiss. “

I wondered what had become of him, which is what we say of people who have made an ominous impression. If you wonder what became of someone and they turned out normal and undistinguished, it is disappointing. Asking what became of Franck could be suitably answered only with scenarios like:

Franck was killed in the commission of a bank robbery in Milan. Or Franck works with the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan Africa, preaching abstinence. Or Franck became a leftist insurgent in central-southwestern France, and masterminded the kidnapping of the Franco-Iberian subminister Pablo Platon y Platon, who was never seen again, his body never found, and Franck is now in prison, possibly for life.

While those answers might be okay, the most satisfying answer, the only answer that would not disturb the early impression of Franck and his terrifying sexual confidence at age nine, would be: Franck never grew up. Franck’s precocious sexual appetite resulted in the magic trick of permanent youth. Franck looks now as he did at the time he appeared in this film--button face, brown hair with overgrown bangs. Franck continues to be nine years old, to chew gum and say “Giusto” and to talk about the relaxing and healthful benefits of sexual intercourse among children.

Sadie Smith looks up Franck on Facebook. His banner is a stock photo of a Lamborghini. He has 31 facebook friends, his hobbies include Nescafe, Burger King and a Facebook group called “I Love My Daughter.”

Smith concludes:

“Adulthood had sanded him into someone profoundly unremarkable.”

Perhaps this is Sadie Smith’s fear: the fear of becoming ordinary, as ordinary as the pseudonym she has chosen for herself.

It struck me that Smith herself was as amoral as Frank and has become the equivalent of an insurance salesman, selling herself for money. She seems to give no thought to the consequence of thwarting the efforts of this commune to ensure that the water resources of the countryside remain available to the people who actually farm it. She repeats that as soon as her job is done, she’s moving on.

Garner is impressed with some of the other random information sprinkled throughout the novel about social class, what clothing says about the wearer, the cinema, etc.. “She takes a floor level interest in humanity. Close observation of the sort never grows tedious.” I agree that there is close observation, but I found it extremely tedious because it wasn’t connected to the life of Sadie Smith. The ending underscores the fact that Smith is uninterested in humanity, the planet, ecology, Bruno, the commune or anybody else other than herself. Because she doesn’t care about anything, it’s hard to care about her.

So why is this novel on the short list for the Booker Prize this year? It strikes me that it’s the subject matter. It reminds me of “Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton, an eco-thriller set on a New Zealand farm. That novel also dealt with a group of idealistic young people who planted vegetables in secret in public spaces to help feed the poor. They get involved with a man who is conducting an illegal mining operation on the land they’re farming, culminating in a dangerous confrontation with disastrous results. Even though the protagonist gets too involved with the villain, we want to see her succeed. Their project may have a negligible effect on world hunger, but their motives are pure.

Rachel Kushner can be an elegant writer when she chooses to be. I found images and turns of phrase that were absolutely stunning, so stunning that I wrote them down. Here are some:

                  he sent the little silver ball up the rails and watched it make its way back toward him like a loyal pet before being shot back up to ricochet from bumper to slot.

                  the hills were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition

                  a valley of pure green, like you’re gazing at the landscape through a Heineken bottle

However, after about 40 pages, I put down my pen. Kushner seemed to discard her literary chops for the meandering story itself. It was as if she had said “well now you see that I can do this, so I really don’t need to keep it up. Just keep reading to see if I might surprise you again.” She didn’t.

Perhaps it’s the political climate right now, but Sadie Smith’s  attitude of bravado resonated strongly with me as something that I see on the nightly news. I don’t like it any better there.

Let me know if you agree or disagree. A heart, letting me know you read this piece, is always appreciated!