Bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring ... The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit ... The story, told in short chapters that feel punchy even when they’re highly cerebral, slides around the labyrinth of Sadie’s mind, which is equally deceptive and deceived ... Kushner inhabits the spy’s perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun she’s having ... Bore through this noir posing and wry satire of radical politics, and you feel something vital and profound prowling around in the darkness beneath.
Sinuous and powerfully understated ... Consolidates Kushner’s status as one of finest novelists working in the English language. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration ... Pointed comic observation in this novel blends with her earnestness in vinaigrette harmony.
An espionage thriller sealed tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir. Existential dread and exhaustion are its signature moods ... You don’t read Kushner for the 'relatability' of her characters or even, particularly, for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines ... Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times. The only thing that isn’t disposable in her novels is her own singular voice as a writer.
Dazzling ... Kushner fashions a gripping and muscular narrative that is by turns lyrical, suspenseful, and slyly funny ... Kushner has tapped into something primal, pure, and unforgettable.
It’s necessary to be charmed by Bruno’s erudite email monologues, because this novel, surprisingly, lacks suspense ... Precious little happens in the book...and the pacing between minor events is agonizingly slow.
Buckle up: Known for her daring and cerebral work, Rachel Kushner knows how to take readers on a wild ride ... Using the framework of an espionage novel, Kushner creates a spellbinding story of intrigue and subterfuge that examines the limits of control and moral influence ... A sexy, physical novel of lies and caustic, increasingly harrowing choices tethered to ruin.
The thematic and historical reach of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel is ambitiously broad ... At its best, Creation Lake essays an absurd but subtle analysis of antinomies arising between anti-capitalist and environmental politics. At its weakest, it feels like a bet-hedging period study of same ... For all its fizzing voice and narrative texture, its intellectual curiosity, Kushner’s clever skew on genre-fiction conventions, and the ways 2013 may function as allegory of today, something in Creation Lake remains muffled and distant ... Rachel Kushner on more urgent or intractable tensions in radical politics today—that is a story (or essay) to look forward to.
The book is at once a thriller, a history of the French left, a survey of academic theories about the prehistoric age, and a philosophical novel about human nature. It is also a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral ... At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive, Kushner’s prose here moves between global capital and hyperlocalized suffering.
Kushner’s choice of narrative perspective and character have the effect of disaggregating a collective into its component individuals and reducing political convictions to personal interests ... May describe a period of political restorationism, but is itself an instance of aesthetic restorationism. As such, it not only formally mirrors the political impasses of its own time, it reproduces them. It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it is no less difficult, it seems, to imagine a new form for the novel. Perhaps these two difficulties are not unrelated.
Asks big questions about civilization and society; it seeks to understand what can be known about ancient people ... It also offers a flat-out page turner of a spy story, dotted with sex and booze, sarcasm and cynicism, and a heady dose of vital curiosity.
Kushner is alternately warm and caustic, funny and slippery, able to swing from high-literary registers to street slang and back in an instant ... Kushner has grown more interested in the push-pull between material restriction and psychic freedom ... Not a conventional spy novel, but, unlike Kushner’s shaggy earlier books, it often feels as tight as a thriller ... The novel doesn’t become digressive and loose like its predecessors, but it certainly stops feeling like a thriller. After many chapters that seemed to build to a dramatic act of sabotage, the story shifts register, heading into a very different, more emotional denouement. Relinquishing some swagger, Kushner opens up in her writing to new levels of feeling and possibilities for change ... Sadie’s swerve suggests that Kushner is ready for big change.
Singular and enthralling ... A fascinating saga ... Kushner interweaves revolutionary politics with radical and land philosophy ... Foundationally interested in art and transformation, the processes via which we think and become.
A scintillating novel of espionage and ideas ... From this thrillerlike premise, Kushner spins a brisk plot that’s equal parts tradecraft and penetrating inquiry into the possibility of radical social change ... Features many allusions to French intellectual history that can be recondite and, frankly, a bit ridiculous, but the ideas the novel explores are universal, at least among those who’d like to think that the world could be a better place.
Charm, charisma, and its seductive powers prove in Creation Lake’s final act to be impotent ... Initially, Sadie’s strength comes from her ability to tap into the desires of her marks. But that relies on an asymmetry: they project their desires onto her, and she molds herself into an object capable of fulfilling their fantasies.
A remarkably original book, in which profound meditations on the human condition are embedded thoughtfully and convincingly within the scaffolding of a thriller, and within the thoughts of characters who are memorably drawn.
Eccentric, digressive ... The vinegary portraits of self-important men are hugely enjoyable ... But much of the book’s pleasure comes from attempting to reconcile the contradictory impressions of Sadie.
Juggles radical politics, artistic endeavors (if with far less focus) and an intellectually engaging backdrop. This novel is Kushner’s take on noir and deals in many of the genre’s classic tropes ... Kushner may have used the old tropes of a genre, but this novel, to my mind, conjures something completely new.
A mesmeric, cool and deeply intelligent exploration of (among other things) early man’s relationship to time and space. It is huge in scope, finely mapped by Kushner, who – sentence by sentence – steers us exactly where she wants us; a novel about navigation.
Kushner swerves between profound wisdom, humour and glimpses of humanity’s path toward environmental disaster, making this novel both fun and devastating – and far more urgent than a typical spy thriller.
Cerebral ... Creation Lake is a spy novel, and for the most part, Kushner sustains the brisk pacing and plot-heavy hallmarks of a good spy novel. She held my attention and kept me wanting more, at least until the overly tidy and anticlimactic climax ... The world of Creation Lake is a haven for complex and multifaceted ideas, one that carries a special appeal for Sadie and Pascal and perhaps even the author herself.
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? ... I longed for a justification, no matter how small, for the scrambling of the timeline through the first third of the novel. Instead, it just felt like contempt.
Shifts of register like this help construct a lively, timely, satisfyingly rough-grained novel of ideas, they also make for an excitingly complex and fascinating narrator ... Sadie is a triumph of character – not quite fully self-deceived, not even entirely corrupted by the barely controlled confusions, emotional complications and near-disasters of the deep-cover agent’s life. She’s a satire, but she’s also being straight with us.
Hugely enjoyable ... An espionage drama pulsating with twisty revelation and drip-fed backstory, dealing with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, it adds a killer plot and expert pacing to the reach and sophistication of her previous work, as well as vital fun ... The final 100 pages, pinballing between peril and farce, are amazingly tense: wall-to-wall entertainment, and a real treat.
The acquisition of secret knowledge is one of the central pleasures of the spy novel, and Kushner works several unusual varieties of such knowledge into the novel’s propulsive plot ... More low-key ... For all Creation Lake’s philosophical expansiveness, Kushner plots the final third of the novel with ever-tightening precision, right down to the details of which numbered road will serve as an escape route.
Kushner’s novels are always more containers for thought than plot-driven narratives. But whereas her first three thrummed with energy, dazzling readers, Creation Lake feels more removed. The world of espionage has, of course, provided endless ambience for fiction. But Creation Lake is less spy novel spoof or eco-exposé than anthropological disquisition ... Disappointingly put-downable.
Kushner’s long fascination with underground rebels and their uprisings attains new depths and resonance in this bravura improvisation on the secret-agent trope; this brain-spinning tale of lies, greed, surveillance, crimes against nature, and ecowarriors; this searing look at our perilous estrangement from nature.
In her latest work, she dares to have a sense of humor and reveal a glistening vulnerability about creative work ... has a sharper sense of humor than its predecessors. In it, Kushner’s fiction seems to have gained a thrilling self-awareness, expressed through in-jokes that presume a readerly understanding...and images that resist analysis...We’ll get it, Kushner seems to think; gratifyingly, she trusts us to keep up ... Creation Lake is the closest to an ars poetica that Kushner has ever given us, her ravening, greedy, ill-mannered horde of readers. And one thing’s for certain: neither admirers nor detractors appear able to look away.
Cerebral ... Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species, should we take the time to think it through.
Rachel Kushner’s ambitious, intelligent and gripping latest novel, Creation Lake, concerns the eternal human capacity for delusion, while wondering whether utopian ideals can ever be realized without serious compromise. And it manages all this within the form of an expertly slick thriller, set against the backdrop of contemporary rural France, its history, politics and class system, all carefully woven in alongside an account of the rise and fall of the Neanderthals ... Expansive in its reach, fiercely uncompromising in its intellectual heft, yet as readable and enjoyable as a pacy spy thriller, Creation Lake is one of the best books of the year so far.
Nobody would mistake it for a thriller, but Kushner has captured the internal crisis of ideology that spy yarns often ignore, while creating an engaging tale in its own right. A deft, brainy take on the espionage novel.
