'Sadie Smith' is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by 'cold bump'—making him believe the encounter was accidental. And like everyone she chooses to interact with, Lucien is useful to her. Sadie operates on strategy and dissimulation, based on what her 'contacts,'—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
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.
