“The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheese (Comte, Roquefort, Cabecou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.”
“Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.”
The Booker train continues. The shortlist was announced this week, and I was pleasantly surprised that four of the six are actually on my personal shortlist. (Pats self on back.) I was not surprised that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Scribner 2024) made the cut. It also made the National Book Award longlist. (So did James and My Friends (the fact My Friends didn’t make the Booker shortlist still leaves me gob smacked.) I admit to being a bit surprised that both Creation Lake and The Safekeep made the short because they are both “thriller” novels of obsession and unreliable narrators, but I also selected both so I can’t be too surprised.
It took me a minute to get into Creation Lake because I think the blurb does it a huge disservice; if you’re looking for a spy novel, this isn’t it. Half the novel (not all in one chunk but spread out) is philosophical musings and anthropological studies about Neanderthals and the evolution of man as emailed by a reclusive to his commune of followers. The recluse, Bruno, is our narrator’s “target” and she has hacked his emails.
Sadie Smith, as she’s given as has her name for this job in rural France, is an unreliable and untrustworthy narrator. She’s lost grasp on reality and her own identity, and her obsession with Bruno and her desire to be rooted becomes more pronounced as the novel progresses. She is indeed a spy, formally with the US government but now in the private sector after some questionable tactics resulted in a successful entrapment defense from one of her “jobs,” but she’s not as sharp and skilled as she thinks she is. Her “job” in rural, concerns the Prime Minister and infiltrating an eco-terrorist group, allegedly led by Bruno. Sadie becomes very attached to Bruno, and she is cognizant that she treats this mythical figure with more familiarity than those who actually know him.
The use of sex in novel is expected considering the focus on creation and evolution, but I didn’t expect the repeated imagery of children engaged in sexual activity. There is the song, which I did google to find out it is indeed real and was popular in the 80s, “Lemon Incest,” which is performed by a father and his then twelve-year-old daughter with lyrics that hint at both pedophilia and incest. There is the 13-year-old boy who’d been kicked out of the commune after impregnating his teacher at age 11. And there’s a documentary about a very young boy’s very active sex life that Sadie references frequently.
As an aside, there’s an undercurrent of regret concerning missed motherhood, and the reoccurring imagery of Sadie finding a crying baby in a dumpster is reminiscent of Pearl, from last year’s longlist.
In a longlist of rather short novels, Creation Lake might be the longest. It’s not my favorite, but there’s a reason I predicted it to fall on the shortlist.
Read this book.
Booker count: 11 of 13
A Girl Named Tommi 