It was a brave/foolish move by Rachel Kushner to centre Creation Lake around the comings and goings of a repugnant spy-cop, Sadie Smith, whose Ayn Rand certainties and judgements get increasingly tedious. In the UK in particular most people think the best spy-cop is, to put it bluntly, a jailed spy-cop, so Kushner was always going to have her work cut out. How does she make the reader stick with such a character for four-hundred pages? I’m not sure she does. To cut a long story short Sadie spy-cop is out to expose/fit up an environmental group who are trying to stop the latest corporation stealing/hoarding water and making an area in France more water poor than it currently is. Middle-class eco warriors with the wrong shade of politics seem to be the go-to enemies the world over, whether you’re a nasty old middle-class industrialist or a certain kind of middle-class writer. Cutting to the chase, Kushner’s point is? Direct action has had its day? Middle-class activists are not to be trusted? The implied way forward a let’s change ourselves and the world will change with us schtick which smacks of a kind of ‘there there’ politics which has through history changed absolutely fuck all. As Brandon Williams put it in his review of Creation Lake, “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”. Indeed. Which is a shame because, based on her previous work which I love, she is smart, but Creation Lake is, well, marmite, and at the moment I can’t decide whether it’s an over ambitious failure or just a failure.

Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner – publ by Vintage - £9.99

Steven Long