{"id":12780,"date":"2024-12-22T08:33:30","date_gmt":"2024-12-22T07:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12780"},"modified":"2025-01-06T12:32:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T11:32:18","slug":"rachel-kushner-creation-lake-reviewed-by-georgina-parfitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12780","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake, reviewed by Georgina Parfitt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>An unreliable narrator\u2019s cry for help<\/i><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Creation-Lake.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Rachel Kushner| <i>Creation Lake <\/i>| Jonathan Cape: \u00a318.99<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> <br \/><\/span>Reviewed by Georgina Parfitt<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My friend and I happened to be reading <i>Creation Lake<\/i> at the same time without knowing it. I mentioned it one day, withholding my thoughts, and my friend got excited: <i>Oh, you too?, <\/i>We hesitated. There are elements of Rachel Kushner\u2019s latest novel that seem\u2026 well, sort of bad. Or, they <i>might<\/i> be bad. We\u2019re led by a narrator who is almost cartoonishly unreliable, a persona who is very aware of her own breasts as instruments of espionage, for example. (\u201cI laughed, my own implants barely contained in the triangles of my white bikini.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The sentences in Sadie\u2019s voice have a clumsiness to them, the way she says \u201cimplants\u201d instead of \u201cbreasts\u201d even, forcing us to imagine silicon shapes in a bikini, a messy illusion. And other examples, too, \u201cthe clang of a church bell heard from a distance, et cetera,\u201d might suggest that we\u2019re reading a spy novel with a speaker who is jaded about \u201creal life\u201d in that typical, spy-novel way. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>And, yes, the book is full of unreal relationships. In fact, Sadie\u2019s success (read: persistence) as an undercover agent seems to have a lot to do with her undoubted ability to seduce. Relationships are Sadie\u2019s way into a job. However, counter to our expectations of the unreliable narrator (this persona that has become, actually, quite reliable), Sadie\u2019s relationships are not complete charades. If she\u2019s supposed to be a femme fatale, enticing otherwise smart, streetwise-ish men to fall for her, she plays this role awkwardly. She entered the world of spying accidentally, after getting in too deep with a group of bikers, and from this uneasy starting point, her career progresses in a series of stumbles. The word \u201cjob\u201d is so synonymous with \u201crelationship\u201d that by the end of the book, when we hear of Sadie \u201cturning down all offers of work,\u201d we know that she has also turned away from men.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>There are some tropes in play (the spy losing control of the cover story, those familiar slippages of the unreliable narrator, the piecemeal construction of scenes-as-clues). And yet, my friend and I both liked the book \u2013 tore through it, were gripped and interested \u2013 and we both found Brandon Taylor\u2019s review in the LRB frustrating (the review is titled, pretty rudely, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v46\/n17\/brandon-taylor\/use-your-human-mind\">Use your human mind!<\/a>\u201d). In the review, Taylor despairs of the book\u2019s \u201ccareless construction and totalising cynicism.\u201d Yet, he seems most upset by a more general shoddiness, an affliction shared by too many writers today \u2013 \u201cShallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars,\u201d he writes, and Kushner\u2019s novel is made an example of. \u201cWhy did you even write this,\u201d he asks, but the question feels like it\u2019s directed beyond this novel in particular. Why does anyone write anything?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The despair in this critique reminded me of Anne Haverty\u2019s recent essay, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/stingingfly.org\/2024\/12\/05\/writing-in-the-stupid-age\/\">Writing In The Stupid Age<\/a>,\u201d a kinder point of view. \u201cCan we write anymore about people?\u201d she asks. \u201cCan\u2019t we only write about phone-people? Writers may be asking themselves this question, as more of them abandon what looks like barren ground and turn instead to writing about the past.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>My experience of the book was not one of totalising cynicism, and my experience of its narrator was neither one of a stupid person nor of a person playing dumb (as Taylor suggests in his review). Instead, I encountered a person numbed, dissociated, but also sad. Sadie\u2019s veils are faulty, her wiles are limited, she cannot, James Bond-like, simply soar into a new mission anchored by a familiar cocktail order. Sadie drinks whatever she can get hold of, she shares information inelegantly, even the fianc\u00e9 she\u2019s manipulating cheats on her in the end. If she seems like a relic of an unkind tradition (both literary and cultural), she is by no means a perfect example of an inhuman double agent.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Sadie has signed off from the authentic, the moral, the actual, gone off-grid, and yet, in drawing her, Kushner keeps an eye on need and pain. The experience I have of Sadie is of a person very far gone but not quite disappeared, even when she seems to move deliberately further and further from the trappings of real relationships through the course of the novel (even to the point of retiring to an invented town named after a signpost, Priest Valley). We are lonely in the \u201cstupid age\u201d and we can\u2019t actually disappear, even if we near-drown ourselves with screen-life and avatars. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It is not an accident that the novel lands somewhere quite sentimental. Throughout her mission, attempting to befriend and betray the radical group Le Moulin, Sadie describes the world around her with an uncomfortable detachment. Even her metaphors seem to be selected from a narrow semantic realm: \u201cI passed a tower on a cliff, its top edges eaten away like a sugar cone.\u201d In her own words, a \u201ctasteless container.\u201d Sadie can only liken real things to\u2026 less real things. She thinks down, not up. But when this person, who has led us through numerous fake relationships leaves us, she is looking up at the sky, stargazing. There is wonder and hope in <i>Creation Lake<\/i>. While it may not rest in the French village square or in the arms of a new lover, or even in the project of communism, it does appear via the long, tangential emails of Bruno Lacombe that Sadie drinks up, with their Neanderthal facts, their water, darkness, cave paintings, voices, fire. The wonder happens \u2013 yes, in a difficult, roundabout way \u2013 but it happens; we may be \u201cstupefied,\u201d as Anne Haverty (and perhaps, Rachel Kushner) would suggest, not stupid.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i>Reviewed by Georgina Parfitt<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An unreliable narrator\u2019s cry for help Rachel Kushner| Creation Lake | Jonathan Cape: \u00a318.99 Reviewed by Georgina Parfitt My friend and I happened to be reading Creation Lake at the same time without knowing it. I mentioned it one day, withholding my thoughts, and my friend got excited: Oh, you too?, We hesitated. There are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake, reviewed by Georgina Parfitt - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12780\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake, reviewed by Georgina Parfitt - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An unreliable narrator\u2019s cry for help Rachel Kushner| Creation Lake | Jonathan Cape: \u00a318.99 Reviewed by Georgina Parfitt My friend and I happened to be reading Creation Lake at the same time without knowing it. 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