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In late September, two Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced to prison terms of two years and 20 months respectively for the crime of throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflowers” to raise awareness of the climate crisis. A few months earlier, five climate crisis campaigners were given sentences of four and five years for blocking traffic—the longest ever for non-violent protests. Climate activists around the world have faced wide ranging punishments—from community service to sentences of weeks or months—for undertaking similar actions.
American author Rachel Kushner’s new novel Creation Lake imagines the shadowy forces working against a crew of similar guerrilla climate change activists. Her narrator is disgraced American spy turned corporate espionage freelancer Sadie Smith.
It’s clear from the outset that we’re not meant to like Sadie, which is not her real name, but one she has adopted for her assignment to infiltrate and disrupt a commune of French eco-radicals. When we first meet her, she relates her romantic and sexual manipulation of a hapless filmmaker whom she has used to gain access to the commune. She discusses in a matter-of-fact way her past efforts to “plant the idea of violence” in the head of an otherwise well-meaning activist, “since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own,” which then results in his arrest. And she makes it repeatedly apparent that she views everyone she encounters as mere tools to further her increasingly high-stakes, morally bankrupt mission. She has a great many ironic opinions about everything, but believes in nothing.
Sadie never offers justification for her activities—which not only ruin individual lives but also contribute to the approaching ecological calamity. She rarely seems to question her own base motivation, either: money. She comes off as a confident, beautiful, empty vehicle of environmental antagonism, nihilistic (and increasingly drunk) in the face of an approaching disaster. She knows it’s coming but she just doesn’t care.
What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self?
But her opponents in this tale frequently seem as misguided and vapid as she does. The commune is led by misogynistic sons of wealth turned petty revolutionaries more interested in arguing over theory than affecting real change. “We’ve ceased to locate ourselves in a larger system, a grand design,” Sadie muses as she begins to intimate the errors of her and our collective ways. The people who populate Creation Lake—like so many of us in reality—suffer from individual and environmental fragmentation, failing to connect authentically within their communities, and with nature and the cosmos at large.
The one person in the novel who displays the slightest ability to appreciate the big picture has taken himself out of it: a 1960s counterculture revolutionary named Bruno Lacomb, whose failures at fighting the capitalist machine drive him to seek hermitage in a cave where he seems to be losing his mind amidst his theorizing about Neanderthals, Medieval philosophy, and the shortcomings of modern civilization. Bruno is not only isolated physically and ideologically but narratively as he enters the story solely via hearsay repeated by other characters and emails hacked by Sadie. He is a legend we never meet, but only hear of.
While Lacomb is posed as the arch-antagonist of Sadie’s mission, he appears at times the failed, inconsequential crackpot, and at others the transcendent visionary. Part of the conundrum for the reader is to identify which conception is accurate.
Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake features her deadpan writing style and tendency toward creeping thrills that are reminiscent of Don DeLillo, who she has previously cited as a major influence. It’s an engaging, fast-paced read, and her technique of weaving between Sadie’s narration and Lacomb’s emails delivers a balance of stark nihilism and maniacal idealism. The Guggenheim Foundation Fellow has won numerous awards for her previous novels, and Creation Lake is already shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award.
Creation Lake is a purposefully nihilistic novel—Kushner intends for the reader to feel Sadie’s cynicism—but its very meaning is derived from the ferocity of that nihilism. The world cannot be as heartless as this person. Kushner’s agent is a font of abnegation (“Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and that goodness is punished,” Sadie notes when discussing her disbelief in justice). But it is this very sense of shrugged moral renunciation that inspires in the reader a compulsion toward action.
“What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary 4 a.m. self? What is inside them?” Sadie muses. “Not politics. There are no politics inside of people.”
But what Kushner is counting on is that our 4 a.m. selves, in fact, do want to live in a world in which defeat is not all but certain. A world where we’re not ruled by financially fueled forces driving us off the cliff of environmental doom. A world where the Sadies face the consequences they so justly deserve.
In Creation Lake, Sadie is comfortable pushing right-minded (if sometimes obnoxiously myopic) eco-activists to perform crimes they likely wouldn’t have otherwise, shepherding them toward violence, arrest, and ignominy. Kushner’s novel evokes a question: Here in the real world, where climate campaigners suffer extravagant prison sentences for tossing soup, why are we so comfortable meting out punishment for causing a scene rather than for poisoning the world? What are we to do about Sadie, or at least what she represents?
It’s time to not only pick a side, Kushner suggests, but to act on it. 
Lead image: dan.nikonov / Shutterstock
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