Rachel Kushner ‘01 Blends Genre and Character in 'Creation Lake'

Talking to Rachel Kushner '01, author of the National Book Award-nominated and Booker Prize shortlisted novel Creation Lake, is like traversing through galactic orbits with black holes pulling you in without you knowing. She doesn’t bend genres, she blends them, upholding them as they are but weaving intricate paths through character, perspective, the rules of this world and those who break them, and those who uphold them. In an interview on Zoom just a few days ahead of her New York City book tour stop, I spoke to Kushner about how she manipulates and curates perspective, both characters and worldviews. We discussed the curse of fiction, the dichotomy between the individual and community, and how she realized writing the novel.

Kushner set the novel in 2013 because she wanted it “to be contiguous with particular foundational incidents.” That particular incident is when French police raided a commune in the village of Tarmac in the Northern Perez. “I had been there,” Kushner said about this nugget of inspiration. “I knew some of those people and watched it all happen, and that’s when the seed was planted that I would write a book like this. I’m furnishing my parallel universe with elements of this world,” she remarked about how her materials arrive. 

“There was this whole new movement that had formed in France…about trying to stop the French state’s industrial farming initiative to control all the water and build these mega basins, and I had just grabbed that detail because I needed my commune to be against something, not just borrow from reality. It’s 2013 but it has elements of now."

The novel follows Sadie, an undercover spy, into Le Moulin, a commune in the countryside of France where her job is to provoke criminal behavior, manufacturing it if necessary. Sadie’s victims are as sympathetic as they come: rural people fighting corporations to keep control of their water and land. She finds undercover work with corporations that want her to turn the state against the people either by catching them in a criminal act, setting them up to commit it, or by framing them. 

We do not need to agree with a person or group, or even like them, to meaningfully engage with them, Kushner is showing us. She’s writing a difficult character, a character she doesn’t sympathize with, agree with, or like. Sadie is only concerned with her mission, despite the harm she will cause so many people, and ultimately, herself. She skirts the concept of considering those around her, not merely as a flaw of character, but as a principle, an outlook on life. And yet the reader is never asked to pick a side.

It’s through Sadie's work that we land in the email inbox of Bruno Lacombe, a character who has lived in a cave and hasn’t spoken to or lived amongst anyone for twenty-five years, and also an unofficial leader of the commune. Bruno, unlike Sadie, believes that life is precious and made precious when it’s treated that way. In an email to the commune, he makes it clear that any plans they have that might risk the safety or lives of people, because he “deplore[s] violence in all its forms,” is wrong.

Bruno's emails are filtered through Sadie, as though she were reading them to us, interjecting bits and pieces of her own thoughts and shifting the occasional pronoun to redirect who is being addressed, or doing the addressing. ​​While the story is told only from Sadie’s perspective, neither she nor Bruno are given more of the narrative. The reader’s job, then, is to observe the two, Sadie and Bruno, with an eye on how each character moves through the world.

“It’s essential to create a character, even when they speak in the first person, who doesn’t block the author’s contact with the reader where they can see around and through the narrator to the territory of the other characters—and the narrator in ways that contradict what the narrator claims,” Kushner said. “There’s a monopoly on perspective, which is this narrator who is not who she presents herself as. She’s reading very closely the correspondences, the communications of Bruno, and I think that forces her into this intimate relationship with him." What Kushner hoped to pull off with this intimacy is what she calls a “formal trick…because then there are actually two storytellers in the novel.” When Sadie plunges into Bruno’s emails, we’re meant to forget that Sadie is there. But as Kushner said, it’s a trick.

As for storytelling, Kushner is interested in “the sermon form,” saying “it’s at the root of American literature.” She credits, even defines the sermon, an oral and aural poetic tradition of the Black church, as “the way we tell stories, [starting] as moral anecdotes that are interpretations of the Bible,” not entirely unlike Bruno’s emails. For Kushner, the moral is very clear. 

“The project of living is about accountability. How can I move through the world with care? And if I don’t feel like my actions matter then there’s nothing giving me the sense that my life has any meaning. That’s where all the meaning comes from. I was curious about writing this character [Sadie] who has no sense of meaning and just thinking that that is like an existential crisis because what gets you up in the morning?”

For Kusher, the exercise of writing a character like Sadie has led to interesting questions about the relationship, and the level of separation, between author and narrator—an assumption that the narrator reflects the author—the curse of fiction. “I think that just in terms of generating fiction, it was oddly critical for me—or oddly essential for me—to have a narrator who didn’t have my own biases because then by forcing myself to see through her perspective, I could find out what elements of my own belief system could stand the scourge of her,” said Kushner.

Despite the cynical nature of her main character, Kushner maintains that Creation Lake is not meant to be a cynical book. Instead, it's a book which hopes to lay bare and examine the challenges of our world. “The more disconnected [the narrator] is, the more they think it’s a cynical book," she said. "But really I’m just encountering the challenges that exist because I’ve seen them.

“Sometimes fiction writing is very introspective and psychological, or it’s very reduced into this kind of domestic sphere attending to the little details and the emotional minutiae of day-to-day life,” she continued. “There are people who face inward and there are people who face outward—and I’m just of that second type. Even just to locate myself, I’m thinking of the mechanics of the world more than I’m thinking about my own feelings, which don’t quite interest me as much as other things do.”

Creation Lake is a portrait of how the individual and communities form, are tested, and break. It's a lot of work navigating being among people not your own, seeing them, understanding them, and then respecting them even if you don’t like what you see. What Creation Lake does is challenge us in that sphere where we have to meet and connect, and have ourselves reflected back to us.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and her nonfiction in Harpers and the New York Times Magazine.