SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Rachel Kushner's new novel "Creation Lake" is an eco-espionage story wrapped in philosophy, deception and radical politics. Sadie Smith is the operational name of a freelance spy once cast off by the FBI sent to penetrate the Moulinards, a small, intense anarchist agricultural movement in France. Are they targeting a large-scale farming project, as her unnamed employers believe, or is something else at play in this hall of mirrors? "Creation Lake" has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. And Rachel Kushner joins us now from our studios in Culver City. Thanks so much for being with us.
RACHEL KUSHNER: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: This is a story guided in many ways by two charismatic presences. Tell us first about Sadie, or whatever her name is.
KUSHNER: Sure. Well, she is somebody who had originally worked for a federal agency in the United States and retreated into the shadowy, unregulated world of privately contracted surveillance. And she sets out to destroy people's lives. And the only backstory she shares with the reader is other situations where she likewise meant to destroy lives. Normally, you might get psychological backstory which comes to account for why the narrator makes the decisions that she does.
But when you have a narrator who has a fundamentally kind of Teflon and amoral tone where they don't have a very strong egoistic sense of their own moral righteousness, they are able - or at least I so found as the writer - to locate and point out the contradictions of everybody else. But what that also does is puts them into a rather brittle position, ultimately, because what do they believe? And over the course of the novel, the cracks in her veneer do start to show.
SIMON: Tell us about the very charismatic figure in many ways at the center of this novel - Bruno Lacombe. He refers to Homo sapiens as the occupiers who displaced Neanderthals.
KUSHNER: Yeah. Well, Bruno is an elder who is seen as a kind of mysterious figure and adviser to this group of young people who have formed a commune in rural France. And he lives in a cave underground and writes these long communiques to the group that Sadie is intercepting. He's looking at prehistory, and he's looking for where human life took a wrong turn. It's speculative. It's a way to think about why we're so drawn to imagining the lives of people who lived before the written down. It's also a way to make a character who's free to think about what seemed to me while I was writing it, rather fundamental questions about who we are and where we've come from and where we're going. Bruno feels that currently, we are trapped in a driverless car and careening off a cliff. And his question is, how do we exit the car?
SIMON: How much anthropology did you have to get hold of? How do you create Le Moulinards?
KUSHNER: In my own personal life, I have had some exposure to and access to the social world, political world of people who form these kinds of communes. The region where I set the book, it's fictional. I call it the Guyenne, which is a, like, 12th century name for a region of southwestern France that happens to contain within it - it's no longer used - places that I know quite well and visit every summer. That part was fairly easy to render.
What was uncomfortable at first was because I had access to certain details that I would need to make this world plausible, I had to think through what it meant to employ those details because it's an act of betrayal to the people in these sorts of communes to render the interior of that life visible for all. And it wasn't until I realized that the person who has an up-close view is, in fact, herself very much of a betrayer that I saw the way to do it.
SIMON: Given the way that Sadie Smith has to immerse herself into Bruno's philosophy and the fact that she becomes a part of this group, and she develops friends and has fun, does that begin to compromise her?
KUSHNER: This is a sort of classical question of the undercover agent and the spy. I had been interested in a case concerning a British agent who worked for the Metropolitan U.K. Police who was surveilling leftist activists across Europe. And he seemed to get himself into a number of delicate situations by having affairs with women in these groups and then was cornered by some of the people in one of these groups who found - from what I understand - in his glove box about nine different passports. And when he was cornered by the group, as I was told, he cried and professed his love to them and said, you know, I'm really with you guys. I've gone over to the other side. And at first, they believed him because they wanted to believe him. And after that, he disappeared into the private sector. And I was interested in this character and had asked myself, what kind of a person would do that?
SIMON: I got to tell you I wound up feeling for Sadie.
KUSHNER: You did?
SIMON: Yeah.
KUSHNER: She's very alone, and no one in the book can know her. And she flaunts that unknowability by at one point in the novel saying, you people aren't real to me. No one is. And she has this view of reality where she can be one way to the people in the book and turn to the reader and say things to the reader that she doesn't say to those she's surveilling. And at first, it's a kind of gag. To me, it's funny. But after a while, one has to wonder, what is the cost for a person like this who thinks that they have all of reality rigged under their own control? And as she is attentively reading the communiques of Bruno, it almost seems as if he is her closest companion on earth...
SIMON: Yeah.
KUSHNER: ...But that he doesn't know she exists. And she almost has signed up to be something like his ersatz daughter. And the only place where she can approach him and be close and finally be his sort of spiritual daughter is in this philosophy that he's made between earth and cosmos.
SIMON: Rachel Kushner's new novel, "Creation Lake." Thank you so much for being with us.
KUSHNER: Thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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