A novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to infiltrate an anarchist collective in France

Creation Lake is a story about radicals -- radicals who theorize and radicals who act. In this novel, Kushner uses a cynical spy, under the alias of Sadie, to look a radical anti-corporate group in France and look at the ways they live up to and fail at their morals. Sadie is a purely superficial character who believes nothing and just acts how she must to do her job and get paid. Kushner contrasts Sadie with Bruno Lacombe, the elder thought leader of the commune who writes quasi-historic email manifestos from the caves he lives in. Kushner alternates between Sadie's summaries of Bruno's emails about Neanderthals and ancient French worker uprisings with Sadie's spy work to infiltrate the commune and try to manipulate it into criminal acts that will get it broken up. The writing of the novel is the kind of slick beauty Kushner excels at, and the themes are strong, although there's one glaring weak point. At the center of this is Guy Debord - Kushner describes leaders of the commune as trying to look like Debord, Bruno met Debord as a youth, and Debord's Society of the Spectacle is invoked several times. Kushner never actually explains Debord's theory, which is a major flaw of Creation Lake, since the themes of the novel revolve around it. Debord essentially argues that society under capitalism eventually replaces value with the appearance of value, and the appearance of value is what Kushner shows in the commune, revolutionaries who disregard successful activists because they aren't young and cool, egalitarian societies with 'natural' gender roles that exclude women from power, and movements that claim to speak for the people when they only get bare minimal support. Kushner does a terrific job demonstrating all of these hypocrisies, most critically Sadie's own, slowly facing the vapidity of her cynicism as the mission spirals into chaos. We really do wish Kushner gave us more access to the central theories here -- we had to go to Wikipedia to find the skeleton key to the novel. That said, once we understood it, we found Creation Lake a well-written, fast-moving, and profound work.