I picked up Rachel Kushner’s newest novel, Creation Lake, when it was short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. But unlike Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which ended up winning the prize and was one of my favorite recent reads, this one proved a fact that I often forget when faced with an offbeat and stylistic literary darling: Many of them just aren’t my style.
Creation Lake tells the story of a seductive American secret agent who infiltrates a group of French radicals. The narrator goes by the name Sadie Smith, and we know next to nothing about her, including who she’s working for or what she’s actually trying to accomplish. We do know she has managed to tap into the emails of a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, who serves as a mentor in absentia to the rural commune of French subversives. Lacombe is so anti-establishment that he has forsaken modern life to live in a cave, and his dispatches argue that Neanderthals may have been wiser and better suited to this planet than Homo sapiens.
Amid the constant anthropology lessons, we follow Sadie’s quest to wriggle in among the radicals, and the book centers on her high opinion of herself and her grim view of everything and everyone else. “Slow burn” doesn’t begin to describe the glacial pace of this novel, or its relentless focus on … nothing in particular. I came away thinking this was well-written and so smart at a sentence level, but not particularly enjoyable.
For me, Creation Lake serves as a valuable reminder of a reading goal that I rarely achieve — and that is, to abandon books that just aren’t working for me. Kushner’s novel clearly wowed the Booker judges, but it left me disengaged and resentful. Time to make DNF, or “did not finish,” a higher priority for the new year.
