Rachel Kushner's new novel 'Creation Lake' is inspired by real-life espionage

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Rachel Kushner's new novel, Creation Lake, has all the makings of a great spy thriller: a cool and unknowable secret agent, a mysterious figure who communicates only by email and a radical commune of French eco-activists. Kushner has said that some of these elements were, in fact, inspired by real-world stories of espionage and her own access to the social and political worlds of activist communes. In today's episode, Kushner speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about the murky boundaries of being an undercover agent–and a writer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Listen, I'm guilty of enjoying a certain
0:07.6	brand of literary novel where, let's face it, not much happens. A character walks around,
0:14.1	being sad, thinks about his family and relationships, and then that's it. That's the end of the book.
0:19.7	This is not the case with the new Rachel Kushner novel,
0:23.2	Creation Lake. This is a book about spies and communes and underground caves, but it's also a book
0:30.0	about how to know yourself when your job as a spy requires you to be a reflection of the people around you.
0:39.8	Kushner spoke with NPR Scott Simon about digging deep into her central character and
0:44.0	the real-life undercover agents that inspired this book.
0:48.1	That's coming up.
0:50.2	Rachel Kushner's new novel, Creation Lake, is an eco-espionage story, wrapped in philosophy, deception,
0:57.3	and radical politics. Sadie Smith is the operational name of a freelance spy, once cast off
1:04.9	by the FBI, sent to penetrate the Moulinard, a small, intense anarchist agricultural movement in France.
1:13.3	Are they targeting a large-scale farming project as her unnamed employers believe, or is something
1:20.0	else at play in this Hall of Mirrors? Creation Lake has been long listed for the Booker Prize,
1:25.8	and Rachel Kushner joins us now from our studios
1:28.5	in Culver City. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Scott. This is a story guided in many ways
1:35.0	by two charismatic presences. Tell us first about Savie or whatever her name is. 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.
2:00.3	And she sets out to destroy people's lives. world of privately contracted surveillance.
2:05.1	And she sets out to destroy people's lives. And the only backstory she shares with the reader is other situations where she
2:12.3	likewise meant to destroy lives.
2:15.4	Normally, you might get psychological backstory, which comes to account for
2:20.4	why the narrator makes the decisions that she does. But when you have a narrator who has a fundamentally
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