Rachel Kushner brings spy noir to Southwest France in latest novel

American author Rachel Kushner’s new novel “Creation Lake” transports readers to Guyenne, a fictional region of southwest France. Fiction today, but Guyenne did exist. It had been the name of a rural region until the French Revolution.

“I fictionalized it, but I wanted it to feel authentic. … It’s where I go every summer,” Kushner said in a phone interview.

“And it’s a gentle way to wink at my French editors, my French readers and my French friends.”

“Creation Lake” is her fourth novel but her first in the noir genre.

The protagonist is Sadie Smith, a disgraced former FBI agent now spying on behalf of a phantom private firm.

She’s assigned to infiltrate a commune of anti-capitalist activists called the Moulinards. They’ve decamped from Paris for Guyenne where they want to live closer to nature and closer to local farmers and oppose big industry and big government.

Sadie’s undercover assignment requires her to infiltrate the Moulinards and influence them to commit an act of violence at a local, popular agricultural fair. The intended victim is a visiting French government official.

Sadie also secretly intercepts and reads correspondence emailed to the Moulinards from the unseen, forward-thinking character of Bruno Lacombe.

Lacombe, a mentor to the activists, is a mysterious fellow; he’s lived in a barn, a stone hut and more recently has holed up in a cave.

Lacombe encourages the activists to rethink the ancient past to better understand the future. Eventually, Sadie sheds her cynicism and latches on to Lacombe’s wisdom.

The novel is brimming with digressions that explore what’s on Bruno’s fertile mind. Kushner describes him as a “kooky armchair philosopher” whose thoughts are a guiding light. They are more compelling than — and opposite to — anything the hard-hearted Sadie proposes.

One of the more intriguing and extended digressions is of a little known, subjugated people — the Cagot. They had lived in Guyenne for a millennium, according to Lacombe, but were discriminated against and banished from the community.

They weren’t allowed to worship in church nor take Communion, except with an empathetic priest in a single parish, who offered the humiliated Cagot the Communion through a slit on the side of a chapel, Lacombe writes.

He concludes that the Cagot heritage “is a secret flame that is cupped and held and protected from the wind.”

The Cagot were real, but the author said that the Cagot Rebellion of 1594, to which she refers in the book, is an event she imagined.

In another digression, Lacombe reflects that, in the absence of “mindful scholarship,” the Neanderthals, shortened to Thals, were conjurers and artists, versus Homo sapiens, who were copiers, and hence, frauds.

Lacombe later writes that he believes early inhabitants of the earth have much to teach us today. One group of teachers are the Polynesians, whom he argued were the world’s most advanced sailors.

“They sailed much of the globe, long before the Europeans had achieved any such thing. They went all the way to the Americas, and before Columbus,” he writes to the Moulinards. How they did that, with their maps, is still a mystery; and keep in mind that the North Star (Polaris) is valuable for navigation in the Northern Hemisphere, but it isn’t visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

By the end of the book, Sadie has turned her thinking, and her life, around by paying attention to Bruno’s wisdom, so that now Sadie follows a star path for herself.

“Creation Lake” was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Kushner’s books have twice been a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Rachel Kushner brings spy noir to Southwest France in latest novel