The Brooklyn Rail

Writing about revolutionaries, like artists and musicians, can often be a tough task. When I went to Buenos Aires in 2018 to write about the Posadists, an obscure Trotskyist tendency best known for their enthusiasm for UFOs and nuclear war, I received a cold reception at their office. “Go to the library and read our newspaper. Everything you need to know about us is there,” the aging militant told me, before closing the door in my face.

I imagine Rachel Kushner has received similar suspicion since the publication of her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers. The Oprah-promoted bestseller included somewhat unflattering portrayals of the New York City anarchist street-gang Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and the Italian Autonomists. Creation Lake’s more-recent setting of a 2013 rural French commune named Le Moulin is a far more ambitious subject, closely resembling the more contemporary, and notoriously secretive, Tarnac enclave of the Invisible Committee.

The commune’s trademark tactical opacity is pierced by narrator Sadie, an agent-provocateur hired by powerful clients presumably connected to transnational corporations and the French State. Her mission is to lure them into a violent plot against a nearby megabasin—an industrial project that leeches communal groundwater into a massive private reservoir. While local irrigation farmers oppose the project, it seems only the ex-Parisian autonomists have the will or skill to properly oppose it. Sadie’s clients hope to agitate them away from covert and careful sabotage and towards an act of spectacular violence that will turn the locals against them and give the state a free-hand to crush the commune and prosecute its leaders.

Kushner does excellent work of using the details of two environmentalist infiltrations from the time around the book’s setting to show how these provocateurs operate. Like infiltrators Mark Kennedy in the UK, and the still unknown “Anna” in the US, she seeks out a small, inexperienced crew to manipulate with shame and sexual seduction towards riskier confrontation. The book’s climactic depiction of the riot against the megabasin likewise demonstrates seasoned street-fighters seeing right through her murderous scheme, while her previous spreading of a rumored plan to a semi-excluded outer circle of activist hanger-ons lays sufficient groundwork to make it happen.

The depiction of this milieu through the eyes of a narc reads uncomfortably relatable to me. Since the release of Appel [Call] (2004) and L'insurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection] (2007), I have read all I could about the the Invisible Committee, including their anonymous texts and the dozens of think-pieces, comment-section rumors, denunciations from anarchist rivals, and court proceedings that claim to reveal their true character. Following a European group this intimately with little direct connection to their militants and projects always felt somewhat perverse. Sadie’s similar method of investigation recast this hobby as akin to the police work of a malicious agent.

Some of the marketing for Creation Lake stresses this point by implying it is an experiment in the detective fiction genre. The Marxist writer C.L.R. James noted in American Civilization (1993) the ambiguous position these narratives maintain within popular political imagination. They are not neat fantasies of heroic cops defeating criminals to preserve law and order, he argues in his description of Dashiel Hammet’s noirs and the Dick Tracy comic strip: “The people did not want this avenger to be a cop—the law, authority, the state. He had to be an ordinary guy—one who went out and did the job himself.” The rogue detectives of noir are thus a stand-in for the worker who feels equally threatened by the anarchy of the criminal underclass, the anarchy of the market, and the corrupt state that manages conflicts between the two.

Sadie, then, is something like a Sam Spade of the gig-economy era. She is a hired-by-email gun, working with near-total ambivalence towards her goal as she balances her guilt for past entrapments with her personal distaste towards her Moulinard targets. She becomes an armed version of the online-stalker of real movements—a critical observer with the power to deploy her often superficial criticisms of the communards’ naïveté, pretension, privilege, and misogyny in ways capable of destroying the movement.

She is not the only shady interloper at Le Moulin. There’s the transient struggle-hopping couple, devotees to Le Moulin’s intellectual leader Pascal Balmy, desperate to receive his orders despite their relegation to a tent outside the village. There’s a bitter anarchist that follows Sadie in a car for the sole purpose of talking shit on Pascal over some incomprehensible conflict at the ZAD, a real-life land-reclamation project outside of Nanterre. Then there’s the non-communard residents and regional working class who treat the whole milieu a bit like a joke, the way upstate New Yorkers refer to exurbanites as “Citidiots.”

Sadie’s sympathies lie with the latter group, because she, too, is a worker. Any chance of her siding with the revolutionaries over her employer is dispelled by their strident rejection of wage-labor—a position especially offensive to her given their wealthy backgrounds. Like the local trade unions, she is indecisive about the megabasin, capitalism, and civilization itself. But in order to make a living, she must play her role in building it.

As she works, Sadie devours the work of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a situationist who turned to writing detective novels during the seventies as an exercise in subverting the cookie-cutter expectations of popular literature. In the end, Manchette’s success as a writer once again proved the futility of attempting to use capitalism’s cultural tools against it—just as the libertarian ruptures of ’68 only served to reorganize a new era of capitalism in the developed world.

It is some relief, then, that Creation Lake mostly resists the neo-noir style. The most genre moment I recall was a nosy uncle, portrayed and dispatched with the surreal cruelty of a Jim Thompson antagonist. Kushner instead sticks to her postmodern comedic style, a deadpan mixture of commonplace details of roadside debris and children’s wallpaper mingling with prolonged meditations on EU logistics, Marxist feminism, the trauma of the Holocaust, and the immense challenges facing humanity that must defy and surpass all revolutionary blueprints of the past.

By the end of her operation, Sadie finds herself gravitating towards the despair of Balmy’s foil, the aging Marxist-turned-primitivist Bruno Lacombe. The failure of ’68 to accomplish a single revolution led Lacombe to believe the proletariat had become fully domesticated to the class-society they once sought to destroy. The triumph of industrial barbarism so terrified him he went back to land, eschewing tractors for hand planting, and eventually abandoning all domesticity to live deep in a cave. There, he concluded humanity itself was a lost cause since the Stone-Age outbreeding of our emotionally superior Neanderthal cousins. Drawing on the work of Soviet historian Boris Porshnev, he theorized untouchable-caste populations are Neanderthal ancestors who have mounted uprisings against the human elite ever since.

Here, Sadie finds a nihilistic communism adequate to the hopelessness of the working-class. As if to test the sincerity of his maximalism, she desperately tries to find Bruno and draw him into her entrapment plan. By failing to do so, she is finally convinced to take the greatest action she could to support the revolution—she quits her job.

When it comes to the author herself, Kushner has claimed she had more fun working on Creation Lake than any book to date. It is not a denunciation, nor a dossier, but a dreamlike impression of a perhaps-fading revolutionary milieu. The result is probably her most entertaining novel—more of a page-tuner than the lengthier meditations of The Flamethrowers, and with far less of the too-real horrors of a woman’s prison portrayed in The Mars Room. I suppose fun could also be considered another signifier of genre fiction, arriving here with an equal measure of unsettling political ambiguity.