What this a satirical take on corporate spy thillers? A statement on capitalism and over-development? A commentary on leftist thinkers and anarchists? A screed on the enduring influence of humanoids?
Sure, yes, all of that. Whether you loved this book or hated it (and the reviews are indeed mixed), Creation Lake will give your book club plenty to talk about and then some.
Get the conversation started with these Creation Lake book club questions. The discussion guide includes 10 discussion prompts, a synopsis and some selected reviews. And if you’re keen to read more like Creation Lake, we’ve got some reading suggestions at the bottom of the page.
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Creation Lake Synopsis
(We always chose to provide the publisher synopsis because we feel that it’s worthwhile to discuss whether the official book description actually squared with your experience of the book.)
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet—a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
10 Creation Lake Book Club Questions
These questions have been tailored to this book’s specific reading experience, but if you want more ideas, we also have an article with 101 generic book club questions.
- Rate the book on a scale of 1-10. 1 being “Huh?”, and 10 being “I saw what you did there”.
- Sadie is not a character we’re meant to like. She’s mercenary, she messy, and she drives drunk. What were your feelings about Sadie? Is liking the main character a prerequisite for liking the novel? And if not, then what does the novel need to do for you to get past the dislike?
- Bruno keeps coming back to transmigration, migration and evolution. What was he trying to say about modern society? Why is he so fixated on it?
- Creation Lake gives off a strong sense of disorientation. Sadie has shadowy clients, Bruno lives in a cave and obsesses about “Thal”, and the “eco-terrorists” are just hanging out and growing crops…they don’t seem to be doing much plotting.
What was Kushner trying to do with this disorientation? How did it affect your reading experience? - The members of Le Moulin are anti-government and anti-development. But a number of them live on government assistance. They also seem to have defaulted to traditional gender roles. Are they living their professed values?
- Talk about luck. Sadie seems to have a lot of it, especially during the culminating scenes of the book. How much of the action was she actually generating, and how much was from luck or other outside influences?
- “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?…I’ll keep it as a souvenir. It’ll remind me of that time some crazy chick came to Le Moulin and tried to stir up a bunch of shit and no one went for it.”
Sadie seemed sure that she had Burdmoore locked in, but instead, he took the gun and brushed off her plan. Where do you think she went wrong with him? What was he seeing that the others didn’t see? - Sadie says, “People might claim to be this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.”
Is the four a.m. version of you different than the version that you perform during the daylight hours? - Sadie says that “Pascal enjoyed it when people devoted to him weren’t devoted to each other “
Pascal is a chauvinist and an egoist. Does that make a good leader? Fast forward a few years, will the group still follow him? - This book was shortlisted for a Booker and longlisted for a National Book Award. And yet, the Goodreads reviews clocked in at 3.36, which is not a great score. And there was a lot of love/hate in the reviews (see some samples below).
Are you also having love/hate within your book group? Do you think that the awards are looking for something that doesn’t jive with what the average reader wants?
Selected Reviews for Creation Lake
(Use these selected Goodreads reviews to compare with your own experience of the book. Do you agree or disagree with the reviews?)
“The complexity Sadie as main character offers, using sex to get her way, stealing and drinking while driving, yet also being looked down upon by the Paris elite and men in general and distrusted by women, is definitely the highlight of the book. She is a pawn of capitalism but also manages to exploit the patriarchy financially, making her a compelling main character. “
“The narrator is so incredibly unlikeable that I started to wonder if the book was an intentional farce. Are we supposed to think she is “cool”? Are we supposed to sympathize with her mission to sabotage utopian activist communities and land people in prison? Are we supposed to think that she’s awesome because she has casual sex (shocking!) even as she entraps activists? If we are not supposed to like her, then why doesn’t Kushner give us a more developed critique of her life/behavior, another character to see the world through? “
“This book is filled to the brim with information, theories and ideas about the Neanderthals, the Cagots, astrology etc. And even though Kushner is very smart and I admire her knowledge, I personally didn’t really care about all the anthropology. I would have liked to learn more about the characters and what motivated them, but I felt I hardly got to know them. Also, this was presented as a spy novel about eco-terrorism, but nothing much happens and except for the ending it wasn’t very thrilling.”
“I enjoyed “Creation Lake” well enough but even after several weeks I’m not sure how I feel about it. I can understand the rave reviews on GR and elsewhere. I’m far less sympathetic with the London Review of Books write-up (“a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile” — don’t sugarcoat it, dude, tell us what you really think). I’m somewhere in-between, leaning toward the first group. I enjoyed the intellectual pleasure of trying to puzzle out what Kushner was trying to do, and yes, reading to find out what would happen to the protagonist. But all this wasn’t enough to put me in the camp of the 5-star givers.”
What to Read Next
Creation Lake was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve also got some guides for those award nominees from female authors. Try Small Things Like These (Claire Keegen), Girl Woman Other (Bernadine Evaristo), Matrix (Lauren Groff), The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett).
Each of those guides has a non-spoiler synopsis toward the top of the page and a link out to pricing and reviews on Amazon.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
If you liked the unlikable Sadie, here’s another character for you to have love/hate feelings about.
The narrator is a recent Colombia grad with a mildly interesting gallery job, a trust fund and a Wall Street boyfriend. She’s also a truly rotten friend, profoundly depressed, and unbearably tired. So she runs a mad experiment to sleep as much as possible for a year. She accomplishes this by finding a dodgy psychiatrist willing to prescribe her a mountain of various psychotropic drugs.
Fueled by the drugs and occasional visits to the corner store for milk and ice cream, she lives her year.
I waited forever to read this book because I knew right away that I wouldn’t like the main character. But the book ended up earning one of my few 5 star reviews. Go ahead, take the risk!
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
Like Sadie, Janina is also a lone wolf with a dark streak.
She spends her dark winter days brooding, translating William Blake and keeping an eye on the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw folks. To say that she’s an eccentric would be a vast understatement. She has a beef with the local hunters and a difficult relationship with her neighbor “Big Foot”. When he turns up dead, the local townspeople and police completely ignore her thoughts on the matter. The book is very atmospheric with pitch black humor and a lot of surprises. It won the Nobel…and for good reason.
Who is Vera Kelley, Rosalie Knecht
This choice is a straight up play for those of you who want more spies served with a hot slice of activism. But it’s less James Bond in a speeding car, and more of a slow burn character study.
Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. Despite her checkered youth, she ends up being recruited by the CIA and sent on a mission to Argentina to infiltrate a student group. Well, that doesn’t go so well, and after a miliary coup and some betrayals, Vera finds herself on a wild ride trying to escape Argentina.
More Book Club Guides with Thriller Elements
Creation Lake Book Club Questions and Discussion Guide
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The Frozen River Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide
