Sadie Your Anxiety is Showing: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

I was just reading an article about how today’s college students don’t have the attention span to complete an assigned book — a piece of classic literature — whose only fault is that it runs longer than 220 characters. And all I can think is how lucky I am to have embraced an early and voracious love of reading. Because without it, I’d miss out on work like “Creation Lake.“

Rachel Kushner’s latest (and the first I’ve ever read by her) is a contemplative, artfully designed character study into the moral ambiguity of a female spy/professional shitstirrer and the evolving personal ideals of an environmental anarchist.

I picked this up primarily based off the advance hype, and because I wanted to say I actually read more than one award-nominated book. The short review is that it delivers — spy infiltrates an eco-commune in an attempt to subvert their activities and, oh maybe get them to kill someone.

The spy, also known as Sadie Smith, serves the private sector as an infiltrator for hire, and readers find her in southern France, sidling up to the Moulinards, a back-to-nature commune living off the land with the barest of minimum modern conveniences, led by Pascal Balmy, himself a follower of the musings of Bruno Lacombe, the elder statesmen of a movement that lauds the lifestyle of early man. As in Neanderthal. REALLY early man.

Bruno’s emails have been hacked by Sadie, who, while I wouldn’t quite say has fallen under his spell, definitely reads more into them than the audience he intends them for — Pascal and his crew.

Sadie’s psyche is also under attack from her own anxiety-ridden machinations about her last assignment as a Fed — and a resulting botched prosecution that resulted in her targets ultimately going free. Having been wronged, those one targeted are now targeting her for financial retribution.

It also doesn’t help that her very profession requires her to betray nearly everyone with whom she comes into contact, going so far as feign love or threaten revenge. It’s a job that takes its toll, and Sadie numbs with copious amounts of alcohol and general disdain for her environment.

The care with which Kushner tends to Sadie’s eventual transformation is worth the read alone, but I also throughly enjoyed Bruno’s ever-evolving thinking about man’s relationship to nature, and the thought-provoking pushback on widely accepted norms when it comes to that history as we learn it today.

“Creation Lake” isn’t something I may have selected on my own without the marketing supporting it, but its books like these that remind me I actually do love mysteries and thrillers and there’s a certain enjoyment I get from reading about characters that are so completely different from me. And it’s certainly deserving of all the honor it’s receiving. It moves at a great pace and keeps readers engaged throughout with an exceptional cast of characters. If this was ever to turn into a Netflix series, I feel like there’s an entire backstory treatment we could get on Burdmoore. Yowza.

Thanks, Sadie. Thanks, Bruno. I’ll be looking for Polaris tonight.