The Secret Agent

On November 11, 2008, 150 police officers surrounded the tiny village of Tarnac, in central France. They had come to arrest members of a small leftist commune that had been operating a farm, along with a general store and a bar, for the previous four years. The charge was terrorism, or rather being part of an “association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking”—in this case the use of iron rods to disrupt several high-speed rail lines in the area.

Industrial sabotage is a venerable French tradition; the rods had caused significant delays, but there had been no chance of anyone getting hurt. It quickly became clear that the Tarnac Nine—as the main suspects were known—had been taken into custody for another reason, namely that government officials believed they were behind a political tract called The Coming Insurrection, written by a group going by comité invisible, or the Invisible Committee.

Published in 2007, The Coming Insurrection is an anticapitalist, anarchist treatise that advocates for the formation of autonomous communities, or communes, as a means of building resistance to state power. It’s written in a punchy, confrontational style with no shortage of bons mots: “The economy is not ‘in’ crisis, the economy is itself the crisis.” “We are not depressed; we’re on strike.” “An authentic pacifism cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them….It’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are freed from the need to fire.” The book caught the attention of the American conservative pundit Glenn Beck, who held up a copy of it on his Fox News show. “It is a dangerous book,” Beck insisted. “Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them.”

Over in France, the Invisible Committee attracted the notice of Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology whom then president Nicolas Sarkozy had hired to help create a national security council. Bauer, a onetime consultant to Lafarge, the world’s largest cement manufacturer, discovered The Coming Insurrection on the shelves at the retail chain FNAC, which is a bit like finding Manufacturing Consent at Best Buy. He bought forty copies and mailed them to various intelligence professionals, thus kicking off a sting operation that led to the arrests at Tarnac and involved wiretapping and document forging as part of the effort to build the government’s case. It also involved using The Coming Insurrection as evidence of the group’s terrorist intent.

Nearly ten years later the Tarnac Nine were acquitted of the most serious charges. Julien Coupat and Yildune Lévy, two prominent members of the group, were convicted of refusing to submit to DNA testing. L’affaire de Tarnac is generally considered an embarrassment to France’s counterterrorism program, an absurd instance of government overreach and red-scare hysteria. However, as the poet Jean-Marie Gleize puts it in his 2011 collection Tarnac, un acte préparatoire (Tarnac, a Preparatory Act), the reality is far more foreboding. When books are used as “evidence of opinions” to incriminate their authors or readers, and when any relationship between two or more people, “even love or friendship,” can be said to constitute a gang or a cell, we are not seeing a democratic government take national security too far; we are seeing an authoritarian state show its true face. “It would be illusory,” Gleize writes, “to demand that this procedural regime be applied in/manners less broad or less brutal: it is designed to be/applied precisely as it is.”

When the trial at last concluded, the presiding magistrate, Corinne Goetzmann, declared: “Le groupe de Tarnac était une fiction”—the Tarnac group was a fiction. In Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner tells a story about a group very much like the Tarnac Nine, and about the spy-for-hire who infiltrates its ranks. The book is at once a thriller, a history of the French left, a survey of academic theories about the prehistoric age, and a philosophical novel about human nature. It is also a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral.

The narrator of Creation Lake goes by the alias Sadie Smith. She is a freelance secret agent who works for governments and corporations, and she specializes in entrapping left-wing activists. A recent assignment for the FBI did not turn out as planned, and Sadie has a lot riding on her current mission. That mission is to gain the trust of Pascal Balmy, the leader of a group of French anarchists who run a commune called Le Moulin, made up mostly of former graduate students from Paris plus a few hangers-on. Le Moulin lies in the Guyenne, in southwestern France. There its members farm (not very well), take care of their children (not very well), and (more successfully) help run a small bar in town.

Meanwhile Sadie is also supposed to bring about the demise, one way or another, of the unpopular politician Paul Platon, Spanish by birth and France’s deputy minister of “rural coherence.” (What the first task has to do with the second becomes clearer as the novel unfolds.) Some of these characters are based on real people. Platon, so obnoxious his own driver hopes he gets killed, is the spitting image of Manuel Valls, the gaffe-prone prime minister of France between 2014 and 2016 and, before that, the minister of the interior.

Pascal resembles Julien Coupat, the most high-profile member of the Tarnac Nine. Like Coupat, Pascal comes from a good bourgeois family—it’s his inheritance that purchased Le Moulin—and was once questioned in relation to the bombing of an army recruitment center in Times Square. Sadie reports that Pascal is sometimes compared to the radical French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, on whom Coupat wrote his dissertation. Both Coupat and Pascal have Debord’s “signature hairstyle”—“short, even bangs over a high forehead.” As for the Moulinards, they’ve been involved in multiple acts of so-called ecotage, including the disruption of the TGV, France’s high-speed rail line.

Creation Lake is also populated by a cluster of minor characters. There is Sadie’s new husband, Lucien, who is Pascal’s old school chum, a filmmaker, and Sadie’s ticket to Pascal’s inner circle; Lucien’s aunt Agathe and uncle Robert, caretakers of the old farmhouse where Sadie sets up operations in the Guyenne; Nadia, a disgruntled former Moulinard; Françoise and Denis, veteran activists scorned by Pascal; Burdmoore, an American ex-con and a strange presence at Le Moulin; and Vito, the boyfriend of Lucien’s collaborator, Serge, and Sadie’s only friend. In the rearview mirror are Nancy and “the boy with the chin-line beard,” the targets of Sadie’s inglorious last sting, to whom her thoughts are often reluctantly drawn.

The novel’s center of gravity, however, is Bruno Lacombe, a once-prominent French radical and associate of Debord’s who lives, or so he says, underground, in a series of primeval caves beneath the forests of the Guyenne. Now in his seventies, Bruno first came to the region after becoming disillusioned with politics following the student uprisings of 1968. “None of these eruptions,” Sadie notes, “had resulted in the overthrow of capitalism in any of the advanced industrial nations of the entire European continent—not a single one.” “In the wake of the colossal failure of leftist revolt” Bruno moved to the countryside, convinced that capitalism could not be directly dismantled but instead had to be abandoned, and another way of life built outside and beyond it.

When Creation Lake begins, Bruno is the Moulinards’ unofficial guru, an “anti-civver” whose rejection of modern life inspires their own back-to-the-land brand of nonviolent ecotage. Despite having forsaken most forms of technology, he still has access to e-mail, which he uses to send Pascal and the group regular correspondence about human prehistory and his personal hobbyhorse, the Neanderthals. Drawing on a mixture of extensive scholarly research and intuitive conjecture, Bruno has decided that the Neanderthals were a superior life-form to Homo sapiens, that “interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with.” “Thal,” as Bruno calls him, was more creative and less violent than his genetic relative, modern man, who is currently hurtling “toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car,” his own “death drive” behind the wheel.

When Sadie, who has hacked into Bruno’s and Le Moulin’s e-mail accounts, begins reading his missives, she greets them with a professional skeptic’s hard-boiled indifference:

At first I wondered if these emails about the Neanderthal were a prank, as if Bruno had planted them for whoever had gained access to his account, to divert them from his actual correspondence with Pascal and the Moulinards.

Neanderthals, for Sadie, are “a species who, let’s face it, could not hack it, or they’d be here still, and they weren’t.” Gradually, however, Bruno gets to her. Eating some grapes by the side of the road, she remembers that Bruno “had said the old Occitan name for this region…was the Aguienne Neire,” neire meaning black and perhaps referring “to black walnuts and black grapes.” “Here I was,” she observes, “tasting these local grapes, as sweet as he claimed.”

Behind her growing sympathy for Bruno is a fact of which the Moulinards, to Sadie’s surprise, are unaware. To them, Bruno’s flight underground is simply an extreme application of his political principles, eccentric but admirable. Sadie knows something they don’t, which is that Bruno went to live in the caves only after the accidental death of his young daughter, crushed beneath the tractor Bruno was teaching her to drive. “In my cave,” writes Bruno, “I hear voices”—of ancient humans, of Cathars and other heretics hiding from persecution, of Resistance fighters “who retreated underground to hide from rampaging Germans”:

Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to get inside the monophony, to tease it apart. Eventually, you encounter an extraordinary polyphony. You begin to sort, to filter. You hear whispers, laughter, murmurs, pleas. There’s a feeling that everyone is here…. Suddenly you realize how alone we have been, how isolated, to be trapped, stuck in calendar time, and cut off from everyone who came before us.

“Bruno was some kind of lunatic,” the rationalist Sadie decides. “At the same time, I could not help but see his discussions of cave frequency as a naked expression of grief. He was down there looking for his dead daughter, convincing himself he heard her voice.”

Kushner doesn’t share Sadie’s desire to reduce Bruno’s political ideas to his personal tragedy. For her, ideas are no less real than feelings, abstract principles no less compelling than intimate attachments. Her previous full-length novels—Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room—are about the ways individual lives are constrained by historical forces much too large for anyone to grasp completely. These books are structured according to a belief that everything about our world—from how we dress to the jobs we work to the kinds of government we have—is to some extent determined by the time we live in and, more to the point, by the economic system specific to that time.

Karl Marx called this belief (or a version of it) historical materialism, and in his 1916 study The Theory of the Novel the Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács argued that works of art, too, have features that are exemplary of this or that era in the history of human society. In ancient Greece, Lukács said, people thought of themselves both as part of nature and as belonging completely to their communities. This has consequences for the way characters are presented in literature. Odysseus and Achilles have definite traits (smart and sneaky, hot-tempered), but they don’t seem like individuals with irreducibly rich interior lives.

By contrast, Jane Austen’s heroines or James Baldwin’s antiheroes remind us of ourselves because, like us, they feel alienated from the world in which they must live and act, and from other people too. They are isolated by and within their homes, their families, their jobs, their cities or towns, and, above all, their own heads. Their private thoughts are more tangible to them than anything having to do with society at large, even as they may try, desperately, to connect with others through love or activism or art or sex. For these characters, what Lukács calls “the outside world” remains inert. It acquires “life only when [it] can be related either to the life-experiencing interiority of the individual…or to the observing and creative eye” of the novelist herself.

This description serves pretty well when it comes to the modern American novel. Think of Don DeLillo’s Jack and Babette Gladney in White Noise, a husband and wife who remain radically disconnected from their environment and from each other, even as a toxic chemical spill threatens to obliterate any boundary between their bodies and the poisoned air. In White Noise, as in DeLillo’s greatest novel, Underworld, history itself is the main character, if by “history” we understand the mood or tone of a distinctive time and place—the pharmaceutical haze and suburban dissociation of the 1980s, the nuclear dread and crumbling innocence of the postwar period.

Kushner often cites DeLillo as an influence, but Creation Lake most clearly bears the imprint of a handful of European writers, including the Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini and the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The first chapter of Manchette’s 1976 novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (Three to Kill) begins, “And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now,” before launching into a description of Manchette’s protagonist, Georges Gerfaut, a middle-class nobody caught up in murder:

The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

In her introduction to a 2016 English translation of Balestrini’s We Want Everything, an electric account of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of workers’ strikes in 1969, Kushner observed that his narrators—who are often nameless—“are always one person speaking anonymously as a type.” Their “voices,” she continues,

have all the specificity of an individual—a set of attitudes, moods, prejudices, back stories, but they each speak in a way that exemplifies what life was like for a person such as them, in a moment when there were many like them.

Paradoxically, this anonymity works against the sense of alienation Lukács described—at least in the domain of literature. If capitalism creates a world in which human beings are violently atomized, cut off from one another by the daily demands of wage labor and the barriers of class society, the character who speaks at once for himself and for everyone like him represents the possibility of a world in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully, freely ourselves and part of a multitude of interdependent, mutually supportive lives.

Kushner’s characters often have an intentionally imprecise quality. Reno, the narrator of The Flamethrowers, is so named because she’s from Reno, Nevada, and while she is in many ways unusual—an art-school graduate who happens to be a skilled motorcyclist—there is a vagueness to her. “I was passing through,” she says at one point. “A girl who would be around every day for a spell, and then one day be gone.” When Reno is caught up in Italy’s uprisings of 1977, largely driven by the leftist Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy) movement, her passivity is turned toward radical ends. “I did not think of myself as someone who needed to make decisions,” she says. “I was, instead, one of the people in [an]…apartment where so many congregated…. I was part of the rage and celebration.”

Romy Hall, the protagonist of The Mars Room, is also importantly generic while still being skillfully drawn. A woman serving back-to-back life sentences for killing her stalker, she could arguably be any of us. While The Mars Room is a novel and not a polemic, it uses the rhetorical and imaginative powers of fiction to make an argument for prison abolition. As Kushner put it in an interview, when it comes to debates about mass incarceration, “focusing on the individual story is such a part of the liberal fantasy of our ‘broken system.’” The problem is not that sometimes the system punishes people who don’t deserve to be punished; the problem is the logic of punishment itself.

By making “one character,” say Romy or Reno, “a conduit through which a history can flow,” Kushner tweaks without wholly abandoning the conventions of realist fiction. She preserves the novel’s basic formal features—individuated characters, linear plot, a more or less stable narrative voice—while making them seem strange or unfamiliar. In this she represents an important trend within contemporary fiction. Like Éric Vuillard, Joseph Andras, Stephanie LaCava, and Ana Schnabl, she writes books that are intensely political without being didactic, and whose faintly hallucinatory quality mirrors the incomprehensibility and cruel distortions of the systems that control our lives.

Spy and detective novels, like all forms of genre fiction, thrive on the opacity of their characters, who are always more type than individual. What do we know about James Bond other than his small arsenal of flat habits (martinis, promiscuity, quips)? As Dashiell Hammett said of Sam Spade, he “had no original” but is rather “a dream man” reduced almost entirely to two things: being “a hard and shifty fellow” and a prolific drinker. Of Philip Marlowe, another lush, Raymond Chandler said he “just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.”

Sadie Smith is also no one person. She is, in a sense, no person at all. Her name is made up, and she likes to tell people that she’s from a place called Priest Valley, a real place in California with a population (she says) of zero. She’s in the habit of hinting to the reader that her breasts are fake, a piece of information that becomes a synecdoche for her sexuality. Whether she’s honey-trapping Lucien or falling into bed with the loutish René, one of the Moulinards, Sadie’s desires are always simulated, a means to an end and not a source of pleasure or joy. What she does like, however, is booze, and the more-than-occasional benzo. “I am a better driver after a few drinks,” she insists, “more focused.”

Sadie spends most of Creation Lake buzzed, but it never really affects her abilities. She is unforgivingly perceptive, with no patience for sentimentality. That doesn’t mean, however, that she has no morals. Sadie describes the cold facts of modern life—the life to which Bruno and the Moulinards so passionately object—without any editorial hand-wringing, almost as if they don’t bother her. But when we consider how fine-tuned her observations are and how wide an ambit of the world’s misery they include, we begin to understand what Manchette meant when he called crime fiction “the great moral literature of our time.”

In one early passage Sadie, who has pulled over by the side of the road to pee, offers a razor-sharp appraisal of contemporary Europe based on the sight of “a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.” “Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s ‘Europe,’” Sadie remarks. Despite what tourists believe,

the real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate…. The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors…. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.”

As for the orange panties, Sadie imagines they belonged to

a girl or woman fallen on hard times, not French, and without EU documents, stuck in a rural outpost, picking her way out to the main road in impractical high-heeled shoes of flesh-biting imitation leather, aloe in her purse for rapid-fire hand jobs…. The panties hanging on a bush in front of my face are a package of three for five euros at Carrefour. They are like Kleenex. You sweat or leak or bleed into them and then toss them on a bush, or in the trash, or you flush them and clog the plumbing, someone else’s plumbing, ideally.

At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive, Kushner’s prose here moves between global capital and hyperlocalized suffering, from Europe’s “giant grid” to the clear and present scene of what Sadie will come to call the “Tomb of the Unknown Hooker.” The paragraphs obviously indict a world “full of disposability,” but they are also just great writing: true, funny, sad, shrewd, and beautifully controlled through each unyielding sentence.

The mistreatment of women is a subtle but powerful current running through Creation Lake. When Sadie visits Le Moulin, she finds the Moulinards have created a society that seems far from revolutionary. The women on the commune are cooking and looking after children while the men discuss politics and tactics and work in the library. When Sadie confronts Pascal, he shrugs her off. It just happened that way, he says, and “we don’t have a magic solution.” Sadie later hears from Nadia, who says she was thrown out of Le Moulin for being too old and that Pascal is a womanizer particularly interested in young girls. “They talk about their supposed ethics,” Nadia sneers, “but none of it applies to him.”

The moral core of Creation Lake is Bruno, but it’s Sadie whose unblinkered gaze allows his vision to shine through both the posturing of the Moulinards and the grim canopy of the EU, with its windowless warehouses and treacherous rest stops. “Look up,” Bruno writes in one of his e-mails to Pascal and his associates. “The roof of the world is open.” Sadie, who likes facts, might put it a bit differently. She might say that the oldest hominids appeared on earth as early as seven million years ago, and this means that humanity is both very old and very young. Its story—wild, improbable, immense—isn’t over yet.