THE LONG CON

Rachel Kushner's anti-spy, anti-realism novel.

- ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

The narrator of “Creation Lake” (Scribner), Rachel Kushner’s new novel, is the pseudonymous Sadie Smith, a thirty-four-year-old American who specializes in infiltrating tight-knit groups of rebels, radicals, and subversives. She has penetrated a criminal biker gang and attempted to entrap eco-anarchists committed to animal liberation. Her current mission has landed her in France, where she is tasked with surveilling an anarchist commune called Le Moulin, in the southwestern region of Guyenne. The Moulinards farm; they raise their children collectively; and, though the government cannot yet prove it, they are suspected of sabotaging local infrastructure in order to cripple—or at least hobble—the capitalist state. Six months before the novel’s action begins, five costly excavators that were being used to dig a “megabasin,” a huge, plasticlined reservoir intended to store water for the industrial production of corn, were found burned in a presumed act of arson. “Between Boulière and Tayssac I had seen this corn, vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon,” Sadie observes. The Moulinards deplore such environmental degradation—one of their goals is to “rewild” the surrounding ecosystem—but Sadie is unbothered. She’s a mercenary, unfreighted by qualm or scruple. She doesn’t even know the identity of the shadowy “contacts” who have hired her— only that they are paying her well.