Good Reader, Bad Reader: A Book for Both?
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner, 2024)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
Readers of this year’s Booker shortlist may well get to Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake and think, “one of these things is not like the other.” While Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and Anne Michaels’ Held explore the beauty of humanity and the power of love, and Percival Everett’s James rewrites Huckleberry Finn to leave Jim free and empowered, Creation Lake is much more cynical, exploring the darker aspects of the human condition and the world we live in.
Creation Lake also stands out among the rest of the Booker nominees because of its genre. Kushner’s novel is a mystery/thriller, placing it squarely in the realm of “genre fiction” that critics and scholars so often see as less than literary. In Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), Merve Emre claims that after World War II, two things happened to reading in the U.S.: first, literary studies became more formalized within the academy due to the rise of charismatic critics like Vladimir Nabokov, F.O. Mathiesen, and Edward Said. Secondly, general reading outside of the academic setting became more commodified due to the rise of genre fiction (mystery, romance, fantasy, etc.) and the increase in commercial reading enterprises like the Book of the Month club.
Emre tongue-in-cheekily labels the former type of reader as “good” and the latter as “bad.” She notes that “good,” trained readers read as if they are separate from the realities of politics, economics, and commerce, focusing on the text in a vacuum. On the other hand, “bad” readers “read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens”—their reading blends into the reality of the everyday. As a prolific professor of English and writer for The New Yorker, Emre is by all definitions a member of the “good reader” class, but through Paraliterary, she argues that, in the twenty-first century, “we must proudly claim the bad readers as our own if we wish to make claims about reading at all” (16). Twenty-first-century scholars are making strides toward this, as analyzing literature through cultural and political lenses is now commonplace in the academy. However, whether works of genre fiction like Creation Lake can be fully accepted as worthy of this type of analysis remains to be seen in some circles.
The tenuous exclusion of genre fiction in literary studies persists in part because notions about what makes a “good” versus a “bad” reader still seep into our perceptions of what makes a book “literary.” Crime novels have not often been seriously considered for the Booker Prize—In 2010, British academic, author, and two-time Booker Prize judge John Sutherland said that submitting a crime novel for the prize was “like putting a donkey into the Grand National.” And yet, since 2010, a small variety of murder mystery and thriller books have been both long- and shortlisted for the Booker, including Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet in 2016 and The Trees by Percival Everett in 2022. And, in 2022, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a murder mystery, won the prize. Even so, as Emre argues, books in this genre are often seen more as light, escapist reading rather than heavy-hitting literary material.
Part of what makes a mystery novel so appealing to the “bad” reader is that there are certain conventions most authors follow. There is usually an abnormally gifted detective, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. The audience is often allowed very little insight into the inner life of this character—their mystique contributes to the plot development. The detective is also usually working around the shortcomings of an inept police department. Of course, what is perhaps the most important of these conventions, and likely much of the reason mystery novels are so popular today, is that they end well. Readers can expect that, even with a story’s intense twists and harrowing close calls, their hero will come out on top. The “good” will always win over the “bad.” This straightforward morality makes the mystery genre incredibly digestible for light bedtime reading, but also makes it difficult to approach as a “good” reader.
Creation Lake, though, bears little similarity to today’s popular murder mystery. For one, while the novel’s protagonist “Sadie Smith” is certainly mysterious (her real name is never revealed), she is not particularly gifted at her job. We find out that one of her previous assignments was not successful, and she was fired by the FBI. She now does freelance work. Her latest contract is to infiltrate a communist enclave of supposed ecoterrorists in rural France called Le Moulin. And, unlike the plots of most mystery novels, her project is not to solve a recent killing or theft, but instead to figure out what exactly her employers want her to do.
Initially, the only information Sadie has is that she needs to find the founder of the commune, a mysterious man named Bruno. Sadie has been intercepting Bruno’s emails for a while, but she can’t yet locate him, so she enters a feigned romantic relationship with Lucien, a close friend of Pascal Balmy, one of the more present leaders of Le Moulin who will hopefully lead her to Bruno. This relationship leads to an invitation to their village from Pascal, where she can conveniently stay in Lucien’s family’s summer home. Once she arrives, Pascal quickly entrusts her with the project of translating the community’s manifestos, giving her ample access to the society’s inner workings.
While all this sets Sadie up well professionally, personally, she is spiraling. Living under an alias, it seems she has no real connection to her true identity and spends many of her nights drinking or taking pills to help her sleep. And her vices don’t end there—she also gratuitously enters into an affair with Rene, another leader of Le Moulin, and she completely trashes Lucien’s family’s house because she knows that in a few days, she will move on and never see Lucien, or anyone else in the village again. She also falsely accuses Lucien’s uncle of sexual harassment to keep him and Lucien’s aunt from dropping by their summer home while she is there. Conventions of the genre might prime readers to expect Sadie to be a particularly moral and conscientious character, but Sadie moves through these decisions with little to no emotion, often making it difficult to tell if she is really one of the “good guys” or not.
Le Moulin itself is morally grey as well, especially as Sadie discovers the distance between the community’s ideals and how those ideals play out in reality. The town was set up to function as a perfect commune, where everyone shares their resources equally. For example, there is a childcare facility that runs on the expectation that all members of the community will willingly look after the children occasionally, relieving parents so that they can both work and raise kids. However, as Sadie notices, “the old division of labor between men and women reasserts itself when people attempt to live in a commune” —in reality, it is only the mothers of the children in the daycare who “volunteer” their time to watch them (246). Additionally, this idealist society is not immune to ostracizing nonconformists. Sadie befriends a local misanthrope named Nadia in her efforts to locate Bruno. Nadia has been shunned from her society because her vision of the commune’s purpose differs from Pascal’s, and she now lives out of her car on the fringes of the village, disallowed from participating in the benefits of communal living.
But perhaps the greatest evidence of the differences between idealism and reality in the novel is in the character of Bruno. Sadie and the reader never actually meet Bruno physically—we only get excerpts of emails that Sadie intercepts, many of which wax poetic about the differences between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. As revealed in his emails, Bruno is obsessed with the idea that Neanderthals were better equipped to create a just society than Homo Sapiens are. When writing about the discovery of fire, Bruno says “Man, bland and featureless in this myth, lacking his own special trait, was condemned, instead, to ingenuity, to being a devious little bastard” (24). In his estimation, it is this ingenuity that has led to competition, the source of all the problems he sees associated with late-stage capitalism—“the use of fire for harm instead of good seems to have taken hold, suspiciously and damningly, just as the Neanderthals began to disappear and Homo Sapiens rose up, an interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with” (25). Bruno takes his reverence of the Neanderthal to the extreme, as we later find out that, like the embodiment of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, he now lives in a remote cave, convinced that retreating from modern society to Le Moulin is no longer enough to escape the “world we’re stuck with.” Sadie eventually locates this cave, but once she gets there, she cannot find Bruno—she only briefly interacts with his son.
Shortly after her failure to locate Bruno, the novel comes crashing to an end when Sadie finally realizes the true purpose of her mission. There is an agricultural fair coming up near Le Moulin that Pascal and the Moulinards plan to disrupt, as much of their activism centers on the idea that industrialized farming is the source of many of the world’s problems. Sadie finds out that a local charismatic political leader named Paul Platon will be visiting the fair and comes to the realization that assassinating him has been her employer’s goal all along—they would rather a fringe group be blamed for neutralizing him than themselves. Sadie needs to help convince the Moulinards to carry out the killing. In a rare display of conventional morality, Sadie feels uncomfortable with this idea. But when she demands that her employer pay her far more than she has ever charged for a contract before and they come up with the money, she continues in her plot to turn the community against Platon.
The twists and turns Kushner offers as the events of the agricultural fair reach their climax provide enough intrigue to satisfy any “bad” reader. But, Creation Lake is most strikingly different from other novels in the mystery genre its untidy ending. After the events unfold, Kushner’s outlook on humanity appears bleak—neither Sadie’s employers, nor the Moulinards, nor Sadie herself can be considered fully on the side of the “good” in this situation. In this way, Creation Lake is easier to approach as a “good” reader than many mystery novels—there are many more layers to unravel. And, the intrigue, particularly toward the end of the novel, also makes it easy to approach this book as a “bad reader.” Perhaps Kushner’s attempt to serve both camps also makes her less effective in both, but Creation Lake still offers thought-provoking insight on human nature, the power of the good, and the complexity of morality.
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
