Is a Writer a Kind of Spy?

Rachel Kushner had warned me that there might be snakes and one very mean turkey on the farm. There would also be mud; she recommended rubber boots. And, as far as she remembered, there was no cell service.

The property in Delaware County, N.Y., belonged to her cousin, who did not want to be named in this article but greeted me with a saxophone performance on the porch of a green cottage. Across the way was the house where Ms. Kushner, a novelist whose work often explores society’s gritty margins, was staying for a few days early this summer.

“I was weeding for hours and hours yesterday,” she said.

Everyone who visits the farm must work. Over the years, even garage-rock band members recording music in the barn’s grain elevator have traversed rows of root vegetables in their jeans.

Ms. Kushner, 55, was used to it: In her 20s, shortly after her cousin purchased the land, she helped rescue the guesthouse from “a state of total abandon” and lived there on the weekends for a while. Years later, when her husband, a professor, received a fellowship at Cornell University, they would visit often with their young son, who learned from Ms. Kushner’s cousin how to ride a tractor and catch fish.

More recently, the farm provided some inspiration for her fourth novel, “Creation Lake,” a sexy, noirish thriller about a 34-year-old American woman, a spy-for-hire, who infiltrates an eco-commune in the south of France.

Her mission is to disrupt the group’s plans to sabotage the French government’s efforts to bring corporate agriculture to the area, but she finds herself occasionally distracted by warm six-packs of beer, a mysterious cave-dwelling philosopher and a communard she seduces.