A Smart, Sinuous Espionage Thriller Brimming With Heat

CREATION LAKE, by Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” is set in rural France, but not the rural France of guidebooks and Peter Mayle memoirs. No one rhapsodizes over an escargot or a tarte Tatin. We’re in the country’s southwest, where the soil is rocky. More essentially, we are in what Kushner calls the proletarian “real Europe,” with vistas of “highways and nuclear power plants” and “windowless distribution warehouses.”

Kushner’s narrator is an American spy-for-hire. She’s 34, a dropout from a Berkeley Ph.D. program in rhetoric. She is working under an assumed name, “Sadie Smith,” that has unnecessary — for this reader — literary undertones. Sadie has come to this region to infiltrate a radical farming commune bent on violence.

Sadie is not, in the manner of a John le Carré character, longing to come in from the cold. She is already one of the coldest customers serious American fiction has seen in recent years. The isolation, the danger and the emotional hardships of her work (including unwelcome sex) roll off her shoulders. She likes what she does. She has a knack for it.

Biographical details about Sadie are scant, though the reader is made aware of two of her previous assignments. At 24 she infiltrated the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, where she was the “old lady” of an older man she put in prison. Later she convinced a troubled young man to buy 500 pounds of fertilizer for bomb making. When he was found innocent at trial due to entrapment, she was fired by the F.B.I. and went freelance.

I dislike plot description because it’s close to meaningless — everything I’ve said so far could apply to a bland Hulu drama series as well as to a sinuous and powerfully understated novel, which “Creation Lake” is — but here is a necessary bit more.

The farming commune is called Le Moulin. Sadie is well-read in the history of radical movements, but as she befriends the group’s key members, she imbibes their philosophies and absorbs the revisionist ideas that have been passed, like batons, down generations. The leader, Pascal, is a womanizer and a self-styled heir to the French Marxist theorist Guy Debord.