Creation Lake

Kushner's narrator, an American operative working under the alias Sadie Smith, infiltrates a rural French commune of agrarian anarchists on behalf of clients whose actual motives stay deliberately blurry throughout. The novel runs two registers at once: a genre spy plot with real mechanical tension, and a much slower philosophical thread channeled through the commune's guiding intellectual, a reclusive theorist whose ideas about prehistory and human decline Sadie mines for information while half-seduced by them herself. That combination is also where the book divides readers, since the espionage plot's momentum occasionally stalls under the weight of the ideas sections, and the ending resolves less decisively than the spy-thriller architecture leads readers to expect. Kushner is playing against the genre's usual payoffs on purpose, which works better as a novel of atmosphere and voice than as a novel of plot.