A New Series: One Minute Reviews of
Books by Vermont Authors
Laura's column "One Minute Reviews" has appeared bi-weekly in Wilmington, Vermont's Deerfield Valley News since 2015. In April 2018, she found that no Vermont periodical consistently reviews all commercially published fiction and non-fiction by Vermont authors, so she started a series to fill that void. Published reviews from that series and some earlier reviews of local authors are listed with links to a scan of the printed copy. Reviews still in queue are listed without links until they appear in print.
The books reviewed in this series are available through Wilmington's Pettee Memorial Library, the Whitingham Free Public Library, and locally owned Bartleby's Books in Wilmington.
Deerfield Valley News, 10/10/2024
A spy story and reflection on eco-terrorism
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake. Scribner, 2024
Creation Lake ingeniously interweaves a spy story, a reflection on eco-terrorism, and a symbolically rich comparison of Neanderthal man with homo sapiens in her fourth novel. It’s an amazing achievement.
The spy who narrates the tale is “Sadie Smith,” a good-looking, cold-blooded, savvy 34-year-old American woman who, after being fired by the CIA for an unsuccessful framing attempt, is now working for unnamed private “Contacts” who have sent her to the [fictional] Guyenne district in Southern France. The Contacts remain anonymous—perhaps even to Sadie—but they clearly have financial interest in the agribusiness that is pushing out the historic area’s small farms and establishing monocrop conglomerates. The monocrops require irrigation; the conglomerates are bent on supplying it by creating huge plastic-lined megabasins filled with water siphoned from the lakes, rivers and—above all—the ancient caves and caverns for which the area is famous.
Local farmers, and most visibly, a farming cooperative called le Moulin, have actively protested the commercial attempts; six months before Sadie was hired, five expensive megabasin excavators near the commune were set on fire. Paul Platon, a minor security agent of the region’s Ministry of Rural Coherence, has been ineffective at defending corporate interest. Sadie’s job is to discredit Platon, and simultaneously to infiltrate le Moulin and prove that its leader, Pascal Balmy, is guilty of leading the sabotage.
The book is divided into eight sections, roughly following Sadie’s progress, but its short chapters juxtapose the present and the past, for Sadie’s matter-of-fact descriptions of her machinations merge with her memories of betrayals she performed in her previous assignments. Several chapters also reach into the more distant past, as Sadie reads the (hacked) emails that le Moulin’s founder, Bruno Lacombe, sends to the Moulinards. Bruno, one of the primary Paris radicals of the 1968 risings, later retreated to the country, and subsequently, after a personal tragedy, became what the present communards term “an anti-civ.” The retreat has been literal—to the underground caves that sheltered pre-historic man. After long periods experimenting with the skills of the region’s earliest people, he comes to believe that the evils of capitalism can be undone only if “we go back to where we went wrong,” more than hinting that the problem started when the large-faced Neanderthals were supplanted by homo sapiens.
One of the great pleasures of reading the novel is the splendid contrast between Bruno’s scholarly, earnest, gentle emails about the “transmission” of the local past (both pre-historical and more recent) to the present, and Sadie’s caustic acceptance of a stand-alone present, where “the real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants,” and one simply shrugs off the knowledge that lives may be destroyed in order to make a living. But gradually, Sadie realizes that Bruno has somehow “insinuated himself” into her thoughts. That’s an inconvenience to somebody who is orchestrating an action sure to result in hundreds of arrests, discredit protest against powerful interests, and ruin the lives of people she knows. What will happen? Only an author of exceptional skill could bring a book this rich in plot, philosophy and narrative voice to a close this unexpected; but Rachel Kushner does it well.