Does Rachel Kushner's Latest Book Work as a Novel?

Does she care?

This essay will appear in Issue 6 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Creation Lake: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

Scribner, 416 pp., $26.05

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In his Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes that in times of war, the real fight has almost nothing to do with soldiers in trenches staring across no-man’s land at each other. The true battle is the clash between the soldiers and the military policemen on their own side, the soldiers’ desperate attempts to get out of the conflict and the military policemen’s sadistic efforts to stop them.

The clash between writer and critic is maybe less primal than that between grunt and military policeman, but not by much. What a critic (or, if we’re being real, some very high percentage of readers) is actually doing when he or she reads literary fiction is not looking to be entertained. What critics are up to has to do with the complex zone of envy, resentment, and vindictiveness between themselves and the book under review—and which is a review’s real subject. The writer of the book has already been chosen, already been placed on some kind of pedestal. The writer may have had earlier, well-regarded books. This newest book reaches the critic as if on a triumphant litter at the end of a long procession— proceeded already by the glowing blurbs, by the first round of reverential reviews.

The critic tries very hard to be open-minded. The critic—after all—is only a critic because of a life-long, excruciating love of reading. But the critic is also a writer—a writer almost always with less prestige than the writer who has the book under review —and the critic is wondering, above all else, why that should be the case, why the writer has the reputation that they do or whether there might be some cosmic error afoot. The critic is perfectly willing to find and acknowledge some new masterpiece—part of what the critic is inwardly prepared to do as they start a book is to render obeisance to someone who proves themselves a better writer than they are. But that’s really not what the critic is itching to do as the starting-gun goes off—what the critic is hoping for is for the acclaimed writer to make a fool of themselves, for the acclaimed writer to show him- or herself to the world (with the critic’s assistance) to be an overrated hack. In his heart of heart, the critic’s ultimate desire is for the book to be a failure.

In that sense, Creation Lake was, for me, an immensely satisfying experience.