Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

I read this because it is short listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and it was not my favorite book that I read on that list. The author is an excellent one, and her previous book is on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, so it is entirely possible that I did not get this book and that others might enjoy it more than I did. This is a bit of a spy thriller, but the tension level is not what you would expect if you are a reader of that genre. Bruno Lacombe, in his youth an ally of the 1960s revolutionary intellectual Guy Debord, is now self-exiled to a cave complex in the limestone regions of southern France. The caves vanished inhabitants obsess him (as they do me, if the truth be told) and that is a side note in the book. Since the Neanderthal extinction, “the wedge between human beings and nature” has become “far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth century life”. The left, he believes, needs to properly understand this--this is not my personal obsession. Mine has to do with the deep and ancient motivation that man has to make art, and how that connects us across cultures and across millennia. Meanwhile, shadowy French authorities have decided that Lacombe and the Moulinards – the post-Debordian eco-commune he mentors by email – need to be steered out of their less than utopian rural domesticity and towards some act of serious terrorism, so they can be dealt with. So they hire Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate and provoke an outrage. The situation Sadie finds on the ground is confused and intersectional, centered on a real-life green issue: the diversion of local water supplies into vast “mega-basins” to support corporate agribusiness projects at the expense of the local farmers and the environment. Actors within and without the Moulinard commune, less in bad or good faith than in something shifting constantly between the two, all have their motives for protest or intervention. Suffice it to say the agitation gets somewhat bogged down and the spy is not the charmer you might hope her to be. I am interested to talk with someone who loved this book to see what I missed.