In Rachel Kushner’s New Novel, a Spy Infiltrates the Left

Review of Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner, 2024)

In the late 1970s, when Michael Bettaney, a fascist sympathizer who made the familiar British journey from Oxford to MI5, was pulled over. Drunk and out of sorts, he is reported to have told officers: “You can’t arrest me, I’m a spy.” Drunkenness and antisemitism made Bettaney especially qualified for the intelligence service. He rose within its ranks even after his sudden conversion to communism; after evangelizing about its virtues to his colleagues, he was promptly promoted to the Soviet desk. It was only pilfering government documents to send to the other side that eventually got him the sack.

The protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, is free of the ideological confusions that plagued Bettaney. Sadie Smith, our hero’s alias, was at the center of a plot to entrap a young man from an activist grouplet with promises of romance. Thrown under the bus by the FBI, Sadie works as a spy for hire, sleuthing leftist groups across Europe.

In her attention to history and politics, Kushner reprises themes found in her earlier work. Telex from Cuba (2008), her debut, was set in Oriente Province in the lead-up to the revolution. Granular in its focus on the country’s social classes, history, and dramatis personae, Kushner’s novel sprung out of an ethos that continues to underly her subsequent work: in her novels, equal attention is paid to the political and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. She followed Telex from Cuba with The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018), books whose subjects were Italy’s red years and mass incarceration from the vantage point of a woman’s prison in the United…