Rachel Kushner
I have often thought there was something more classical in the simplicity of having a single novel narrator rather than an ensemble. But with all three of my prior novels, I was dealing with worlds as much as I was with characters, and a single consciousness would constrain the enterprise, reduce it. Although in this case, even if there is only one narrator, there are actually two storytellers; it’s just that one is fitted inside the other, and it’s not even clear to me that Sadie is the main character, even as she has a monopoly and speaks in the first person. The letters from Bruno Lacombe that she is transposing for the reader put her at his service and he is, to me, the heart of the book and its presiding spirit. From the very first sentence, it’s him speaking — not her.
In terms of developing Sadie, whose name is a temporary alias over the six weeks we know her, I had planned that Creation Lake would be told by an American woman, but for a long time I didn’t have a sense of who that woman was. I’m familiar with the part of France where I set the book, and with the milieu of the militants who’ve developed a kind of hermetic commune, Le Moulin, in a remote village: the political reference points, the scene, socially and historically, a desire to tap into a certain spirit of resistance in “La France Profonde.” I had a place and a situation, a rural commune on a collision course with the French state.
With the character of Bruno Lacombe, I had a mentor who has retreated from the long twentieth century into a kind of primitivism, who is composing sermon-like emails about revolutionizing consciousness and looking to the deep past for indications of where to go. But with the narrator, it took longer to figure out who she was. Making her someone who shows up at Le Moulin hopeful of finding her place, of fitting in,…
Auteur: Rachel Kushner
