March: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

For March, we'll be reading Creation Lake, a novel by Rachel Kushner. As usual, don't feel you can't come if you don't finish or even read the book, but do keep your RSVP up to date if you can't make it.

Location: Moscow on the Hill on Selby in St. Paul

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.