IN AN ESSAY INCLUDED in her 2021 collection The Hard Crowd, the novelist Rachel Kushner pays homage to the Italian writer Nanni Balestrini, whose work forced her to question the link she had previously drawn between “style and cynicism.” In her youth, she writes, she had “regarded a lack of nihilism as an artistic weakness,” reasoning that in order “to leave nothing sacred” one had to feel a certain “contempt for humanity.” But Balestrini’s novels convinced her otherwise; they seemed to derive their subversive power not from misanthropy but rather from “a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility.” This insurgent literature was rooted in the writer’s lifelong commitment to radical politics: He was a founding member of the leftist group Potere Operaio (“Workers’ Power”), and his celebrated novels We Want Everything (1971) and The Unseen (1987) emerged from his involvement in the revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. Incorporating testimony he had collected from the workers and activists he met in the movement, Balestrini recast the literary protagonist as “a speck in the multitude, a witness,” Kushner writes—“not a person receding from the crowd, but the anonymous political subject, scored with the knife of history.” Thus, she argues, he rejected the bourgeois novel’s traditional focus “on consciousness as distance, distinction, observation, or inner experience,” and with it the individualist ethos that undergirds the status quo. His fiction embraced an interest in the many rather than the chosen few.

Reading between the lines, one can glimpse some of Kushner’s own views on the novel: the idea that it possesses a special capacity to capture the unfolding of collective experience—or, as she put it in a recent interviewwith The Drift, quoting the literary theorist Fredric Jameson, that it constitutes “time’s relief map, its furrows and spurs marking the intrusion of history into individual lives or else its tell-tale silences.” The supposition that, to realize this potential, the author must strip away some of her characters’ selfhood to make room for the moments that transform their sense of reality. And the thesis that only then might the form animate the possibilities that are eclipsed in hindsight, dismissed when foreclosed as if they never were—a project that involves avoiding both the calcifications of nostalgia and the certainties of cynicism.

These beliefs shape Kushner’s own widely read and award-winning novels, Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018), and, most recently, Creation Lake (2024). Her characters are often ciphers who stumble into moments of historic uncertainty—people who are fundamentally anonymous even to themselves, and who become instruments of upheaval by virtue of their malleability. For instance, her debut, set during the Cuban Revolution, includes among its large cast of protagonists a weapons-running, allegiance-shifting French aristocrat who views revolt, regardless of its ideological bent, as “a luminous bubble” in which a shrewd person finds everything ripe for the taking. In The Flamethrowers, it is the very blandness of the young narrator known only by the nickname “Reno”—the everywoman status underscored by her “cake-box face” and all-American naivety—that allows her to blend into various scenes and subcultures, landing finally in the world of 1970s Italian radicals much like the ones Balestrini described. At a march in Rome that gives way to a violent riot, she witnesses a “kind of counterreality,” a suspension of ordinary order, encapsulated in the sole image she records on her camera, of a flock of rising white balloons. As Kushner’s characters lose themselves in the tumult, the reader, too, is invited to savor the impersonal, transportive energy of the crowd, the bite of the knife of history.

Kushner’s latest novel, Creation Lake, positions her most evasive protagonist to date at the site of another attempted rupture. Our narrator is a woman currently calling herself Sadie Smith, a secret agent who freelances for faceless masters of the universe, at what she’ll have us know are first-class rates. The year is 2013, and Sadie has been sent to the south of France to infiltrate a far-left commune, Le Moulin, whose members are suspected of sabotaging a state project that would destroy the region’s delicate ecosystem to serve the needs of corporate “megagrowers.” Her assignment is to find evidence of the Moulinards’ guilt or catch them in some new act of lawbreaking, even if she has to engineer it herself. Kushner has had a career-long fascination with questions of performance and authenticity—with the idea that identities are “things [one] does,” as she writes in Telex, “things [one] is by virtue of doing them”—and the figure of the spy pushes this thesis to its logical conclusion. Sadie can become anyone (a bleeding-heart activist, a hardened biker chick, or, for the purposes of this job, a grad school dropout adrift in France) because she recognizes that the self is an easily falsifiable construct; nobody is who they claim to be, or who they believe themselves to be at that. While all of Kushner’s characters share a certain swagger, Sadie proves superlative in this regard as well, boasting about her unerring instinct for exploiting others’ weaknesses, even or especially when benumbed by her own barely managed drinking problem. In her rare dalliances with introspection, she seems to be daring the reader to ask what kind of person could think such a thing, precisely so she can then refuse us an answer—as when she emphasizes her lack of remorse over entrapping a young eco-activist on terrorism charges, and her readiness to do it again.

Creation Lake, then, is one answer to Kushner’s own question about what happens when a novel rejects the premium on inner experience. But if Kushner does not reward the reader’s interest in Sadie as an individual, nor does she immerse us in the kind of multitude that is present elsewhere in her work. While her three prior novels contain multiple narrators, she confines herself this time to a single, sometimes suffocating point of view: Sadie is a relentlessly lonely protagonist, a woman who seeks to manipulate every person she interacts with across 400 pages. Kushner’s left-wing idealists turn out to be every bit as self-serving, and the lack of social connection in a novel ostensibly about a commune presents a kind of synecdoche for the absolute hollowness of every supposedly radical idea encountered here. This might seem to have the makings of an incisive critique of certain political subcultures, but the book stops short of becoming one: Kushner never takes the content of these leftist experiments seriously enough to suggest that one might learn from their failures; they register instead as validation of Sadie’s belief in the ugliness of everything. In its detachment, Creation Lake ultimately gives us cynicism as style, a world in which not only is nothing sacred, but everyone is deserving of ridicule. Its nihilism may reflect our political moment, in which a better future often seems out of reach, but it cedes the sense of possibility that animates Kushner’s other novels, proving far too airless to support the flicker of a counterreality.