In “The Lake of Creation” by Rachel Kushner, we float, we tread water and then we drown

For her fourth novel, Kushner draws direct inspiration from Julien Coupat and the Tarnac group, whom she met during summers spent in France. Presented as a philosophical thriller by the American press, The Lake of Creation is unfortunately neither one nor the other, even if it is riddled with supposedly profound digressions on Neanderthals, Guy Debord, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and many others.

And all this, even before the heroine, a secret agent in the service of the Americans, has yet infiltrated the group she is supposed to monitor. Not his fault: it took him 120 pages (and a lot of implausibilities) to reach the South of France, where he is based, from Paris.

Kushner wants to tell us something, but what? If her aim – at least what we guess after a lot of effort – is to question the possibility of a left today and the notion of progress, she misses it by bloating her text with banal reflections. At best, we learn that Europe is not just an old-fashioned tea room, but that it is a free trade system that has disfigured the landscape.

The writing is either flat or pretentious; when her narrator takes two sleeping pills, it becomes: “So I had chemically subjugated my cortex by channeling it with two tiny pills.” Ah good.

The Lake of Creation by Rachel Kushner (Stock/“La Cosmopolite”), translated from English (United States) by Emmanuelle and Philippe Aronson, 480 p., 23.40 €. In bookstores January 8.