It’s little wonder that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake made it onto numerous “Best Books of 2024” lists. Through the voice of Sadie Smith, a mercenary spy, we’re told of her infiltration into a farming commune in southwestern France. As with Sadie’s real name, her employer is unknown. But it’s clear that clandestine corporate interests view this commune as a major threat to large-scale agribusiness expansions. Regardless, it’s not the spy craft that elevated this novel to critical acclaim. It’s the uniqueness and depth of Kushner’s writing. Kushner primarily delves into two characters, taking us inward and—at times—back tens of thousands of years.

We know this much about Sadie: she’s 34, a Berkeley PhD dropout in rhetoric, and a former (fired) FBI agent. She’s also quite the user of people. To be fair, a spy is a user by trade. But it feels different with Sadie. It’s as though she disdains the subjects she manipulates simply because they are so easily manipulated. Sadie feels little remorse, for she believes most people are poseurs of some sort when they adopt their own respective identities. “People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could even be said that they are no longer pretending.” In this instance, the group Sadie pretends to join is known as the Moulinards.

Sadie’s contacts point her to a Parisian (Lucien) who is old friends with an influential commune leader. Within a matter of months, Sadie and Lucien are living together, moving her closer to the commune. It’s yet another easy exploitation, for she already knew Lucien “believed he deserved to fall in love.” At the same time, she accesses the email account of the Moulinards’ spiritual leader, Bruno Lacombe.

For a cult to exist, it must orbit an individual who alone possesses “the truth.” As with many cult leaders, Bruno rejects civilization, known among the activist communities as an “anti-civver.” Bruno in fact doesn’t even live with the Moulinards. He spends most of his time in a cave, worshiping a failed species: the Neanderthals, or Thals, as Bruno calls them. Ostensibly, Bruno steps out of the dark long enough to occasionally use his daughter’s computer, sending missives to the group on what he’s gleaned down in the deep.

Bruno laments the world that was lost when the Neanderthals went extinct. Because we know—and live—how the human drama is playing out, the Neanderthal world is a tabula rasa for Bruno, and for anyone who wants to cleanse their mind of commodified images. This deprogramming takes place underground, by the “modalities and visions that darkness” promises.

Sound ridiculous? Of course. It’s ready-made to mock. But does Kushner give it depth nevertheless? That she does.

As Sadie winds her way closer to the Moulinards, Kushner not only returns to Bruno’s disquisitions, but to the life traumas that sent him into darkness. After surreptitiously reading Bruno’s emails, Sadie questions whether the commune’s inhabitants actually understand and deserve Bruno’s insights. Such questions are not part of Sadie’s mission, of course. But, then again, you don’t have to be a spy yourself to see that she’s at risk of losing control.

Still, Sadie performs her role well, eliminating potential threats to her mission by offering preemptive threats, as she does to an older French man who questions her identity. Her return threat leaves him looking “dejected and childish, like I had just taken something that belonged to him, and broken it, and handed it back.” However, when traveling by high-speed train through the countryside and becoming startled by the sudden appearance of another high-speed train traveling from the opposite direction, we know it means more than Sadie being startled. A reckoning is afoot.

One early morning, Sadie looks outside and says, “For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.” We can substitute “Sadie” for “dawn” in that sentence. With Sadie, how long can she keep these disappearing acts up?

There’s piercing intelligence in Kushner’s writing. It’s not just her crackling writing style, where a hill left devoid of trees via logging looks “like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.” Kushner writes Sadie as a scary smart individual who knows there are always sectarians among radicals, where a division can be made that will kill the whole.

It’s clear to Sadie that the existence of a charismatic leader speaks more to what the followers need to believe than what the leader is saying. Taken further, it’s why people are so credulous of the fantastical. Cryptozoology endures because people want to believe that there’s evidence of the unexplained. Why are there still Bigfoot sightings? It’s because people want to believe in Bigfoot. Even Bruno concedes as much.

The questions Bruno elicits within Sadie are more complicated. To be sure, Bruno’s theories at least point to a fossil record. After that, it’s a whole lot of conjecture. But, in the end, we’re not really talking about Neanderthals. To Sadie, it’s like waking up in the middle of the night and confronting your true self. “When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.” It’s “the four a.m. reality of being.”

It’s fitting that Bruno exists only to Sadie through his writing and that he doesn’t even know of her existence. When orchestrated events arrive and things become tense with the Moulinards, Sadie—detaching, as always—says to herself, “You people are not real to me. No one is.” This could have been just as easily said by Bruno. In many ways, it’s time for Sadie to step into her own metaphorical cave.

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Review by Jason Sullivan

Hernán Cortés meeting Moctezuma in 1519 holds some space in our North American imagination. Two trajectories of human development—long separated by time and distance—crossed in Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. For many, it symbolizes the beginning of the end, the Old World commencing its dominion in the New World. Imagine the meeting: European steel and gunpowder entering the dominant empire in Mesoamerica. We can almost feel the tension five centuries later.

In You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue has a reimagining for the ages. Yes, it foretells the eventual clash between Spanish conquistadors and a sophisticated city. But most of the novel reads like the most awkward of weekend getaways between two groups of people trying to understand what in the blazes is going on. It’s often comedic, taking the reader on a delightful, almost hallucinogenic flight.

We first find Cortés and a few of his men as dinner guests of Moctezuma’s retinue. One conquistador, never having experienced the deliciousness of chocolate, wants to down the frothy cacao drink that was served. However, the Tenochtitlan priest seated next to him—”his teeth filed sharp as a cat’s”—has him more than a little unnerved. More than anything, it’s the nauseating stench of coagulated blood from the priest’s cape made of human skin.

The fact that the Spaniard is not eating his soup is becoming an issue. Moctezuma’s priests are whispering. Cortés shoots the soldier a reproachful look, like a parent silently scolding a child with a flash of the eyes: Eat! The soldier finally imbibes, prompting a comrade to raise his cup of chocolate at his countrymen, as if to say, “Looking good, Spain.”

Moctezuma leaves others to deal with the Spaniards. He’s deep within the palace complex, self-medicating with psychedelic mushrooms. His depressed malaise is crippling. He’s always having to solidify power and find opposing warriors to sacrifice in the temples. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. And it’s not as though the “testy gods” are appreciative, what with their “blithely doling out droughts, earthquakes, defeats, and invasions.” Now, here are these Spaniards, these “bearded ones.” So Moctezuma lies down. “The Silence his nap demanded was imperial.” All things within the palace become hushed. When he wakes, he rings a royal bell, its peal waking “a whole world” just before he returns to sleep.

The conquistadors are left to wander the impressive and disorienting palace complex. With its many canals, one soldier remarks that it’s like Venice. Another responds, “It’s like Venice, but in hell.” The palace is so silent and empty it feels as though they’re “strolling along the seafloor.” Every day is like a Sunday, says another. Meanwhile, the soldier charged with stabling the horses is having some difficulty in finding suitable accommodations. The problem, of course, is that horses are just as new to the area as the Spanish.

Are they guests, or are they prisoners? They don’t know. There is, nevertheless, the feeling that they are getting away with something. Could they ever get this close to the Spanish crown? Of course not. But look at them now, even if they do feel idiotic marching through this heat and humidity in helmets and breastplates. In fact, when comparing their attire with Moctezuma’s warriors’ headdresses representing their guardian animals, the Spanish crested helmets seem “about as majestic now as a bagpiper’s bonnet.”

Tlilpotonqui, the mayor of Tenochtitlan, at times comes across as an overworked concierge. When Moctezuma beacons, go he must. He’s had it up to here with everyone and everything. We can imagine him trying not to get caught rolling his eyes when has to listen to He Who Looses the Rain of Words and Governs the Songs Lest We Be Like the Flowers and Bees That Last But a Few Days sing—once again —the “interminable” Legend of the Suns.

Excessive rumination is not something that burdens Cortés. We know from history that Cortés was positively awful. And he’s dreadful here too. If there is one thing that burns inside Cortés, it’s his quest for gold. It’s purported that Cortés said to Moctezuma’s representatives, “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.”

Eventually, Moctezuma—fully sated on magic mushrooms—emerges. Here he is, the mighty ruler of the “fear-producing machine” that is Tenochtitlan. And what happens? He and one of his priests hear a T.Rex song from the 1970s and start dancing about.

Absurd? Yes, of course. But there’s Borgesian magical realism in play here, especially toward the end of the novel. If that’s not exactly your literary bag, perhaps it may help to know that this novel is rather svelte, coming in at just over 200 pages. And, really, when capturing the peculiarity of this time and place, magical realism offers its own illuminative qualities.

Cortés and his men weren’t the first Spaniards to reach Mesoamerica. It was already known among many Mesoamericans that these “foreigners were ordinary men, but when there were many of them they became terrifying.” So it’s no wonder that in Enrigue’s incantatory novel, he has Moctezuma asking Cortés to just stop, to join him, and to “dream now.” It all “doesn’t last, like flowers.”

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan