Oct. 8, 2024: ‘Bibi, What the F--k?’

Union Sq. protester: ‘You f—king Jew!’; New stats on youth gender surgeries; Harris speaks, sort of

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The Big Story

Last week, following Iran’s second direct ballistic missile attack on Israel, we mentioned what struck us at the time as unusually forceful rhetoric from the usual Obama-Biden apparatchiks: Here’s a report that Biden’s Lebanon envoy Amos Hochstein had encouraged the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; here’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan promising that Washington would work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran; here’s State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller calling the Iranian attacks “brazen and unacceptable” and defending Israel’s killing of senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. And look, here’s Vice President Kamala Harris telling 60 Minutes—in a clip that was cut from the interview that aired on television—that Iran was our “greatest adversary” and a country with “American blood” on its hands.

Finally, the Democratic Party is coming to its senses and standing up to the pro-Hamas radicals in its midst, right? Fake, fake, fake. 

The first hints came last week. As we reported on the day of the attack, the Israelis had informed the Iranians via back channels that any direct strike on Israel would provoke Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear or oil infrastructure. Last Wednesday, President Biden ruled out a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities but said he was “discussing” a potential Israeli strike on Iranian oil facilities. On Friday, he added that the oil facilities were off-limits, too. Which helped clarify Sullivan’s comment about Washington working with Israel to decide on “consequences”—i.e., that Washington will decide and that there will be no consequences. The Iranians—who, whatever their other faults, are smart enough to take a hint—duly announced Tuesday that an Israeli attack on a nuclear or oil target would cross a “red line,” thus teeing up the White House for more Kabuki about how its desperate efforts to save the Iranians, now exposed as a Potemkin power, are merely attempts to ward off a “regional war.” 

Also on Tuesday, Barak Ravid reported in Axios that the Biden administration was growing “increasingly distrustful” of what the Israeli government was sharing about its plans. The article included leaks from a call between Sullivan and top Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer, in which Sullivan reportedly threatened Dermer that if the Israelis didn’t provide “clarity and transparency” about their plans vis-à-vis the Iranians, the United States “wouldn’t automatically be on board” to defend Israel against another Iranian missile attack. (The irony of complaining about Israeli information-sharing while leaking the details of classified high-level conversations was apparently lost on these officials.) The article also noted that U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was “fuming” that the Israelis had not given him more notice about their plan to assassinate Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. As we reported last Monday, Israel had informed Washington of a previous plan to kill Nasrallah on Oct. 8, 2023. On that occasion, Biden called Bibi and ordered him to call off the strike. 

Also on Tuesday, the media published excerpts of a new book by Bob Woodward, War, which included snippets of Biden’s interactions with various world leaders, including Netanyahu. While our general rule is to believe about half of what Woodward writes, his account of Biden’s reaction to the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in July is nonetheless telling. Per The Times of Israel:

“Bibi, what the fuck?” yelled Biden in their next conversation. “You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor.”

At the time of his death, Shukr had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head for his role in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. On other occasions, according to Woodward, Biden referred to Bibi as “a fucking liar,” a “son of a bitch,” and “a bad fucking guy.” 

The Times reported Tuesday that Team Biden has “mounted a campaign” to take strikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure “off the table,” though it’s unclear whether Israel can or will hit Iranian nuclear facilities without U.S. support. At a campaign event on Friday, Donald Trump offered an opposing view. “That’s the thing you want to hit, right?” Trump said of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. “When they asked [Biden] that question, the answer should have been, ‘Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.’”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Marco Roth reviews Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s nihilistic novel of ideas for the Bushwick set

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The Rest

→We could do an entire edition on yesterday’s anti-Israel protests in New York City (and associated campus protests throughout the nation), which included …

• Pro-Hamas protesters disrupting a candlelight vigil for the Israeli hostages and harassing attendees

• Protesters physically assaulting—and bloodying the nose of—Democratic Majority for Israel board member Todd Richman

• Hundreds of protesters chanting “Allahu Akbar!” during a Muslim call to prayer in Madison Square Park

But our favorite moment was this exchange between protesters at the “Flood NYC for Palestine” protest at Union Square Park:

To recap, one protester (we’ll call him Socrates) yells, “You fucking Jew!” at pro-Israel counterprotesters, at which point a woman in a keffiyeh (we’ll call her Aristotle) says, “Dude, that’s not what this is all about.” Socrates—who is quite obviously a man—then explains, “I’m a Black woman, so don’t tell me nothing about it. … As a Black woman, without our rights, ya’ll wouldn’t have no fucking rights or even a word to say, so know your rights and know your history!”

We extend our heartfelt thanks to both of the debaters. Normally, you could only get this sort of nuanced, high-powered intellectual exchange at Columbia or some similarly elite institution. Now, thanks to the Gaza protests, us peasants can enjoy it for free. 

→Stat of the Day: 5,747

That is the minimum number of children in the United States who underwent “gender transition surgeries”—i.e., breast removal, breast construction, facial surgeries, or genital removal/reconstruction—between 2019 and 2023, according to insurance data obtained by the watchdog Do No Harm and reported by Laurel Duggan in UnHerd. These numbers broadly match the estimate from the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir of between 5,200 and 6,300 breast removal surgeries on female children from 2017 to 2023, which we reported on in August. But both estimates are likely undercounts, since they exclude both surgeries not covered by insurance and cases in which institutions either do not report the surgeries or use false billing codes to skirt state-level restrictions on youth gender care. 

As we reported in August, the existence of these surgeries was long considered right-wing “misinformation”; an August 2022 “fact-check” from PolitiFact, for instance, claimed that there were only two cases ever, in the entire country, of teenagers undergoing gender transition surgeries. Despite claiming that children never underwent such surgeries, however, the Biden administration quietly lobbied medical associations to expand children’s access to them. As we reported in the June 26 Big Story, internal documents and emails from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health revealed that Adm. Rachel Levine, Biden’s assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, pressured WPATH to drop its recommended age minimums for procedures including breast removal, uterus removal, testicle removal, and surgical construction of an artificial vagina using penile tissue. 

WPATH complied, despite internal pushback, but told the public that the age restrictions had been removed to “put the emphasis back on individualized patient care.” 

→Quote of the Day: 

A lot of disinformation is true and factual.

That’s former MI6 agent and current private spook Christopher Steele, the author of the discredited dossier that launched the Russiagate conspiracy theory, in a Tuesday article in Newsweek defending his record, pimping his new book, and warning of the ongoing threat of “Russian disinformation.” The full context of the quote, for what it’s worth, is: “Context is all important. When people talk about disinformation, it’s a bit of a misnomer. A lot of disinformation is true and factual, but it’s slanted, or it leaves things out, or emphasizes some things at the expense of others.” Indeed. For instance, here’s some important context: A recent report from Intelligence Online found that in an investigation into links between Russia and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Steele not only relied on the information of a “part-time novelist” who had been “criticized for falsifying information,” but also continued to cite the source’s reporting even after being informed by colleagues that the source had been dropped by two other private intelligence firms for his unreliability.

→We generally avoid reporting on presidential polling, because (a) everything is subject to change, and (b) our rough understanding is that public polling is less accurate than private polling, which, obviously, we don’t have access to. That said, one thing we’ve consistently been hearing is that Harris is performing far worse in both Democratic and Republican internal polls than in the public polls, which currently how her leading by between two and three points nationally and tied or slightly ahead in the major Midwestern swing states. That’s the background for a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal that private polling from the reelection campaign of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) shows Trump leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points—a state that Harris is winning by just under one percentage point in the RealClearPolitics average of public polls. The Journal report attributes Harris’ poor showing—she is running about five points behind Baldwin, again according to Baldwin’s poll—to her weakness among working-class voters, and especially working-class men. 

→If Harris’ internal polls were bad, that would certainly help explain her recent media blitz, after she spent the better part of the past two months studiously avoiding interviews. Earlier this week, Harris discussed abortion and standing up for women on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” (notable for past episodes such as Welcome to Slut Camp and Fuck Me With a Dildo), and last night, she appeared for a one-on-one interview with Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes. In the interview, Harris visibly struggled with a handful of tough questions, including this exchange on immigration, which we doubt will reassure the 46% of Wisconsin voters who view immigration as the “greatest challenge the United States faces today,” per a late September poll from AtlasIntel:

CBS, moreover, appears to have cleared up some of the vice president’s answers in the version of the interview posted to YouTube on Tuesday. Here’s a side-by-side of the version that aired Monday night and the version currently on YouTube, courtesy of @mazemoore on X

→Meanwhile, the bad news continues to pile up for Second Gentleman and nu-male masculinity influencer Doug Emhoff. Last week, the Daily Mail reported that Emhoff had drunkenly slapped an ex-girlfriend in a valet line outside an A-list fundraiser in Cannes, France, in 2012. Today, the Mail reports that Emhoff’s former colleagues at the law firm Venable say he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” at work. According to one anonymous female former Venable lawyer, it was well-known that Emhoff was “flirty” and that “if you weren’t flirty back or didn’t respond positively, then you were on his shit list” and “wouldn’t get to work on the cases you wanted to work on.” Others described him dispensing favors to “young, pretty girls” at the office and hiring an unqualified former model as a secretary because she was “young, attractive, and friendly” with the older men in the office. The Daily Mail previously reported in August that during his first marriage, Emhoff had an affair with—and impregnated—his family’s nanny, who also taught at his children’s school. 

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TODAY IN TABLET:

A Place at the Table, by Jamie Betesh Carter

Remembering those killed on Oct. 7 by preserving and sharing their favorite recipes

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Clan of the Cave Bore

Rachel Kushner's ‘Creation Lake’ tells us a lot about what its author doesn't want to know

By Marco Roth

Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of paranoia, floating signifiers, and randomness—an homage of sorts to Don DeLillo’s The Names. Mostly, however, it is a container to deliver many different kinds of information in explicit and implicit ways, especially about the evolution of humanity, and the history and topography of rural France. In this way, it resembles an essay or long monologue of a type found in institutionalized avant-garde theater and so-called “performance,” a novel that seems almost designed to receive grant funding from numerous institutions interested in work that “explores” or “examines” issues of climate change and inequality, feminism, and indigeneity, with the aim of “soliciting,” “encouraging,” or “provoking” thoughts about “the human condition” without making anyone too uncomfortable. Future editions should be published with the artist statement.

Our narrator and presiding consciousness is a spy and agente provocatrice in the service of unknown private-sector paymasters. She has been assigned to infiltrate a group of anarchists at a commune in southwestern France by posing as a trusted translator of their writing, then seduce them into an act of violence against the deputy minister of "Rural Coherence." This will discredit their efforts to prevent the state from draining local underground aquifers on behalf of monocrop big agricultural firms. We learn that she used to do similar work for the FBI in Northern California; before that, she tells us, she had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in the rhetoric department at UC Berkeley, Judith Butler's academic homebase.

She makes fun of her former fellow students, "fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare-quoting women." Apart from her lacerating contempt for academia and her yearning for a life of action that presumably makes her a real tough girl, we get relatively little information about her inner life, her beliefs, and, crucially, her motives.

This flatness of character might be excused on the grounds that the novel is always flirting with satire without committing to it. This is a book that makes fun of, but is also desperately serious about, covers. The narrator is undercover as one “Sadie Smith,” a name we have heard somewhere before, but in this case she’s an attractive young American woman with breast implants who speaks perfect American-accented French: "fluency is about how well you understand the language, and how well you are able to speak it. Having a good accent is ... a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent." Through such remarks and asides, the reader learns that we're dealing with someone who enjoys petty status games as much as any academic, novelist, or critic: the masking, the shadow hierarchies, the seduction and withholding, the advantage of knowing more about the people you become intimate with than they know about you. Perhaps most of all, she enjoys the hidden power that comes from being underestimated.

But before we get carried away, all of this spying stuff turns out to be a different kind of deception in its own right: Rachel Kushner's novel does not really set out to investigate the paranoid world of dark ops carried out by the interior ministries of various European liberal states. The novel remains uninterested in the motives that lead Sadie's clients or bosses to goad antiliberal elements to some destructive action that—of course—exposes "The State" and its supposed liberalism to be a sham. All of that is pretty much taken for granted from the outset. Creation Lake is not trying to make readers feel the shock of betrayal by trusted institutions, the way Joseph Conrad did in The Secret Agent. Neither is it a realistic representation of industrial-state espionage in the post-Cold War world order, in the manner of John le Carré’s Constant Gardener.

The novel's most suspenseful and original moment occurs early during Sadie's meandering drive through the Guyenne (Kushner chooses to refer to the region by its ancien régime name) when she stops to piss in the woods by a seemingly abandoned shack, and—crouching mid-piss—notices a pair of orange panties hanging from a nearby branch. I won't reveal what happens except to say that the scene revels in the use of suspense to deliver a perfectly timed anticlimax, and in this respect the orange panties work like a signal flag that lets us know pretty much how things are going to go from that point forward.

What the novel provides instead of absorbing and meaningful action is a remarkably information-dense environment—the suspense of the panties scene derives in part from a detour via a minilecture about how Europe is just another name for a trafficking network for various goods and people. Mostly, Sadie exists to introduce us to the theories, opinions, and experiences of a certain Bruno Lacombe, a (thoroughly made-up) post-1968 Rousseauist philosopher of the origins of inequality—or at least on why, in Adorno and Horkheimer's famous phrase, "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." Sadie has hacked Bruno's email account and discovers his ongoing correspondence with the anarchists and her particular target, Pascal Balmy. As plot devices go, the "hacked email" that is a key to all mythologies is like one of those chunky pairs of shoes repurposed from 1992 for today’s Bushwick set, but at least it gets the novel along its path without blisters.

In these monologuing emails—redacted, "translated," summarized, and annotated by Sadie—Bruno unfolds his theories and descriptions from a life spent in increasingly advanced forms of literal underground seclusion. Abandoning civilization, Bruno now lives in a cave. The observations can frequently enthrall: A passage detailing how Bruno learns to "handfish" like a Neanderthal by watching a pine marten is like one of those hyperdetailed miniatures in the pages of a medieval manuscript that illuminates what is otherwise dulled ink on the page; the theories, however, are that ink.

Where did things go wrong for humanity, according to Bruno? Blame the rise to dominance of what some consider to be humanity itself, that is Homo sapiens, “an interglacial bully that shaped the world we're stuck with." Forget capitalism, Oriental despotism, or even, as has been more recently argued by a certain school of anthropologists, the replacement of nomadic pastoralism with sedentary agriculture! The origin of inequality that will lead to imminent civilizational collapse is coeval with the origin of one particular branch of the human species.

Bruno turns out to be a believer in a robust version of the hypothesis that trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA in contemporary humans are a sign that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could and did interbreed, and that various expressions of Neanderthal traits persist in certain regional populations and among micro ethnic groups. These residual Neanderthal habits of mind offer the best hope for a humanity that is otherwise condemned by our higher functioning and technologically sophisticated sapien ancestors to destroy ourselves and the planet along with us.

Bruno has even developed a remarkable account of what could even be called Neanderthal civilization. Here are the first sentences of the novel:

Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking. Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.

Kushner wants to have fun with her caveman theoretician—combe is another word for cave, a "depression in a hillside," retained in the English word "coomb," but she also wants us to take him seriously, if not literally. Most of the novel, in fact, is devoted to Bruno's theories and Sadie's commentary on these theories. At first her responses are resistant, in the style of Berkeley girls dismissive of would-be mansplainers: “[Bruno's] emails, I noticed, contained quite a bit of italicizing, meaning either that he was helping them interpret his emails by deliberately emphasizing key components, or he had just discovered the shortcut key Command-I, which sent his words slanting rightward, and he found this combination of keys and their applied effects fun." Anyone who has put in time reading French theory will enjoy this snide joke on a crucial typographical différance between Anglo-American and French philosophy. Others might find it twee.

As the novel progresses, however, Sadie herself—trained seductress (remember those breast implants!)—becomes increasingly seduced by Bruno's writings and more interested in the man who wrote them than her ostensible mission. Bruno turns out to be a teenage Holocaust survivor—of course—and a true autodidact, unlike those radicals educated in France’s elite institutions. It might be a coincidence that Bruno's big idea—also Kushner's big idea—that the creative and contemplative aspects of humanity derive from Homo neanderthalensis are an implicit refutation of the anthropological historian Yuval Harari's perhaps no less fictional claim that Homo sapiens’ evolutionary advantage derived specifically from their ability to imagine the unseen and generalize from their environment to larger ideas and forces beyond themselves. According to Bruno, "pictures of hunting ... show us Homo sapiens’s symbolic life, and it consists almost entirely of eating and killing. If symbolism could be defined as the act of storing information outside of one’s own mind, early Homo sapiens had chosen to store images that were already abundant, and by rendering likenesses of the animals he hunted, the Homo sapiens was attempting to exert power, and to own. The Neanderthal, in contrast, wanted to record what he saw in dreams, to put into the world what otherwise did not exist."

Creation Lake comes on like a throwback to a genre of novel that used to be called "the literature of ideas," except the only ideas here are Bruno's. Ideas are not in tension or conflict. No one makes the case for the industrial aquifers, nor, as in Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma (the novel that gave rise to the term "literature of ideas" to describe it)—does a character offer a defense of deep state Machiavellian politics. Instead of ideas and characters in conflict, Creation Lake offers a conflict of novelistic regimes: the realist or satirist's attempt to "capture and kill" her characters through representation and the utopian novelist's or abstract novelist’s wish to put her dreams into the world.

Unfortunately, Creation Lake is—to use Kushner's terms—sapiens all the way down: Even these dreams are synthesized bits of theories already out in the world, and the novel demonstrates Kushner's power and ownership of them by reshaping them to fit her purpose. In this respect, Creation Lake does something with fiction that has been more commonly practiced in the world of theater and performance art: "lecture-performance" or "performance-lecture." This genre dramatizes and synthesizes information for the audience in ways intended to appeal not to their emotions or passions but to their intellect, to dramatize the process of learning about and synthesizing information, rather than—for instance—in the novels of Henry James—dramatizing the process of coming to a moral or emotional awareness that was previously inarticulate or shrouded.

For the Greeks and the Elizabethans, among other earlier human cultures, theater had been an arena to have safe experiences of dangerous emotions. In our epoch of apparently infinite and instantly available information—an epoch that coincides with drastically impoverished ways of organizing and making sense of that information—theater has become the place we go to have safe and discrete informational experiences.

In lecture-performance, curiosity substitutes for catharsis and explanation for motive. This creates certain challenges when transposed to fiction and other forms of dramatic storytelling. There is a lot of information in Creation Lake, some of it true, some of it half-true and half made-up: There are facts about geology and aquifers and caves, there is some regional history of the Guyenne, some words of langue d'oc explained with reference to walnut trees and grapes, an excursus on one of the mysterious outcast groups of Europe, the Cagots, about which Bruno/Kushner can say pretty much whatever she wants and does.

A lot of this distracts the reader from the political and emotional stakes the novel teases us with. Who, for instance, is Sadie's principal antagonist, Pascal Balmy? A very simple answer—although the reader will have to go outside the novel to find it—is that he is a loosely fictionalized version of Julien Coupat. Coupat is widely credited to be the author of "The Coming Insurrection," a French update of the Unabomber manifesto that envisions various direct actions to disrupt industrial and informational societies without advocating for terroristic violence against individual human beings. The pamphlet enjoyed a flaming moment of notoriety when Glenn Beck waved around a copy of Semiotext(e)’s translation on Fox News and proclaimed it a playbook for what the media had not yet labeled "antifa."

Coupat, along with his girlfriend, left Paris and founded a rural commune in the Corrèze, a part of Kushner’s greater Guyenne. They were also arrested and tried for sabotaging a TGV line back in 2008 (a similar act of sabotage was repeated during this past summer's Olympics). At the trial, the main evidence presented were Coupat's writings and surveillance that placed the couple near the scene of the crime but did not provide a "smoking gun." He was acquitted, leading to the common belief that he was either set up by French intelligence, or the victim of a false flag operation.

Novelists, of course, synthesize information all the time; this is a large part of what they do. Successful novelists used to be judged by their abilities to use that information to create fully formed fictional characters. Dostoyevsky's Stavrogin, for instance, the anarchist at the heart of The Possessed, was based partly on the historical revolutionist Sergei Nechayev. But the dramatic energy of The Possessed derives from a fascination with other characters' interest—mirroring and refracting Dostoyevsky's own—in what could be driving this character to act or fail to act as he does. In Creation Lake, by contrast, the "Invisible Committee" stuff is there for a certain kind of reader who will derive a knowing pleasure from recognizing Kushner's source, and it ends there, ditto Sadie/Zadie Smith. Do I detect an allusion to Roland Barthes’ S/Z along with a nod at one of the great contemporary practitioners of satirical realism? Or have I become infected with a search for meaningfulness that lies outside the frame of the novel itself? What would really be at stake here if the novel stopped winking at the reader? Although we're told about Pascal's charisma and charm, he is deliberately flattened on the page when he finally shows up, a man-child in comparison to Kushner's hero Lacombe, who is her own purely fictional invention stitched from a more diverse array of sources and biographies and inspirations. Kushner isn't interested in Pascal except as a figure of satire transposed from a nonfictional world.

In general, the left in Kushner's work—like Pascal and his "Moulinards"—is a milieu, a scene. Creation Lake is good at sketching various personalities in this scene, especially the angry and dissatisfied women who seem to deal with the practicalities while the men theorize, fish, get drunk, fuck each other's not-wives and not-girlfriends, while occasionally managing some carpentry. There's a random token American, a Hells Angels cum Weather Underground type of living fossil, a blowhard with a long criminal record, to whom Kushner gives the absurd name Burdamoor—a cross-cultural wink at Louis Ferdinand Céline's alter ego Ferdinand Bardamu.

If we take all this seriously, though not literally, in the way that all literature is both generalizable as metaphor and specific to what it evokes, the novel invites us to believe that committed leftists are mostly a shiftless bunch of creative types with a greater percentage of depression-prone Neanderthal DNA and are incapable of organizing themselves for violence, only peaceful protests. Left-wing political violence when it arrives is usually the result of a troubling virus introduced into its mix, the secret agent, cop, or provocateur, which makes the group susceptible to the paranoia endemic to so much left-wing theory, practice, and organizing. The cop then succeeds either by failing, or succeeds by succeeding. Here is where Kushner's novel reveals itself to be symptomatic of a particular "left agency" problem: If something actually blows up or people get killed, it's not the fault of the movement, nor its ideas about the necessity of revolutionary transformation by any means necessary; instead, you blame those who would benefit from discrediting the movement and its ideas.

This attitude is probably the most fictitious thing about the whole novel. It displaces an honest reckoning with how desires—common to all humans regardless of primate descent—whether for justice, or transformation, or peace, or material satisfaction—can be contaminated by deeply held beliefs about the unique malevolence of others. It is not just Kushner's narrative persona, the novelist as an amoral spy and human listening device, who evades the tough questions about what drives people to do harm in the name of a belief in their own goodness, righteousness, or power: the novel itself performs that evasion, symptomatic of a desire to have everything in every way possible.

So Creation Lake is a satire of the left that uses the satire to get us to take their ideas seriously, if never quite literally, because they are after all made-up stories, or at least partly fictional, but better researched than other people's made-up stories, and at least they are self-aware, if not quite using scare quotes. At the same time, any action based on those ideas could only be the result of manipulation from forces hostile to them. And so what remains is a novel that whirls us into a place where no one, least of all the author, is really answerable for the consequences of their actions or any actions they might endorse—which is not a recipe for writing good fiction.

At the end of Stendhal's other great novel of ideas, The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel refuses an insanity defense, owns up to attempted murder, and gets guillotined. At the end of Creation Lake, Kushner's Sadie—having accomplished her mission more or less by a series of lucky breaks, and in possession of a large fortune, the wages of her sins—retreats to a hotel in a Spanish village-resort where she looks at the stars and starts learning Catalan, presumably with an American accent. That's nihilism, and it's not funny.