CREATION LAKE

A woman infiltrates a cabal of French radicals. Will she go native?

The narrator of Kushner’s fourth novel goes by Sadie, though her real name—like much of her identity—is clouded in mystery. She works undercover to undermine environmental activists, formerly for the U.S. government, but since a case went sideways, she’s gone freelance. Now, she’s been commissioned by unnamed “contacts” to disrupt the Moulinards, a small farming cooperative in southwestern France protesting a government effort to construct a “megabasin” to support large-scale corporate farming. The Moulinards’ leader, Bruno, is an “anti-civver,” skeptical not just of capitalism but of the entire human species. (His writings—he exists largely in the form of email dispatches—argue that Neanderthals might have been better adapted for the planet.) Sadie has an arsenal of tools to monkey-wrench the monkey wrenchers—a willingness to exchange sex for access, a knack for languages and hacking, well-made cover stories, fake passports—but her work among the Moulinards stokes her own identity crisis. As she enters their world, she processes their enthusiasm, their philosophy (there are abundant references to critic Guy Debord), and their paranoia, which escalates as a national minister plans a visit to the region, upping the stakes. As if echoing Bruno’s concern, Sadie is such a slyly clever human that she’s undermining her own humanity. Sadie is similar to Kushner’s earlier fictional protagonists—astringent, thrill-seeking, serious, worldly—but here the author has tapped into a more melancholy, contemplative mode that weaves neatly around a spy story. Nobody would mistake it for a thriller, but Kushner has captured the internal crisis of ideology that spy yarns often ignore, while creating an engaging tale in its own right.

A deft, brainy take on the espionage novel.