Kushner often cites DeLillo as an influence, but Creation Lake most clearly bears the imprint of a handful of European writers, including the Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini and the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The first chapter of Manchette’s 1976 novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (Three to Kill) begins, “And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now,” before launching into a description of Manchette’s protagonist, Georges Gerfaut, a middle-class nobody caught up in murder:
“The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.”
In her introduction to a 2016 English translation of Balestrini’s We Want Everything, an electric account of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of workers’ strikes in 1969, Kushner observed that his narrators—who are often nameless—“are always one person speaking anonymously as a type.” Their “voices,” she continues,
“have all the specificity of an individual—a set of attitudes, moods, prejudices, back stories, but they each speak in a way that exemplifies what life was like for a person such as them, in a moment when there were many like them.”
Paradoxically, this anonymity works against the sense of alienation Lukács described—at least in the domain of literature. If capitalism creates a world in which human beings are violently atomized, cut off from one another by the daily demands of wage labor and the barriers of class society, the character who speaks at once for himself and for everyone like him represents the possibility of a world in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully, freely ourselves and part of a multitude of interdependent, mutually supportive lives.
The Secret Agent, Anahid Nersessian
Reviewed: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully
