In Kushner’s latest novel are some of the most captivating passages you will ever read in today’s fiction. But, you have to work your way mindfully through Sadie’s story to encounter and appreciate them. In the story she’s an infiltrator, a provocateur, and independent 34-year old. In the novel delivery itself, she is  an intelligent and delightful narrator who can be quite personal. She lets us in on all she’s doing.

Sadie breaks into the account of a protest movement’s grand poobah and mentor, a man named Bruno. She spies on his email-delivered anthropological truths, profound ones, which she gladly shares with us the reader. Her gritty details of espionage and public relations entrapments often give way to Bruno Reports. These delve into the importance of man’s progress on earth, from mindless ape to thinker.

The  plot may be confusing at first. Under an assumed identity, Sadie is being paid to compromise herself in order to disrupt an event. She even takes her role into a romantic relationship. The main incidents occur in rural redneck France, which is well-depicted. Sadie, in her dry wit, informs us that Tractor Pull culture is international and often where we’d least expect it.

Things boil over at a farm protest festival where a visiting government minister is set up as a target. When the minister is dashed and the event is over, Sadie the independent contractor agent is highly rewarded. She collects her money, and retreats to solitude. Free and unattached, she has time to reflect on Bruno’s weightier observations.

One in particular is about the location of Earth among the movement of galaxies, and how the Dipper constellations have long been used as points of navigation. She contemplates Bruno’s description of how ancient Polynesian boaters learned to sail vast distances in the Pacific and even to America by following Polaris, the North Star. As Sadie, flat on her back, studies the night sky in her remote hideaway in Spain, she begins to understand the “continuum,” the eternal movement of our planet in time, the value of natural versus artificial.

She observes that many of the noticeable twinkling lights in the blackness above are in fact man-made satellites, hundreds of them, which she compares to lice.

A great novel has unique revelations of everyday life plus an over-reaching theme, a wise spin on current affairs, science, art, or philosophy. The views encompass and at the same time transcend the novel’s plot and characters’ mundane lives. Kushner can do this, and with Sadie’s dry piercing wit, make us laugh as well.

Sadie’s journey may have begun when she was a fearlessly sexy and brash agent on assignment, but it concludes when, having learned more about mankind than she bargained for, she seems a humble soul approaching enlightenment. It’s time for her to head for the hills back where she calls home.

Rachel K always writes a good book. I love “Telex from Cuba” and consider it the most consistently interesting. IMO, “Creation Lake” is her most literary novel so far. And Sadie Smith, who in the South we might call “a caution,” is a narrator I’d gladly read again.