The newsletter resurrected; thoughts on Creation Lake
I’ve decided to take a crack at having a newsletter again. I’ve migrated from Substack to Ghost for the obvious reasons, though I don’t feel any rancor towards people who haven’t made the same move. Life online in 2025 is the process of choosing from an endless number of imperfect options. My previous attempt at a newsletter was in the form short fiction self-published at irregular and increasingly infrequent intervals, which possibly didn’t play to the desires of the people who subscribe to newsletters. What those desires are—if you’re reading this, I’m speculating baselessly about your desires, which you have much better access to than I do, access that you could use to enjoy having one up on me— I can’t pretend to know. Presumably it varies. Education from a respected thinker, the ability to follow a beloved artist, perhaps the humanization of one of the many celebrities of online, big and small, or maybe the pleasure at seeing letters on the screen.
I’m not intending to pull back the curtain too much on my own life in these. It’s a life spent largely at my desk, for better or worse. I’ll probably describe what I’m working on sometimes, provide links to whatever publication I manage to achieve or what great feats of mine deserve attention, but otherwise I’m probably going to mostly spend it talking about books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, and let my thoughts spin out from those as organically as possible.
One problem that has constrained my non-fiction writing, what little of it I’ve done, is that I’m not a natural at addressing my audience directly. My own mouth is less comfortable than someone else’s. I think my life would be easier if porcelain masks were trendy, but with the closure of the The Phantom of the Opera a couple years ago that reality seems further away than ever. My response to this discomfort is usually to stress about the structure of an essay, sometimes fiddling until I feel like my argument is pristine and sometimes setting it aside for weeks until I can look at it again, neither of which is viable for a newsletter. So I’m committing myself to minimal editing, at least to start out with, and hopefully I’ll end up with something cogent. If I don’t, it’ll be humbling, and maybe there are people out there who will enjoy seeing me go through that.
I just finished Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, a mere six months after its publication, which is unusually punctual for me. There was an author Q & A in Oakland recently, and I thought I’d get more out of it if I read the book. I missed that deadline by twenty pages, but I read the book.
It’s a spy novel, but not the thriller it’s billed as. There aren’t many thrills to be had, the hair on the back of your neck won’t stand up for nervousness, mostly because there is no real adversary to hinder Sadie’s infiltration of Le Moulin, the radical leftist commune she’s been tasked with investigating and, eventually, with entrapping. Part of the listlessness of the narrative is because we are provided the series of events through Sadie’s narration: a nihilist, cynical stream of events in flat affect. Much of what the novel is concerned with is the inner life of someone who would infiltrate these groups and entrap them, who would sleep with people under a false identity and then vanish, based in no small part on police officers and feds who have done exactly that in real life. It’s a good question, and the answer here is a life in which everyone is instrumentalized, is manipulable, and is decidedly dumber than Sadie. Until, in the end, they’re not.
And that is the problem with thinking you’re the smartest person in the room, isn’t it? Even if you’re correct, your theories about another person and how they’ll act can be off by just a little bit, no matter that you’ve identified their desires and resentments correctly. At the end of the novel—turn back here if you want to be surprised while reading—Burdmoore, the aged activist who Sadie taps as the locus of her plan to entrap Le Moulin into killing Paul Platon, a minor French dignitary, surprises her. He takes the gun she gives him, then laughs at how she thought he’d go off and kill this guy, how she thought she could manipulate Le Moulin into escalating beyond the action the larger group planned. The failure wasn’t that she had misidentified his resentments. Pascal, the intellectual leader of Le Moulin, treated Burdmoore like a joke, and he had reason to resent the direction of the group. She wasn’t wrong that he had a long history of violent action and had committed comparable crimes in the past. What she didn’t anticipate was that he, despite seeming like a joke to her, might have insight into what she was doing, that his experience actually counted for something.
In Brandon Taylor’s infamously critical review of Creation Lake, he takes aim at its treatment of Le Moulin, claiming that the enumeration of its flaws, from the members’ Parisian and upper class origins to its reproduction of the gendered division of labor, was the book’s way of dismissing and invalidating it as a political entity. While I don’t disagree with some of his other critiques—I think the construction of this book is a bit mushy, which contributes to its failure to thrill— I think this one is off-base. Sadie, of course, thinks that these things invalidate them, that these contradictions reveal the unseriousness of their beliefs, which is good for her, as someone who doesn’t believe in anything but herself and doesn’t want anyone else to believe in anything either. But why should we agree with Sadie? Why would this narrative want us to do that?
I think the temptation to do so is because that line of argumentation, in which a leftist organization’s failure to completely avoid reproducing the dynamics of oppression in the world it seeks to change, is often deployed to wound that organization with a charge of hypocrisy. If they really believed, they wouldn’t do this. But even a commune, one of the most closed social structures imaginable, is situated in the world. The demand of such an organization, of any leftist organization, isn’t to emulate perfect justice in an injustice world, but to strive. To put forth its best effort to eliminate those injustices inside and out. Different organizations, colored by the rainbow of different leftist ideologies, have placed more emphasis on one or the other. Some entirely focused on creating a small, perfect space, others broadly unconcerned with inequalities and poor treatment within their ranks. Thus far neither approach has succeeded in abolishing capitalism, but maybe some day we’ll be able to look to the scoreboard.
One thing that Creation Lake gets correct about these dynamics, though, is that they create points of tension and vulnerability within an organization. Sadie correctly identifies the relegation of women to more domestic labor in Le Moulin, while the men perform more intellectual labor, as an opportunity. Burdmoore’s desire to be respected in the face of Pascal’s ridicule and everyone else’s indifference and light disdain was an opportunity. The various people outside the organization who resented Pascal for reasons valid and invalid were also opportunities for this spy to infiltrate and manipulate a situation, and how Le Moulin didn’t fall prey to Sadie is left off the page. Burdmoore’s intuition, maybe. Maybe a shared trust in each other and in the mission of the organization, despite the fact that it isn’t perfect.
The lesson here isn’t that reproductions of injustice are political disqualifications, but they are political vulnerabilities. A leftist organization doesn’t have money or institutional inertia to hold it together through internal strife, and enemies to such organizations are all too likely to try and exploit that. It can only overcome such turmoil with the members’ trust in each other and in the project of the organization as a whole, and so those qualities must be cultivated.
That’s all I have to say about Creation Lake. As for what I’ve been working on lately, I’m nearing completion on the first draft of a book about a man who uses Buddhism to become the most divorced man alive, which I’m optimistic about even though the journey from first to second draft promises to be absolutely punishing. While writing the first draft, I’ve wavered on a number of stylistic questions, so I’ll have to set those right on the second run through. I’m also still looking for an agent or publisher for Orpheus Speaks at Last, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through a series of found manuscripts, as the frame story puts it. So far I haven’t been able to get an agent to bite on it, a fact that I’ve decided to be open about despite the potential wounds to my pride. Maybe this newsletter will humanize me yet.