Creation Lake, second reading

 

Feeling I hadn't done Rachel Kushner justice in my sketchy review of Creation Lake, I read her The Flamethrowers, and then her Mars Room.   And then I read Creation Lake a second time.  In between, I read some other reviews of Creation Lake and they weren't so far off from my reaction after reading it the first time.  And yet the people running the Booker Prize had some very laudatory things to say about it in justification for moving from their long list to the short one, things I didn't see after reading number one.   But with of her previous novels under my belt, I became accustomed to her style and was better able to appreciate Creation Lake.  It seemed to me then that the reviews on Youtube critical of the novel were made by reviewers, as I was in my previous review, who were reading Kushner for the first time and being thrown off by her strangeness.  But she grows on you.  She did on me. 

My assumption that some of Sadies assignments were hits may not be right.  Kushner is somewhat vague about what she is asked to do on her assignments.   She is asked to kill Paton and says she doesn't do hits, but she has her price and the ones employing her accept it.  She doesn't actually have to kill the target.  The target climbs up on some logs to get away from a young foolhardy motorcyclist.  The logs collapse, that the target is killed.  We hear the song Get Lucky in the background on one occasion and coincidence is mentioned in another; so maybe Kushner doesn't want Sadie to be an ordinary hit-woman, but she takes the assignment this time and seemingly retires at the end of the novel.  She isn't completely home free.  People are looking for her in regard to a civil suit associated with one of her earlier jobs, one that went awry.  But the statute of limitations has run out on the event so she won't be threatened with jail.  She will, however lose a lot of money if she loses that suit; so she spends a lot of time looking over her shoulder.   She quit smoking and drinking.  She wants to stay retired.  It seems like she'll be able to, but she's living away from people, living by herself, never able to have children, maybe never able to live with anyone, filled with so many things she can't talk about, not able to be herself in a future relationship.  She's in her thirties and counting.

One of the Youtube reviewers said she was "evil, evil, evil."  I didn't see that.   She sets her morals aside when she takes on a job, but she doesn't want to keep on doing that, and she hopes, by the end of the novel, that she won't have to do it again.   When you give up drinking, you can no longer make excuses for the things you do that you don't like.  You need to learn to live with yourself, if you can manage it.  Seems like Kushner is telling us that Sadie can.