Creation Lake
Good Books rating 3.33
Technical:
- ID: 3
- Added: 2025-08-02
- Updated: 2025-09-03
- ISBN: 9781982116538
- Publisher: Simon and Schuster
- Published: 2025-07-01
- Reviews: 3
"'Sadie Smith' is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by 'cold bump'--making him believe the encounter was accidental. And like everyone she chooses to interact with, Lucien is useful to her. ... Sadie operates on strategy and dissimulation, based on what her 'contacts,'--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more"--
Reviews
Pull quotes
- An unreliable narrator's cry for help.
- The narrative choice creates a sense of ambiguity and tension.
- The protagonist is enigmatic yet deeply human.
Pull quotes
- Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile.
- The book struggles to maintain constructive engagement with its themes.
- Despite its ambition, the novel’s structural and tonal flaws prevent it from reaching its potential.
Pull quotes
- Creation Lake takes its cue from the great epistolary and confessional novels of the 19th century.
- The narrator consistently displays an audacious, defiant self-assurance bordering on hubris.
- The overly tidy and anticlimactic climax removes much of the expected moral complexity.