Nine days ago, I failed to post a piece I’d intended to write about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) because I realized, late in the day, that my grasp of the novel’s themes and effect were shakier than I had thought. Today, I discovered that I’m not the only one who has responded to it in that way. Eleanor Franzén writes in her blog “Elle Thinks” (which I recommend) about having been affected very similarly by Kushner’s book. Finding that she doesn’t feel able to write authoritatively about the book despite having read it, she instead engages in a Socratic dialogue with herself which reveals that she found the novel compelling, “ripped through it”, but does not “entirely understand what Kushner is driving at with this novel”. (Kushner does indeed seem to be driving at something, though what it is is elusive.)

I agree with most of what Elle says about Creation Lake, though I’m not wholly convinced by her assertions that “there’s a real value in getting off the hamster wheel” and that that’s “the choice Sadie makes at the end”. I suspect that the protagonist’s ultimate choice is more ambiguous, less simple, than that, though I remain unable to say how. So, I thought I’d link to Elle’s piece as a stand-in for the post I didn’t write, one which partly covers the ground I had meant to stake out. I’m still planning to write about Creation Lake after a further reread later this year.

In the same blog post Elle discusses Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) which I had decided, based on the reviews and other commentary I’d read) was probably not for me. Elle makes it clear that much of that commentary gives a misleading impression:

… the part in which a rich white woman hides from her life, fully redecorates a motel room on a whim, and embarks on an ill-advised, all-consuming affair is actually not the whole book or even most of the book. A lot of All Fours is about what happens after all of that stops, which it must inevitably do.

She expands on this:

I don’t think it’s legible as an argument for or against an open marriage in general; that feels very specific to the unnamed protagonist’s situation. (This might explain so many readers’ issues with the novel, if they’re reading it as a general prescription instead of a contextualised description.) Oddly, I’m not even sure the poly/sex/marriage stuff is the point at all, except insofar as this makes a good exhibit A for staging more abstract points.

So maybe I should take a look at All Fours after all? I’ll think about it.