Wanna-be Revolutionaries and Their Foes: Notes on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake

Cover art for the book Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – Fair Use

Almost all novels, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today’s mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political or not.  Some, like Gore Vidal’s Burr and Lincoln, are more overtly political than others. As literary critics have long noted, novels tend to evade the conscious control of writers, and sooner or later politics...