Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

 

This is a novel that sits awkwardly between explicitly genre fiction and litfic, it's not anything like intense enough to qualify as a thriller, maybe something like "novel of intrigue" except that it's really not all that intriguing, either--maybe we'll call that genre label more aspirational than anything else. There's a lot of incident here, but not a lot of story movement, what narrative momentum there is, is perpetually interrupted by digressions on hominins and society and revolution, all in the form of intercepted emails so it's not as though there's an actual conversation going on involving the narrator. There's some gesturing at thematic concerns in the areas of ecological collapse, governmental espionage on and entrapment of citizens, personal moral/ethical codes, relationships; even though the narrator walks away from things in disgust it's hard to say anything is resolved--which might well be more realistic but is less satisfying. The prose is deeply readable, and there are flashes of mordant dark humor, but the overall impression is that the novel overall manages to be virtually substance-free while simultaneously collapsing under its own weight. I never really considered DNFing this, but it's not all that good, either.