I have no memory of saying that, but I can confirm that I’m a daughter of Coca-Cola, as well as the product of some other influences. I remember that a woman in the back of the room said the passage I read wasn’t in the spirit of the book. “But it’s in the book,” I replied, pointing to the copy in my hand, and people laughed and I felt bad, because I didn’t want to belittle her for having a proprietary sense that my novel should be represented in a certain way.

About me caring about being liked, I think what you’re referring to is something I said about how different I am from my fictional protagonist in Creation Lake, an undercover cop and overconfident manipulator who isn’t at all concerned with likability beyond her need to cast a spell over people so she can use them; in contrast, yes, I do want people to like me. I put effort into that. It’s a lifelong project. But I have other projects. Writing novels is one. If I aim to please when I write a novel, this has to be achieved with an integrity of vision, whose standard is established by me, or something in me and of me. A novel that is true to the vision of its creator is not going to please everyone and shouldn’t. An art that is produced out of a desire to be liked reminds me of the great joke by the artists Komar and Melamid of their “Most Wanted” painting series, which was made by conducting broad surveys of what elements in a painting people tended to prefer — a cottage or cabin, a body of water such as pond, lake, or ocean, a historical figure, a few clouds, etc.

I have often thought there was something more classical in the simplicity of having a single novel narrator rather than an ensemble. But with all three of my prior novels, I was dealing with worlds as much as I was with characters, and a single consciousness would constrain the enterprise, reduce it. Although in this case, even if there is only one narrator, there are actually two storytellers; it’s just that one is fitted inside the other, and it’s not even clear to me that Sadie is the main character, even as she has a monopoly and speaks in the first person. The letters from Bruno Lacombe that she is transposing for the reader put her at his service and he is, to me, the heart of the book and its presiding spirit. From the very first sentence, it’s him speaking — not her.

In terms of developing Sadie, whose name is a temporary alias over the six weeks we know her, I had planned that Creation Lake would be told by an American woman, but for a long time I didn’t have a sense of who that woman was. I’m familiar with the part of France where I set the book, and with the milieu of the militants who’ve developed a kind of hermetic commune, Le Moulin, in a remote village: the political reference points, the scene, socially and historically, a desire to tap into a certain spirit of resistance in “La France Profonde.” I had a place and a situation, a rural commune on a collision course with the French state.

With the character of Bruno Lacombe, I had a mentor who has retreated from the long twentieth century into a kind of primitivism, who is composing sermon-like emails about revolutionizing consciousness and looking to the deep past for indications of where to go. But with the narrator, it took longer to figure out who she was. Making her someone who shows up at Le Moulin hopeful of finding her place, of fitting in, wasn’t going to work, even as it’s a trope that’s familiar from places like Tarnac, where all kinds of people were showing up and wanting to get in on things. Was my narrator going to be . . . a writer? Nah. Non. Autofiction has almost never been my instinct. I can be interested when other people pull it off well, but I do not personally find the sand there for the pearls I want to produce, the hallucinated world I want to conjure.

One morning I wrote the first two lines that became the first two lines of the novel. It’s Bruno speaking, but a woman is conveying what he’s saying. I realized I was borrowing the tone from Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, whose female narrator is relaying passages from letters she’s received from a man. I liked the repetitions in the film of “he told me that, he said that,” and in this case it was “Bruno said, he told them that.” A formal challenge can be the doorway that suddenly opens, and through which everything flows. A clear rule can transform what previously felt like arbitrary decision-making into a mandate, into art.

As I wrote this woman conveying the ideas of Bruno the elder, I began to realize that she wasn’t a stirringly elegant presence like Chris Marker’s narrator. A hostile force had entered the novel — not a comrade, not a writer. She was actually . . . an undercover cop! She has intercepted Bruno’s emails and is reading them illicitly and without, at least at first, any appreciation for what he’s saying. And in the sections where we see who she is and what she is up to, I suddenly understood that she was on her way to the commune to try to destroy it.

In 2004, a female FBI agent had begun spying on a group of eco-activists including this young guy, Eric McDavid, who ended up, thanks to her seduction of him and her pressure to plan sabotage, sentenced to twenty-one years in federal prison. He served nine years before his lawyer was able to prove that this agent had entrapped him, and his conviction was overturned and he was set free. I knew people who knew him and were doing prison support, and I would look at his picture and he just seemed so earnest and young and like he got absolutely screwed over. I would ask myself, about this FBI agent, “What kind of person does that?” If you’re introducing the sabotage to get someone arrested, you’re not even operating on some pathetic idea of law and order. It’s more like nihilism.

Later, there was a UK agent, a spy whose cover was blown, who had infiltrated some of the people from Tarnac, and this cop brought scandal and disgrace to the UK police by having affairs with several of the women he was spying on. Some of these women have sued the UK police. This undercover cop has sued the police himself, for “failing to protect him from falling in love.” He claims to have had Stockholm syndrome. He seems like a lost person with profound disrespect for women. Sadie, my own agent provocateur, points to that spy as an object lesson in what not to do.

Sadie’s backstory, meanwhile, is somewhat borrowed from that FBI agent. She’s been fired by the FBI and is much more seasoned by this point, when the book takes place. She has a lot of experience dissimulating and a blunt disregard for other people, an overconfidence that becomes a kind of haze that fills the pages — so that the reader is getting Sadie’s sense of herself but also clues that cut through that haze here and there. Sadie drinks quite heavily, for instance, and she brags that she never cleans up a mess because there is no need to, since she will never return to the same place twice.

The thought never crossed my mind to challenge other people’s way of seeing France. France is a world that I care about and have thoughts on. My novel is preoccupied with the significance of May ’68 as a moment of huge political and social possibility, with French cinema (it’s no accident that Bruno’s last name is Lacombe, my little homage to Lacombe, Lucien), with Guy Debord and the Lettrists and the Situationist International. The book is full of French leftist history, focusing on the move to the countryside of certain militants in the wake of the failure of May ’68, the success of the occupation of the Larzac plateau in the 1970s, and so forth. I guess it’s perverse that I’ve put some of this precious material into the hands of a cynical narrator, but this grand history is much bigger than she is. She says things like, “All they have better in France is novels and cheese, and in the grand scheme, that’s basically nothing.” Her attempt to undercut “France” is a ruse.

I spend a lot of time in central-southwestern France, where people continue to try to make their living as farmers. In the mid–twentieth century, one-third of French people made their living as farmers. Now it’s less than 2 percent. There’s severe outmigration from these small villages. There’s just not much future there for young people. I chose the issue of water, of these “megabasins,” as a plot point. But when I finished writing Creation Lake, the megabasins had become a huge issue in France. There are these pitched battles taking place in northwestern France between activists and farmers and the French police, who are defending the interests of corporate farming.

When Sadie is going on about truck ruts and nuclear power plants being “the real Europe,” she’s taking one strand of reality and calling it reality. She wants to think she can deromanticize everything around her, and she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. This is a not-insignificant component of her unreliability. She needs to read Bruno’s letters to learn what’s sacred about history and people and nature. In terms of that scene regarding the “real Europe,” a quote from it apparently went viral on Twitter, and people didn’t understand it was from a novel, that it was a narrator, and that novel narrators are fictional. Sadie is riffing in a deliberately provocative manner, telling the reader to more or less take their precious Europe and shove it. She also happens to be drunk.

France is of course “panties on a bush” and “the posh café” — and many other things besides. It’s an industrialized country. But it’s also an incredibly charming place with all of these localisms. Paris is one localism, but a very powerful one. From the perspective of an American, Paris is unique because it centralizes cultural power, financial power, and political power in one city. We don’t have an equivalent in the United States. This is exotic to Sadie and she’s even kind of wowed by it, because she’s feeling the shadow presence of political and corporate power in the form of her bosses, whoever they are.

The president of France for most of the 1970s was a conservative, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Militants in the 1970s in both the United States and in France were in fractured disarray. Then came François Mitterrand, and the dream was over, kaput, finished. But my novel is not at all about dispelling a romance with leftist revolt. Probably the opposite. I came across something Fredric Jameson said about the 1970s to an acquaintance of mine, in response to a question about why Jameson took up literature instead of revolution. Jameson talked about the ’70s being immensely repressive, an era when, internationally, it seemed that the revolutionary horizon would be “truly lost.” And this is where Jameson moved on to his kind of classical formulation, that revolution appears first in the imagination and then in the streets.

In terms of having a romantic idea of May ’68, Chris Marker’s masterpiece, A Grin Without a Cat, about May ’68 and its afterlives, is a devastating film about revolutionary promise and how it played out worldwide. For people who were very involved in and shaped by May ’68, the 1970s were marked by disappointment, paranoia, and despair.

But a character like Bruno is not paranoid, and he is not disillusioned. The trick for me was to render somebody who’s slightly lunatic, but what he points out isn’t lunatic. “We are heading toward extinction,” he says, “in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is, ‘How do we exit this car?’” How do we exit the car? To come up with an answer requires a type of magical thinking. The repair work of Creation Lake for me was to produce that thinking. So I find Bruno, as a character, hopeful and also usefully romantic. His myths suture the wound for me — the wound being the origin and fate of our existence.

Debord is not someone I’d ever write off as a scoundrel. His voice was like no other, and he was correct in so many of his formulations. I was just looking at his 1988 book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, which is superb: “The empty debate on the spectacle — that is, on the activities of the world’s owners — is organized,” he says, “by the spectacle itself.” He goes on to discern “concentrated” spectacle from “diffuse” spectacle, and it’s clear that we now live in an overlap of the two, and also that the integration of these two forms is inside of every person, a Ring camera that points at your third eye and helps you to be inauthentic, to be in thrall to the activities of “the world’s owners.”

More Debord, from this same book: “The highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.” It’s almost like Guy Debord read Creation Lake. Although he would not like the part of the novel where Sadie points out that alcoholism is not revolutionary, despite what Debord, later in his life, came to believe. (Never mind that Sadie herself is in the clutches of her own crippling addiction.)

As a figure, Debord is somewhat tragic. When I was planning to see the big show of his papers at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) in 2013, a friend who knew some of his inner circle, the ones still standing, told me that they were all deeply opposed to the exhibition. It’s understandable: Guy Debord wanted to set places like the BNF on fire yet was suddenly being celebrated by the state, which had only bought his papers when they found out they might be going to Yale University and suddenly decided that this unrepentant insurrectionist should be nationalized (for the tidy sum negotiated by Debord’s widow, Alice Becker-Ho). I asked my friend, “What would be the appropriate way of handling his memory?” And I was told, “Drinking.”

Michèle Bernstein is the only one of that circle who is still alive. She is ninety-two and was Debord’s wife in the 1950s, at the time when, in the book, he meets my fictional character Bruno Lacombe. Bruno’s early biography, and his association with Debord, is borrowed from a real-life figure, Jean-Michel Mension. This is meant to be evident to those who are familiar with it, but it’s irrelevant for those who are not. Mension was an associate of Debord and was kicked out of the Situationist International eventually. The purification process was such that almost nobody managed to avoid that fate.

Sadie tries to puncture other people’s utopian ambitions, such as those of Le Moulin. But she’s not doing it from a place of sophistication and moral righteousness. She’s a cop, remember. She points out the misogyny of the commune but seems herself to be a worse traitor to women then the boys who don’t help out so much with communal childcare. She points out the contradictions of the militants, but these details are not at all news to anyone who has ever circulated in leftist spaces. As Pascal, the leader of Le Moulin, says to her, “We aren’t the first to experience these challenges!”

Because I’ve been doing book events all fall, I’ve started to notice patterns: that the further someone is from the world that the book depicts, the more likely they are to find the book cynical. It turns out that liberals with absolutely no personal connection to radical politics and leftist milieux long for a naively romantic depiction of these milieux. Go figure.

Sadie is an adversary to the militants in the novel, but not because she has reactionary politics. She claims that she has no politics. She keeps pointing to Ecclesiastes, which is the most pessimistic and oblique part of the Old Testament. And she keeps asserting that at our core is our “salt” — a hard substrate in which we might locate some sense of right and wrong, but not political beliefs in any explicit sense. Those wash away when people are denuded of their social context and forced to face themselves. Maybe her salt is what makes her vulnerable to becoming Bruno’s disciple — combined with the fact that she’s so isolated by her life undercover that other people aren’t quite real to her. As she sets out into the French landscape, her only companion is Bruno’s descriptions of that very landscape. He allows her to see the particularity of the world, even as she is somebody who claims explicitly to not care about nature. But there she is, noticing what Bruno calls “neire,” the blackness of the grapes, of the walnuts, of caves, of a proud history of violent peasant revolts.

She’s definitely an American category of wolf, I agree. The spy novel is an American form. While writing this, I borrowed aspects of the noir genre and paid deliberate homage to the French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, whom I really love — and made fun of a French crime writer I find lovable but ridiculous, Jean-Claude Izzo, whose Marseille Trilogy Sadie ridicules when she’s in Marseille. Like many French men of his generation, Manchette was raised on American crime fiction. His generation read authors like Raymond Chandler and Horace McCoy, who’s hugely famous in France and wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

A lot of French crime fiction is filtered through this fantasy of what it means to be American. In borrowing a little from Manchette, I never meant to undermine or subvert the noir novel — it was the exact opposite. I wanted to use a little bit of its power to keep things moving along. Borrowing from the genre inevitably put the female narrator in the position of the femme fatale. Sadie represents both the Americanness of crime fiction and also the French fantasy of what that genre is.

But I’m also interested in the savagery of individualism for the deeper reason that, as an American and an American writer, I’m a product of it. My French friends think America is this psychotic place full of ignorance and violence. They also admire it enormously, and in no small part for the sense that it’s chaotic and dangerous and bursting with energy. France does not have the sense of the individual in the way we do. As one of my French publishers said to me recently, “the state is inside of people in France.” There’s a sense that you are a part of a civic fabric and are meant to behave as one insignificant part of a large organism. Sadie has no state inside her. She is destructive will, a kind of free radical. That is, until Bruno starts to destabilize and reorient her.

Both endings deal cosmologically with some longing to find meaning in human life. The stars destabilize Bruno’s arch need to find a culprit for the failures of civilization. He’s been blaming the Homo sapiens for ravaging across Europe forty thousand years ago. He has discounted their cave art as technologically impressive renderings of mere “eating and killing.” But suddenly he postulates that maybe the renderings in places like Lascaux are actually meant to produce a kind of cosmological structure; the animals depicted are constellations. And then he goes into this thinking of, “What is contemplation of stars?” It’s the desire to locate oneself. He has this idea that a home can be located in the heavens. People can look up and see what others have seen for thousands of years. There’s a deep warmth to continuity. It undercuts doubt and solitude and disappointment in the human project.

In terms of Sadie, I had originally conceived of the end of Creation Lake as her comeuppance. Punishment for Sadie. The Moulinards would show her, once and for all, that she’s really not as clever as she thinks she is. But as I neared the scene where that would take place, I saw that it was wrong. All it would have said was, “Betrayal doesn’t pay.” When I wrote the actual end, it felt exactly right to me and functioned almost like a psychoanalysis. Sadie quits her job working for the world’s owners. She traverses the fantasy, and so does her creator.