Rachel Kushner had warned me that there might be snakes and one very mean turkey on the farm. There would also be mud; she recommended rubber boots. And, as far as she remembered, there was no cell service.

The property in Delaware County, New York, belonged to her cousin. Across the way was the house where Kushner, whose novels often explore society’s gritty margins, was staying for a few days early this summer. “I was weeding for hours and hours yesterday,” she said.

Everyone who visits the farm must work. Over the years, even garage-rock band members recording music in the barn’s grain elevator have traversed rows of root vegetables.

Kushner, 55, was used to it. In her 20s, shortly after her cousin purchased the land, she helped rescue the guesthouse from “a state of total abandon” and lived there on the weekends for a while. Years later, when her husband, a professor, received a fellowship at Cornell University, they would visit with their son.

The farm provided some inspiration for her fourth novel, “Creation Lake,” a sexy, noirish thriller about a 34-year-old American woman, a spy-for-hire, who infiltrates an eco-commune in the south of France.

Her mission is to disrupt its plans to sabotage government efforts to bring corporate agriculture to the area, but she finds herself occasionally distracted by warm six-packs of beer, a mysterious cave-dwelling philosopher and a communard she seduces.

Like other novels by Kushner, the book is centered on a tough female protagonist living among the political avant-garde and inside the author’s playground of ideas — a combination that has earned her the notice of, and comparisons to, Don DeLillo. With “Creation Lake,” Kushner borrows more from the traditions of French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette or British spy novelist John le Carré while adding her own existential twist. She wrote the novel in 14 months.

“It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life,” she said. “When I was writing that book, I do think that I preferred the world that I had made.

“What interests me,” she continued, “what I know, understand, is people who find ways to build their own reality.”

Kushner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and San Francisco, the daughter of scientists who considered the hippie movement to be conformist. Her mother sewed her brother’s clothes and made meals of government cheese. While studying for her doctorate in neurobiology, she asked the local anarchist-feminist bookstore if Rachel, then 5, could help shelve books.

At 16, Kushner enrolled at University of California, Berkeley, to study political economy, partly because her mother had told her not to major in English if she wanted to be a writer.

“I was interested in politics in those days because I sort of thought that the moral wars of my time were going to play themselves out in Central America,” she said, as they did in books by Joan Didion, Deborah Eisenberg and Denis Johnson.

At 27, Kushner headed to New York for Columbia University, where she was a student in a workshop led by novelist Jonathan Franzen. “Reading her work, you had no idea who she was or where she came from,” Franzen said in an email. “From the very beginning, she was telling stories about people who weren’t her.”

Franzen referred Kushner to his literary agent, Susan Golomb, who encouraged her to pursue a novel about her family’s time in Cuba before the revolution. Her grandfather was a metallurgist and an engineer at an American- owned nickel mine.

Kushner said her debut novel, “Telex from Cuba,” published in 2008, lacks the comic sensibility of her more recent work. But it established her as a major presence in the literary world. “It got the acclaim from all of the big hitters of the time … because she really has a muscular style, and ambition,” said Nan Graham, her editor at Scribner.

Kushner said, “You have to have a certain kind of corny ambition to make stuff. There’s a lot of really brilliant people out there who, for reasons of social class or for other reasons to do with disillusionment, don’t have that kind of confidence.”

Her husband, Jason E. Smith, is the first reader of anything Kushner writes and, she said, “is key to the entire thing.” Through his knowledge of 20th-century France and leftist history, Kushner said, “I’m able to access an entire vast world through him,” and elaborate on certain details in her fiction.

“Creation Lake,” Smith said, will resonate with younger American readers “whose political and cultural lives have been defined by the 2008 economic crisis, the Occupy movement and the pipeline blockade at Standing Rock, all of it shadowed by the slow doom of climate collapse.”

The novel is set in 2013, recent enough to feel familiar but long ago enough to give Kushner the benefit of distance.

“To write a contemporary novel in certain ways is harder, because you live in history, but you don’t have the hindsight component to get a spin on things, and yet you want to be able to recognize the warp and weft of where things are going,” she said.

With an inflated sense of her own invincibility, Kushner’s narrator, who goes by the alias Sadie Smith, thinks she has her targets firmly in her control. “If you have a good memory, and if you don’t get in the way of your constructed self, it’s not that hard, even under duress, to remember who you are supposed to be,” the character muses to herself. But it turns out Sadie’s lies and manipulations are not as smooth as she thinks.

Kushner said she wanted to explore “the idea of a narrator who thinks they are authoring the world around them.” That also describes the work of a novelist who, as “Creation Lake” suggests, may be a kind of spy, too. But Kushner said her narrator’s worldview is 180 degrees away from her own.

“People who think they have other people figured out, they’re missing out on a whole layer,” Kushner said. “Not just of that other person but of themselves.”