The Flamethrowers: A Novel

Surprisingly subtle and rich-textured. It developed into a much more imaginative work than the novel I thought I had started reading. I think I may have to read it again. I will pay attention to this author. I wonder if she reads Nicola Barker?

"Certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures. He was saying 'What if I did?' And she was saying, Go ahead.'" This book is one almost entirely of gestures, sometimes sublime, sometimes infuriating. I'd recommend this to someone looking for a mostly easy but mostly interesting read.

Feeling nostalgic about the New York of yesterday but not sure why because you never lived it? This is the book for you. It's about a girl and about art and about making it NY city. And it rarely gets better than that. It's about every fantasy of city life we've had before coming here. If just happens that the character lives it out to the fullest. Read it - it's good for you.

Kushner feels like the Jackson Pollock of writing. She writes so much without saying much. The writing style is vibrant and loquacious, but filled with too many similes and the chronology jumps around a lot. It's a difficult read for people who haven't read many fiction books and sometimes I felt I had to look words up in the dictionary or re-read pages multiple times to understand what was going on.

Broad in scope and ambition, this novel takes a largely passive but oh-so-of-her-time character through a broad sweep of recent history. It flows effortlessly with stories, sharp observation and a wry humour. The voice is singular and compelling. It felt like a novel I've been waiting to read.

If Rachel Kushner were to turn out a movie script, no question she'd be turning in a hip, narrative-driven screen treatment for a film of mighty interest and hipness tailored for a huge contemporary audience. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the screenplay Shane Salerno wrote for "Savages."

Kushner's new novel "The Flame Throwers" has all the raw power, headlong action - not to mention scope and utter speed - of the 2012 Olivier Stone movie, which takes a dive very deep into the workings and patois of the Mexican drug cartel.

Kushner's book, set in the 1970s, is a coming-of-age novel about Reno, a woman in her 20s, born in Nevada, who has a fascination with motorcycles that she turns into an art career that will expose her to lust, love and locales ranging from New York to Italy.

"The Flame Throwers" is lush enough to make even the dead-sea of the Bonneville Salt Flats vibrant with life and speed.

It's on the Nevada salt flats that Reno, as part of an art project, totals out her motorcycle hurtling down the desert floor at 140 miles an hour. That's fast, but later on and riding another bike she turns in a speed of 308.506 miles per hour to take ownership of the title fastest woman on the planet.

In Italy she gets embroiled in radical Fascist politics and involved in murder and intrigue. We learn about rubber plantations and the corrupt money they produce. That should be enough to hint that this novel is writ large on a very expansive canvas. As a reader I kept waiting (fearing really) that Kushner was going to flame out and the story hit a brick wall. That never happens.

Momentum propels the story and I can't immediately think of a story-teller better than Kushner at setting a frenzied pace and keeping things moving; or any other writer who can top her facility at turning a phrase, "All you could do with words, was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment," she has a character say.

You'll be better off if you read this book; enriched and at the very least entertained.

In a word: Gripping

Not knowing anything about this book or its author, my curiosity was piqued after reading that the book had been chosen as one of the top five fiction books of 2013 by the NY Times. One of the other books in this category was "Life After Life" which was a phenomenal book, so I thought I would give this novel a try. Some of the writing was quite good, but not good enough to compensate for what was lacking in the story, characters and plot. As a reader, I never entered the story, and for me that is critical. I spent the whole book trying, quite tedious, and an occasional episode kept me going, but really the only thing I looked forward to was finishing it.

Some great moments of poetic, detached, modern observation. Bombs exploding like cauliflower, etc.
Narrative voice gets shaky sometimes...I don't know. It's ok. What can you say. Hip, stylish, funky cover, fearless female narrator who is not afraid to talk about monkey anuses one moment and then in the next do a weird riff of the Great Gatsby story of Dan Dody and young Jay Gatz to imply some sort of missed opportunity between the narrator and some undeveloped dude named Ronnie. Was the ship an allegory for the narrator? I don't know. Some cool parts in Italy, in NYC. I began this book the morning of the Boston marathon bombings poolside in Florida and then finished it two months later. The end.

Rachel Kushner's brilliant second novel makes reference to Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," and indeed the entire novel is a spiral. A chapter will begin at a certain point in the tale's chronology, spiral back and forth, and end pretty much where it begins. Ms. Kushner is a prose stylist of the first order, and she uses both first-person and third-person here, and very effectively. It's a beautifully written sendup of 1970s New York's art scene that centers around the never named "Reno," the girl on the motorcycle who wants to make movies. The story is about Reno's move from Reno to New York to the Utah salt flats (where she sets a motorcycle speed record) and back again, and then on to Italy, and back.

Throughout, the various characters the author creates appear and reappear, playing different roles--or rather the same roles in different situations. And there's a dual climax: at the New York City power blackout of 1977--the era of "The Bronx Is Burning"--and on a ski slope in Chamonix, France.

To Reno (or perhaps more properly to Ms. Kushner) Outcomes aren't always clear. "Leave, with no answer," Reno says. "Move on to the next question."

She'll leave you dazzled.

Interesting settings and historical context, but chacters were flat, and heavy foreshadowing served no apparent purpose. Found depiction of New York art scene before Soho was commercialized the most engaging.

Loved it ! The way the book is divided into different chapters of times and variation of the telling person and perspective, is a very neat way of writing, catching!
Will now get hold of Telex from Cuba !

The novel was entertaining for me as a retrospective look back at the attitudes and mores of the 70`s. I was left with a feeling of not really understanding the character's however. There could have been more levels of development of the main characters to make them more understandable. Left me with an empty feeling. I did enjoy the language and historical perspective.

After reading all the reviews for "The Flamethrowers", I expected more. It's an average novel, but I like to feel something for the characters, both the likeable ones and the ones you love to hate, and this book didn't inspire any feeling. It was a bit slow, and a bit boring, to be honest.

A kaleidoscope of lost souls adrift in NY and Italy. The author's talent is obvious but she paints the art scene in the most sad and empty way imaginable . She Does it with rich description, imagery and great skill but the burnt out lives, the narcissistic grasping .and the lack of any satisfying humanity are the reader's reward. Brilliant but .....?
That said and thought about, the book has lingered with me. It paints a grim picture of a time, young people and events that are hard to empathize with but ring the bell of painful truth. The lost souls rebel, behave foolishly, hurt others and often dwell in nirvana while seeking something they don't understand and which ultimately validates their own vacuum like "as if "existence. I did not find the book enjoyable but it's a major contribution. "the Flamethrowers" is, of course, a metaphor for that which gives the illusion of power and yet is crippled and vulnerable.
Paul

That this woman can write goes without saying. However, it seems to me that she didn't know how to end the book, so she "artfully" mixed the chapters out of chronological order and , what is left, for me, was an unsatisfying conclusion. There is a line in this which goes "The Flamethrowers are useless". If her imagery hadnt been so superior, the rest of this book would have been.

Fairly ambiguous storyline with no real conclusion at the end. The book had a lot more sex in it than I'm used to. It was recommended to me as a motorcycling book, but it's really more about art in New York in the 1970s than it is about motorcycles. As someone who has never studied art, I found a lot of insight into artists' thinking and sort of how to interpret art, but that was all tangential to the story.

The plot is about a naive girl from Nevada who moves to New York to make it as an artist. There she falls in with a group of artists who are pushing the boundaries of art, and she falls in love with a rich playboy from Italy whose father owns a motorcycle company. I suppose the story is really about her coming of age and seeing the world as a big scary place. I was put off by all of the sex--I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for that reason.

I had high hopes for this book, but after reading half, I had to abandon it. The story is ethereal, fragmented, and hard to follow. Characters introduced chapters back pop up leaving the reader sometimes puzzled about who they are. The flow is ragged, almost stream-of-cousciousness. It's a real challenge to read. Not recommended.

OMGOODNESS! I just discovered this author and her writing is absolutely fabulous. There is SO MUCH going on in this novel and the style is captivating. I am a literary "snob" in that most popular fiction is unreadable in my opinion but this author's use of words and imagery are distinctly original and accessible. From SoHo to Salt Flats to Rubber Trees to Italy...you will be transported seamlessly and effortlessly on Rachel Kushner's imaginative prose. READ THIS BOOK!

I had to really struggle to finish this book. The author tried much to hard. New York City in the 70's - lots of disturbing and unlikeable characters. Pseudo-edgy descriptions of the so-called art scene, improbably motorcyle and anarchy storylines. The main character was distant and this book was just a no. No good.

Intelligently written but I just never cared about the characters. I kept thinking something would HAPPEN. But the plot just meandered around leaving me unsatisfied. In my book club this got 11/12 thumbs down, which is unusual.

For me, Kushner’s The Flamethrowers was a deeply satisfying novel, about “pure freedom, in all its horrors”. I find its setting and subject matter very appealing—revolutionary politics and underground art scenes in both the NYC and Italy of the 1970s— because they’re very fertile novelistic grounds for the first-person narration of great macrocosmic shifts. More specifically, I found it pleasurable because of Kushner’s obvious preference for language for its own sake: the occasional surrendering of meaning to a visually attractive pairing of lesser-intuitive adjectives and nouns (“an anonymous breeze”, “pale discord”), or the submission of clean conveyance of information to a more poetic musicality (“black as melted Prussian cannons”). She employs an atmospheric prose, the ironic and less-direct creation of the specific , low-glam to high-glam fictional space in which her story will take place, I only really find elsewhere in Dana Spiotta and Don DeLillo (“…the slow drift of clouds, great fluffy masses sheared along their bottom edges like they were melting on a hot griddle”). In so doing, she is able to inhabit her imagined Americana-peppered world and criticize its assumptions, portraying each setting and character nakedly but not unmercifully. One character, in a blip of possible authorial self-reference, even says “all you could do with words was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment”.
Kushner manages to have Reno, an originally-naïve character always beholden to the insistent of men, to inhabit extremely-niche settings, New York City’s underground art scene, as well as the politically-turbulent Italian capital of the 1970s, without obfuscating the novel’s thrust in the jargon and high-brow miscellany those circles often effuse. In the same breath, a self-important artist will with nostalgic hindsight compare his work to that of the Futurists in the early twentieth century and casually wave off the consequences of an abandoned, unplanned baby. They are seen for what they are: privileged egoists whose problems are largely self-imposed.
Reno, who grows up around redneck alcoholic motorheads in near-apocalyptic Nevada, is described with grimy precision as a girl having “cake box appeal” “who may dial the same disconnected number more than once”, and she in turn describes her fellow characters as having “a palpable sense of their own future, who constructed plans and then followed them”. The artists are all adopting a pose, gut-checking each other and unknowing passersby according to some misplaced, arrogant impulse to be at the forefront of a self-defined avant garde. This is demonstrated manifestly when Reno is taken to Nevada so the skid marks of her Valera motorcycle can be recorded as art, as well as when a loose confederacy of them self-proclaim as the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. The opinions, derived from the various relative social positions of the characters in the novel, both those of the subversive NYC art scene as well as the upper-echelons of a Fascist-backwashed Italy in the 1970s, refuse to conform to a bland, historically-revisionist liberal worldview that shames the assumed orthodoxy as a cover for hyper political-correctness. Much of contemporary American fiction submits to a collective ideological rectitude, the unspoken safety valve that helps books sell because no reader is made in any way uncomfortable. Indeed, these rich crowds of characters, both in pretended social and actual capital, especially the oxidizing Italian post-aristocrats, are faintly exposed for their vanity, their blinding ego, and most of all, for their witless decline into the self-referential navel-gazing of their own flawed microcosm all while assuming themselves a caste apart from the rest of the world. This is managed deftly by Kushner without verging into a hyper-cynicism where everything is rhetorically destroyed and nothing is valorized or affirmed. Art remains intact, by the novel’s end, as a noble, human endeavor, often diluted or muddled by the short-sighted political or glamorous interests of the artist characters themselves. Art is never the problem, nor is it conferred the same closed-circle, arrogant status into which the artists reveal themselves.

Some novels are linear, taking you front point A to point B and that journey is the reason to read the novel. Others lack such a linear plot and instead revel in painting a portrait of scenes and characters that captures a certain feeling, or a certain time. The Flamethrowers falls into this second category. It isn't about anything but also manages to be about everything all at once. There is no real plot here; rather, Kushner paints a beautiful, detailed portrait of a young woman traveling through the 1970's, through New York's art scene, and through the post-hippie radicals in New York and Italy. Despite the lack of a plot, the novel is about so many subjects: love, freedom, hope, fear, sex, art, speed, friendship, revolution, and people trying to decide who they are, or who they want to be.

What I love most about The Flamethrowers is not what it is about, but how Kushner tells it: she has a way of creating vivid scenes that burn bright, detailing the little sounds that bring the scene to life ("the silky glide of toolbox drawers, the tink of wrenches dropped on the hard salt"), the personal details that make her characters real (mechanics with "their belts buckled off center to avoid scratching the paint"), and sharp dialogue that will make you feel you are there, eavesdropping on their conversations.

The main character is never even named, sometimes called Reno based on her hometown. That Kushner never gives her a name, however, is not an indication that the reader should not expect to come to know her: most of the novel takes place within her head, where Kushner uses Reno's power of observation to paint her portraits with a fine brush. The world seen through Reno's eyes is both fascinating and a farce, full of people pretending to be who they aren't while innocent Reno simply tries to be.

Reno reminded me of some of my favorite literary characters: Sal Paradise of On The Road and Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby. Both were optimistic outsiders trying to make sense of their new worlds and managed to bring the reader into their minds and into the scenes they were living in. Like Paradise and Carraway, Reno is seduced by larger-than-life characters you won't forget. Through her eyes, Kushner takes you into Reno's world, a place I was sad to leave by the end.