The Flamethrowers

"I was the girl on layaway. And it wasn't Ronnie who'd put me on layaway. It was something I had done to myself."

That quote, in a nutshell, is why I didn't like this book.
I don't at all believe characters need to be likable for me to enjoy a story. Often the more unsavory the character, the more exciting the book. And really the issue isn't even whether I "like" a character or not, but whether they fascinate me, even a little bit. It feels stupid putting it in this vague way but--a character has to be something. There has to be some glimmering reason why we're following a particular person's life, why we're engaging with their inner monologue.

I think with this one, Kushner sort of shot herself in the foot. Having decided to tell the story of a young woman who speaks very little, goes where people take her and does what people (ie men) want her to without objection, we are given a narrative where the narrator has effectively removed herself from her own story. There were pages and pages of dialogue between random characters saying senseless things they think sound intelligent, while our narrator, "Reno," sits by, inert and charmless, rarely part of the action, hardly ever making the slightest impact upon the people she encounters. If this happens often enough (it did) and the other characters are tedious enough (they were), then isn't anyone's natural response to demand, in a fit of bored frustration, why the hell should I care? The problem seems fundamental and maybe inescapable: a story about a self-described "layaway" will always be a secondary story, never the headliner.

It's fashioned as the primary story though. But then almost every other chapter focuses on the Valera family history, beginning during WWI and ending in present day. The Valeras are makers of motorcycles and tires--successful in business, but despised by their country folk for their historical ties to fascism and their perceived ill-gotten wealth. I know very little about late 20th century Italian history (it was apparently a time of heightened class tension, in case you didn't have a clue either), and Kushner drops us into that scene with little fanfare, making me wish for slightly more context earlier on. My transition from ignorance to understanding felt accidental.

So what, might you ask, does an Italian family have to do with Reno? Excellent question. I thought the separate stories didn't mesh well. The novel was choppy, unfocused, and seemed transparent in its attempt to combine two perspectives that don't really relate to each other. Temporarily focusing on one story felt like a cheap distraction from the other, a way of prematurely cutting things off before they could fully develop. But the stories are connected, however slipshod the editing may be, because Reno starts dating one of the heirs of the Valera dynasty. The heir that couldn't give a crap about the dynasty. So why should I?...I kept thinking indignantly, as I skimmed the section where Reno and Valera take a trip to Italy to visit the family he dislikes...

WHY INDEED. That's my other problem with The Flamethrowers: I don't know what the heck I should care about because the book doesn't know what it wants to be about. The NYC art scene? Motorcycles and land speed records? Skiing? Underground movements? The infamous Valera family? Italian politics? American politics? The wackjobs you meet in NYC? A guileness, incredibly boring girl, fresh out of art school, looking for someone to cling to? It's all in there, and it all suffers for getting less individual attention than it should. The author needed to pick and choose, starting with who this book is about. Because it was about Reno, but it felt like it really wanted to be about the Valeras. Not that the Valera's particularly compelling either. Like Reno, I got the sense that Kushner takes them all seriously, and what an awkward situation it is for the reader to realize these characters are ridiculous before the author ever does.

Of course like any book that sabotages itself, there were elements I liked, peeking out from under all the narrative rubble. In fact, I enjoyed the first 100 pages. Reno is on her own for most of them, and she seems passionate--a person with interests, talent, and a slight bit of ambition. She also seemed observant to me.

Then she takes up with the much older Sandro Valero (established artist, estranged Valera), and their relationship, ("passionate" and "loving," but actually manipulative) dominates her part of the story--a relationship that began with her and him in a movie theater, his hand up her skirt as they pretend to watch a movie. But like, he put a coat over her lady bits so, chivalrous yeah?

Really, Reno is one of the least clever heroines I've come across in a while. You don't expect her type to pop up in literary fiction unless satirically, but this wasn't satire. As I said, Kushner takes her characters seriously. And so I suffered through Reno's first person narration, knowing her "problem" well before she did.

This book, beautifully written by Rachel Kushner, was a National Book Award fiction finalist, and also #3 on the Times Best of Books of 2013.

Ah, "beautifully written." This phrase can encompass so much about writing. One could argue that Anne Rice's vampire novels are beautifully written, with their attention to detail. One could also argue (and I do) that James Lee Burke's Robicheaux novels are beautifully written, making you feel as if you are walking the streets of New Iberia, Louisiana. However, Burke and Rice have not been selected as finalist for the National Book Award - as their works are, sadly, viewed as genre fiction as opposed to literary fiction.

There is no doubt that Kushner's book is in the latter category. It is not an easy read, it is not something you can race through, and makes you think once you finish the book. The book is essentially historical fiction, being set in the tumultuous times of the mid-1970's in Italy, but also there are some flashback scenes to World War II. I generally do not like fiction set in the 1970's, for various reasons, partially because I was born in 1970 and feel some odd ownership over the decade. Another reason I am not fond of this time period in fiction, is that generally you cannot go two sentences without someone popping LSD, singing the Stones or Pink Floyd, or shooting up. I am not so naive to realize these were prevalent behaviors during this decade, but not in my little narrow view of the world during that decade (no, that actually came in the 1980's).

But back to THIS book. This book does not have a drug scene every other sentence, although it is rampant with very casual scenes of sex and light drug use. The book alternates between New York and Italy, with a few scenes in Nevada thrown in. The art world of New York and the world of privileged Italians literally clash in Kushner's second work. Reno (not her real name), the female narrator, is an art school graduate who goes to New York, with no thoughts of falling in love, but ironically, with the thought of a boy from her art school whom she admired. She meets a waitress, Giddel, who becomes her first friend. The problem with Giddel is that she constantly reinvents herself, and Reno is never sure what is the truth and what is a fabrication. Giddel works as a waitress as a form of art. Reno next meets Nadine and Thurman, and an unnamed man, and spends an incredible night drinking and hearing fascinating stories from these three. Again, stories she is not sure are true or just some fiction the tellers repeat to make themselves seem larger than life. She gets a job, meets a man, races a bike, and continues listening to stories of people who are nominally famous in the New York art scene.

Reno is bold, moving to New York, not in search of a man, but still trying to find the art student she admired. Yet, she has a backwards view of men and women, and of sex. It was the 70's, free love, people being bold and brave where men were concerned, not shy, not scared. Yet, Reno clings to men, forms attachments, first to the nameless man from her night with Thurman and Nadine, then with Sandro, a member of a monied Italian family. Reno is quite timid and shy with Sandro, taking his lead, not exerting herself, for fear of angering and subsequently, losing him. Reno is an anomaly in a sea of feminists who were coming of age in the mid 1970's, and so stands out.

I read numerous reviews of this book (as I always do), and many said, "no plot," "no discernible storyline," and so on. That is really true. There's not so much a storyline to follow in this book so much as an ocean of lies and entanglements. You, as the reader, get to ponder and reflect, as Reno does, what is the truth about the people she meets? Is there no one normal in the city? It's an interesting reflection of the art world and how artists are constantly trying to create new forms of artwork to make a statement, which is met with skepticism by people from outside the artists' community.

The book is a tale of jealousy and even greed in some instances. Other than the love Reno feels for so many people/men she encounters, love does not abound within these pages. In its place is sex, power, and political machinations, but not those of Vietnam or Nixon - none of the usual places where authors attempt to retell the history of the 1970's; that is the most unique aspect of the story - the telling of Italian history during that decade.

Did I love this book? No, I did not love this book, and felt like I sometimes was adrift in all the beautifully written prose, struggling to see where the story was connected. However, once I finally finished, I do have to admit to a grudging like of the book, because it was so beautifully and uniquely written. Many authors are descriptive, and many books are lies. Yet, this author takes the lies of the characters and turns them into lush vignettes, leaving you wanting more.

I wondered halfway through, "how was this book a finalist in the National Book Awards, yet others were long listed?" Although not my favorite, I completely "get it" now. Kushner's medium is words and her canvas a blank piece of paper. Through her beautiful writing, this book is as much a visual masterpiece as a lingual one.

I am sorry to see that there is not a grade lower than one to rate this book.
This has to be the worst excuse for a work trying to pass as literature that I have seen lately.
Reads like some 13 year olds diary.

it is sad to see that this is what is now considered worth of a national book review.

this is not a bad book and it has some decent to very good writing. but if you want to instill a love of learning in someone, keep this book away from them. it is a book for someone who does not need to be kept interested, or enthralled by swift narrative or brilliant writing.

this book has some good elements. an under 30 chicklet who is not fat. ok already that beats 95% of the books out there.

the writer knows her italy and the bits about the milanese family and the business of tyres and motorcycles is good. full credit to an american who understands that japanese sewing machines and american sofas on wheels [hondas and harleys] are NOT motorcycles. the imaginary italian mark valera represents the range of ducati, guzzi, laverda, benelli, morini etc

the representation of the red brigades is also quite well done.

the only thing wrong with this book is that it is written by someone who CAN write, but she shows us no hunger, no visceral NEED to write.

Rachel Kushner writes beautifully. Time and again reading this novel you'll pause to admire a near-perfect sentence or to marvel at an innovative description or a simile that bursts with freshness. Consider for example this evocative passage: "It was the morning of the fourth of July and kids were lighting smoke bombs, sulfurous coils of red and green, the colors dense and bright like concentrated dye blooming through water." Wow. Hardly a page goes by which doesn't contain another such well polished gem. Unfortunately, extraordinary prose can only serve as a pillar for a novel, it can't be the entire foundation. Different readers rely on different aspects of a novel to carry the whole, but for me writing alone isn't enough. When it comes to "The Flamethrowers" other deficiencies of plot and character proved too weighty and subsumed the whole.

Other reviewers and the description have summarized the novel's premise, but here is my take: a beautiful young woman -- the narrator -- recently out of college with a penchant for motorcycles and dreams of becoming an artist moves to New York from out west. She is nicknamed Reno for the city of her birth and quickly falls into the New York art scene of the late 70s. As a plot, this contains all of the needed ingredients for a fine novel.

Yet "The Flamethrowers" depends on Reno captivating the reader. Time and again, she fails at this task for the simple reason that Reno spends so much time "observing" that she forgets, it seems, ever to make any genuine choices. Instead she drifts. She meets people and goes along with them, befriends this one and sleeps with that one, but she seems far more interested in giving us those surroundings than ever really engaging with the plot. The resulting novel often more drags than flows.

To be clear, her observations are often keen, but they feel as though they have less to do with the story and more to do with the author working towards a broader theme. The lives of the rich? Reno has penetrating insights on the irony that just as the wealthy once only ate the whitest white bread as a sign their bounty, now that everyone can eat it, they favor what they once would have considered peasant dark loaves. Likewise in art, Reno muses on the difference between those outside and those in, and how fluidly one can move over those lines. Yet these observations often feel like they are less authentically those of Reno groping to understand her strange new world, and more Kushner groping to offer deep insights.

Perhaps no where is this issue more acute than in the novel's portrayal of New York's SOHO neighborhood in transition. As with the plot, this novel's SOHO feels oppressively thin, more concept than living breathing cultural nexus. Contrast this, for example, with the same neighborhood offered in the same period in Irini Spanidou's "Before" where one gets a sense of the place's real vibrancy. Instead one gets the sense that the setting is offered more as a point of contrast to the modern world and a point of commentary, a movie lot set. In a way, Reno as a character suffers from a similar problem: she is more a collection of attributes than an a recognizable whole, more carefully constructed cypher than someone who leaps into the reader's mind.

On the power of her prose alone -- not to mention the strength of her wonderful debut "Telex From Cuba" -- I will eagerly await Kushner's next novel. "Telex" left my heart pounding with a story I couldn't put down. Unfortunately, with "The Flamethrowers" that same heart rarely even quickened as I trudged my way to the end.

I found it difficult to empathize with any of the many characters in this novel. A group of all age pretentious artists or wannabes in 60/70s NYC. The main character, Reno, goes to New York to give her life meaning, but instability ensues. Sadly, this reader didn’t care.

This book should be better than it was. About 1/3 through I realized how slow going it was, and how uninteresting, despite the flashy settings and time periods. I plowed through it and it wasn't terrible, but it sure isn't as good as the ten pages of laudatory blurbs at the beginning proclaim. There's just not really a story here, and the characters just aren't compelling for some reason.

I'm not sure what to say about THE FLAMETHROWERS. Rachel Kushner's second novel is certainly ambitious, has some tremendously beautiful language, a plot that covers decades and two continents and characters, if not always likeable, certainly complex and completely drawn. I was so at sea, however, after finishing this novel that stretches to almost 400 pages that I read two interviews with the author to gain some insight as to what she wanted to accomplish with this novel that critics are praising. (Colm Toibin finds "her style amazing" and Jonathan Franzen's convinced me to read this book after I ran across his comments about her in the NEW YORK TIMES "By the Book" series.) Ms. Kushner says that she "combines 1970's radical politics in Italy with the art world in New York and motorcycle racing in the American West." That she can pull all these elements together and weave all the different story-lines into a narrative that keeps you reading certainly shows a great deal of brilliance on her part. And I certainly was not surprised to learn that she has owned a motorcycle. The chapter "Spiritual America" and others told by the first person narrator whose nickname is "Reno" surely could not have been written by someone who has never straddled one of these two-wheelers. (In fact, some of these passages made me-- for the first time in my long life-- want to ride a motorcycle, no small accomplishment on the part of Ms. Kushner.)

Ms. Kushner says that "I have learned a lot waiting for people who don't show," which is the position that Reno finds herself in too many times. Certainly the novel is about the difficulties of relations between men and women-- at least these characters. The lines from a Beatles song come to mind: "We were thinking about the space between us all." There is nothing resembling any kind of a very loving relationship-- at least for long-- between any of these characters. To quote Ms. Kushner again on her novel: "Is a sense it is my attempt to understand why some people feel too incomplete to let themselves be loved," as she refers in particular to the character Sandro Valera. Since he treats Reno so badly, I was glad to see more about why he did what he did in a chapter near the end of the novel. Finally, there is a certain loneliness that seems to permeate this novel that haunts you upon completion.

A word about Ms. Kushner's prowess with the English language. Here are only two examples from dozens of possibilities: "Every few minutes an engine screamed as a vehicle flew off the line, spewing a rooster tail of salt from under each rear tire." And the artist Reno's words: "The salt itself, up close, was the color of unbleached sugar, but the sunlight used it as if it were the brightest white. It was only when a cloud momentarily shifted over the sun and cast the earth in a different mood, cool and appealingly somber, that the salt revealed its true self as a light shade of beige. When the cloud moved away, everything blanced to the white sheen of molybdenum grease."

Vintage motorcycles. Conceptual Art. New York. The 70’s. Left-wing Italian politics. Rachel Kushner’s second novel has all the makings of a literary darling—and indeed that has been the book’s fate so far. While Kushner manages to ride the fumes of her modishly eclectic material, this novel doesn’t simply coast on style alone, for it is also a beautifully subtle story of love, friendship, and independence. A young and beautiful motorcycle enthusiast (nicknamed “Reno”) moves from the arid no-man’s land of Nevada to New York, hoping to break into the art world. She develops a relationship with Sandro, an accomplished artist with a mysterious, aristocratic family background. Sandro rapidly becomes the catalyst of the novel’s loosely structured thread—he strings Reno along the many social gatherings of the art-world and ultimately to the ultra-rich milieu of Italy, his home. There Reno is catapulted into the frenzied machinations of political rebellion, where the struggle for self-articulation becomes equally the struggle of life. Flamethrowers is at times sloppy, at times too loosely constructed, and yet there is no denying its raw energy and lyrical powers of description. Here, the blind forces of class, identity, and history converge with the unyielding vision of artistic self-creation. An ambitious and tremendously exciting novel.

First off, let me comment on the writing in The Flamethrowers. While I'm generally a fault finder when it comes to prose, I found Rachel Kushner's quite lovely and especially polished. It was refreshing not to have to slog through so-so writing.

That said, the narrator in this tale is a bit of a question mark. At least at first. This isn't the quickest read and you'll need to pay attention and be thoughtful as you progress. Reno (after Reno, the town) (her actual name seems to be purposely withheld) appears to go off on tangents that sometimes feel out of place but become useful at later moments in the story. There's a method to Kushner's seeming madness and non-linear progression. Stay focused and you'll get the payoff in the end.

The visual images of 1970s New York City are spectacular but it's less of a plot driven story and more of a portrait of a young woman navigating a particular iconic era in history. Or a better way to describe it is a portrait of life through the internal ideas of that woman from the inside out - art, motorcycles, romance, travel, politics, revolution - there's so much going on at any given moment in this story but in the end it gels.

My one criticism about Reno is her passiveness. This is an instance of letting life happen to you rather than driving life forward. While I know this passive attitude is probably more common than not in today's world, the 1970s had a different vibe with lots of underlying anger and movement.

Putting that aside, I recommend this novel by an incredibly talented writer who hopefully has more to give us and who will continue to hone her skills.

I may just give this a complete second read.

Rachel Kushner writes beautifully. Time and again reading this novel you'll pause to admire a near-perfect sentence or to marvel at an innovative description or a simile that bursts with freshness. I love reading about the strangeness of mid-twentieth century art history and politics (sexual and otherwise). I was really looking forward to this ambitious and well reviewed work, which promised to be a riotous trip through these themes. Hardly a page goes by which doesn't contain another such well polished gem. Unfortunately, extraordinary prose can only serve as a pillar for a novel, it can't be the entire foundation. Different readers rely on different aspects of a novel to carry the whole, but for me writing alone isn't enough. I was also quite interested in reading about the role of women in the world of avant-garde of art and political radicalism in the 60s and 70s and the paradoxes of sexism among radicals is a fascinating example we consider "progressive". The themes are meaty and complex but the characters at time can seem from central casting and the situations feel too researched as opposed to fully embodied but all in all I would say it is an excellent book, bravo.

I was very much prepared to dislike this read. I had the proverbial sleeves rolled up , expecting some bad pretentious rant of sorts. But I was pleasantly surprised at how strangely engaging this read turned out to be.

As I started reading, I became more and more intrigued with the extraordinary richness of the prose, falling down a rabbit hole of sorts as far as "plot", but being vastly engaged all the more. Soon enough, I didn't care where Ms. Kushner was taking me. Wow, this is pretty good, I thought--but what I deeply enjoyed was the dark, often biting, dry-witted asides--from the tale of the couple who pretended that the wife was an amputee to the oddball family history of the Italian matriarch—one ancestor being ravaged by a pet bear, another contracting Elephantitis in the buttocks where a special plank of wood had to be constructed to keep the swollen derriere in place at bedtime, to the “White Lady”- and everything that is white about her, including White Shoulders perfume, and buying mayonnaise at the local market. Actually, I found myself laughing heartily, noting that not one critic had even bothered to mention how funny this read is in many instances. How could they bypass the nutty humor?

It assures me that these blurbs from the writers on the cover were most likely concocted by the publisher with nary a writer actually reading the work save skimming its pages here and there, and doing a sign off on the said quote.

Dazzling, energizing, perceptive, but don't expect a riveting story with characters you can actually feel and touch. Actually, this is not a novel, but sketches and meditations of sorts put into a novelistic format. An interesting and weirdly enjoyable read.

Beautifully written, this novel well reveals what's it's like to be a young/newly arrived person who hasn't yet fully formed their identity in their new surroundings. The main character, Reno, may seem passive, but she's critically observant. At one point, in a rebuttal to another character's criticism that a girl's outrageous costume has "been done before," Reno thinks, "but it's never been done by her. It's new to her." And that's the point of Reno - we may cringe at the mistakes she makes, which seem so glaringly obvious to the reader, as she passively accepts the faults of those around her without defending herself. But...she's new to the art world, new to being an independent adult, and new to New York City. She's experiencing this new life on her own terms and timeline. The New Yorkers that surround her may obviously come across as jaded and selfish to the reader, but Reno seems optimistic that at it's heart, the world is as sincere and gentle as she is. And over the course of the novel, with some painful assistance from those who dazzled & bewitched her at first, thanks to her balanced observations, she doesn't turn as cruel or detached as those damaged people are, but, more successfully, she begins to claim her own more mature emotional and intellectual space. The contrast to the brutish life of the original Valera serves as a great foil to Reno as well.

This novel could be viewed as a study in cultural contrasts with linkage provided by a particular brand of Italian motorcycle. Its lineage is a story in and of itself. Primarily, though, the author explores the world of the New York art scene and the Italian social upheavals of the 1970's through the eyes of a young, impressionable recent film school graduate nicknamed Reno for her roots to that town and mindset. Her obsession with motorcycles, particularly with an Italian brand, prompts her to create "land art" as her contribution to that scene and also to travel to Italy for a promotional event for the motorcycle company. She's molded, or at least heavily influenced, by these events, but is she transformed in any meaningful way?

The New York art scene chews up major portions of this work and is depicted in agonizing detail. Perhaps that's the author's point; tedium prevails, as one listens to these so-called artists droning on both sophomorically and sententiously on the relevance of their output, while offering insipid philosophical insights straight out of a Seinfeld episode.

By contrast, and without giving too much away, the Red Brigades, anarchists, militant labor unions, and assorted other dissidents to which she is exposed in Italy have heartfelt, deeply passionate convictions for social change, however naïve and misguided they are as to likelihood of success, Arab spring notwithstanding.

Reno has social and romantic ties with both of these worlds, and again her passion for motorcycles gives her a stabilizing emotional center point.

Characters both shallow and complex are depicted with an exacting eye for those peculiar and telling traits we all possess.

Anything as over-hyped as The Flamethrowers is bound to disappoint. And it does. However, I would say to anyone struggling in the early stages of the book to hang in there. It does improve.

This is the story of a young woman who leaves her Nevada home to try and become a successful new-wave artist in 1970s New York. The charismatic Ronnie, with whom she has a one-night stand, nicknames her Reno after her home-town; we never get to know her real name. Her attraction to Ronnie persists, even after she becomes coincidentally involved in a long affair with his best friend, Sandro Valera, also a successful artist.

Sandro is a scion of a fabulously wealthy family who own Milan's vast motor tyre company, Valera, and it is when Reno stays in the family's palatial Lake Como retreat that the novel finally catches fire. It's during the parts of the story that are set in New York that Rachel Kushner's narrative seems to go adrift. Along with the tiresome figures from the New York art scene, there's also a sub-Bolano section about a renegade group of anarchists. All Kushner's characters suffer from a distancing effect and even Reno herself is difficult to engage with. And whilst Kushner's prose is clever, the coolness makes it difficult for the reader (or, at least, this reader) to give much of a damn about any of them. It has its moments though. 3.5 stars.

In many publications’ 2013 Top Ten lists, The Flamethrowers starts strong, with the heroine testing her new-model Valera motorcycle and her nerve at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Coincidentally, she’s taken up with Sandro Valera, a sculptor of aluminum boxes in Manhattan, where she hopes photographs of her bike’s tracks across the flats will make her mark in the early 1970′s art world, too. This naive gal from Reno, Nevada, is always a couple of steps off pace, trying to hold her own among the older, jaded New York artists and hangers-on, and falls hopelessly behind when Sandro takes her to his wealthy family’s villa above Lake Como. There she encounters the really sharp social knives. Her interactions with Sandro’s mother are breathtaking. I won’t say more about plot, in case you decide to read it. Nice writing. Here’s a sample: “Roy Orbison’s voice entered the room like a floating silk ribbon . . . “And the hair. Black as melted-down record vinyl.”

This is the story The Flamethrowers tells: Young women trying to make their way in the world, fierce and ambitious, are waylaid by people who use for their own purposes. The young women think they are being appreciated for their own instrinic selves, for their wit, their insights, their focused energy. When they realize that the attention has nothing to do with who they are, only for their youth, their freshness, they are embarrassed, ashamed. But if they are strong and capable they get back on track, a little smarter and bitter. Reno realizes, far into the book and after a lot of confusion and embarrassment: "I was the girl on layaway... It was something I had done to myself." This story has been told before but never with a such strong, speed-loving protagonist. This book is flat-out exciting focused and fast--like Reno on her Moto Valera, tracing lines on the Bonneville salt flats. And the language is as original and intense as Reno.

For the 2nd time this year a book has completely confounded me as a reader. This time it's Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers" which is a weird story involving a girl named Reno & a cast of characters that takes you across various decades in Italian history & a sequence of events that honestly to me made very little sense. The plot for the most part is overcomplicated by the flashbacks & sexual references that pervade the book in places that completely come out of nowhere. Within this range of characters & plot lines is a story that tries to know where it wants to go, but is uneven at times & confusing. This is a book I may need to revisit again to figure out what it was I read or perhaps forget about since I'm not sure a 2nd pass would clear up the fog.

Race cars on the Bonneville salt flats, the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, Italy during the turmoil of Red Brigade campaigns. After gathering laudatory reviews, some bordering on gushing, Rachel Kushner's second novel launched with considerable momentum. Unfortunately, the book doesn't live up to its buildup.

It does contain some striking descriptive prose - salt sands shape shifting under noon glare, the chiaroscuro of a ski run at twilight, looting in Manhattan during a power failure - but the sum is not greater than the parts because the disparate elements of this novel don't cohere into some form of higher order or understanding. We are left with a series of vignettes about characters who are self-absorbed or enigmatic or both. It's hard to connect with Reno, the young girl at the center of the story who migrates from the hinterlands to the big city, or her older Italian lover Sandro, or Sandro's father, soldier, exploiter of Brazilian Indians, arch-capitalist. The artists and hangers on who populate the New York section of the story are intermittently amusing, almost always deceitful. Some of them can really spin a story, but those stories slow the novel's forward thrust, until, finally, it peters out.

The book might have worked better as a group of short stories. This is an undeniably talented writer, who in this instance too closely mirrors the posturing, randomness and incoherence of the period she is writing about.

From beginning to end my interest was held every moment by the narrator a young woman who grew up in Nevada, moves to New York (where she gets nicknamed "Reno") hoping to make a sucess in the art world, and attaches herself to Sandro, an older, highly successful artist who comes from a wealthy Italian family that he disdains, to a point. There is so much about this work that rings true. At times I felt like I was reading about real people -- Reno's presence, her emotions and perceptions, and Sandro's life and way of expressing himself, were that vivid, as were many of the characters who come and go throughout the book -- Sandro's circle of friends, ex-radicals and hangers-on. Essential to (and not in any way apart from) the narrative is the history of how Sandro's father acquired his wealth, from his knowing exploitation of Brazilian rubber workers to his alignment with fascism in building what would become a (fictional) world-famous make of motorcycles. This is mainly a love story - but it's a love that ends, first in disillusionment and betrayal, and then in political awakening of a sort. Kushner is a terrific writer. A subject that might be didactic in another writer's hands is deftly handled -- personalized and interwoven with Reno's life and relationship with Sandro. I was also constantly delighted by Kushner's writing style and turns of phrase. Those the store reviewers who thought that the characterizations were thin or that the book dragged in places just didn't get it. Too bad for them.

I stuck with Flamethrowers to the end, convinced that at some point the book would reveal itself to be something more than what it appears to be--namely, a bunch of people desperate to show us how cool they are. Given its critical acclaim, I thought there had to be more to it, but I was wrong. The characters are caricatures of themselves. It's actually sad to see how hard they try to appear effortless, sadder still that coolness is their paramount goal in life. There was such an opportunity to expose the ridiculousness of these poseurs; Flamethrowers could have been a brilliant farce. Instead, Kushner actually takes these people seriously, and the book is her attempt to show us how cool she is. She's such a talented writer. Would love to see her write about something that actually matters.

I finally finished this novel. So why the four star review? She has an ability with prose that is worthy of the recognition she has received. Is this a page turner? For me it was not. Beautiful ideas and strings of imagery that floored me at times. There are also some interesting characters who held my attention. I agree with other reviewers that at times the book reads more like vignettes then a traditional novel. I was not disturbed, as some readers were, with her narrators lack of voice. I did not agree that this experiment created a central character with no character. I feel like I got a sense of her. I also found the technique engaging. But much like the modern art movement that is a central feature of the novel- there may not be enough transparency for some readers. Modern art in that time frame was quite the internal conversation- just in the art world, about the world. That said- I enjoyed the novel that took me awhile to finish, and found her to be an excellent word smith with much to offer the literary community.

Interestingly, this book generated a lot of discussion, which is always an indication that there is a lot of "there" there. In other words, it hardly leaves people cold...However, I did not find in many of the reviews much mention of the Italian aspect of the story, where Ms. Kushner presents a meticulously researched view of the social and political turmoil in Italy in the "Years of Lead". This is fascinating stuff for anyone who is aware of what went on during that time. I see the book as 2-fold: part of it is a marvelous riff on the art scene in the 1970's in New York and part of it is social commentary on post-war Italy, NOT the Italy tourists look for, though...That's why the book is so challenging and so satisfying. She goes beneath the surface in the European settings and skims the glittering surface in the New York scenes. Quite an achievement!!!

The novel opens with a flashback to World War I. T.P. Valera is ripping a headlight off the crashed motorcycle of his dead friend. Valera kills a German soldier with the afore-mentioned headlight as he came rushing through a forest of trees. The novel will return periodically to T.P. Valera to follow his story from rags to riches making his fortune in rubber in the jungles of the the store and subsequently making motorcycles in Italy.
T.P. Valera is the father of Sandro Valera, a famous and successful artist in the 1970s who has fled his wealthy and distinguished life in Italy. Sandro is the lover of the novel’s main protagonist and narrator, Reno (so called because that is where she hails from) a young woman in her early twenties who after finishing her art degree has moved to New York. She is obsessed with speed, engines (specifically motorbikes) and land-speed records. Reno is a conceptual artist and in New York she is sucked, willingly, into the bohemian world of artists, revolutionaries and menace.
The novel is set (apart from the flashbacks) post-Watergate, post Nixon, post-Vietnam. Watergate and Nixon’s involvement not only polarized America but also politicized it. The Baby Boomers had decided that the older generation could no longer be trusted to run their country and what America needed was a grassroots revolution, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Reno though not directly involved with the radical revolutionaries in New York falls within their orbit as she becomes part of the Manhattan Soho scene.
Reno is fascinated with capturing “the experience of speed” which she readily displays when she photographs the tracks left by her crashed motorcycle after a speed trial on the salt flats of Bonneville. This “experience of speed” is not limited to fast motorbikes but to the rapidity of her move to New York, her inclusion into the Soho art scene and her sexual relationship with the fast talking, storytelling Ronnie Fontaine the photographer, (whose photographs we get to know very little about).

‘“Speed is every man’s right’ was Honda’s new ad slogan, but speed was not a right. Speed was a causeway between life and death and you hoped you came out on the side of life.”

This need to “experience speed” is not only limited to Reno but also to many of the other characters, especially Sandro who needs to live his life at an abnormally fast speed and this includes his apparent need to live with Reno as soon as possible after having seen her face in a film.
Though we know that Reno, Sandro, Ronnie etc are artists we are never fully aware what the art they are producing is. What descriptions there are, are vague, nebulous and opaque. One has to assume that this was the intention of the author.

“There were tacit rules with these people, and all the people like them I later met: You weren’t supposed to ask basic questions. “What do you do?” “Where are you from?” “What kind of art do you make?” Because I understood he was an artist but you weren’t allowed to ask that.”

What art they produced was irrelevant in the time they lived. Any art they produced was created through their actions, their lives their own bodies. Maybe conventional art such as it was in the seventies was dead and the ‘performance’ of life was what ‘art’ had become.
Rachael Kushner has written a fascinating novel that sets fire to convention not only in terms of art but in terms of the written novel. The author’s turn of phrase is creatively honest and raw; Roy Orbison’s hair is described as, “black as melted-down record vinyl.” While talking to Ronnie and others in a bar for the first time she writes;

“I’d thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, you’re place.”

The novel reeks of machismo and testosterone with its chapters full of motorbikes, violence and misogyny. The New York art scene seems primarily male-dominated with women being allowed to be part of it but still expected to fill the male engendered roles of housewife and sexual plaything.
The title refers to Sandro’s childhood love of the his father’s assault regiment flamethrowers,

“with their twin tanks and their gas mask…The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offence…”

Rachael Kushner appears to be suggesting that the characters in her novel are “flamethrowers,” everything they do is not in defence of their way of life or who they are but is attacking those around them and those who came before them. The artists and revolutionaries are committed to a scorched earth policy; destroying the present and the past and leaving only the future for people to feed on.

First Line – “Valera had fallen back from his squadron and was cutting the wires of another rider’s lamp.”

Memorable Line – “Ronnie said that before his brother robbed banks he sold heroin in Bushwick and that is was a stupidly hard job., sixteen hour days, and his only pay was a morning and evening fix. “That’s the thing about junkies,” Ronnie said, “they work like dogs, it’s all day out on the streets and they think they’re cheating the system. I told my brother you make twelve cents an hour.”

Number of Pages – 405
Sex scenes – Yes
Profanity – Yes
Genre – (Historical) Fiction.

I was really looking forward to reading this book based on the amazing reviews. I plodded along through more than half of it, but ultimately gave up. Perhaps the reviewers read something different? I kept waiting for the bigger, brighter screen described by the NYT, wanted the book to grab me by the throat, as a reviewer wrote here. Instead, I kept looking for excuses to read something else.

While the book gave an interesting window into the 70s, it was not enough. Reno is not engaging. She is an observer, but doesn't provide enough of a filter to put what she sees in a meaningful context.

At the end of the NYT review, it says:

"This is the sound of a writer who loves to hear people talk." I would say that this is a writer who likes words. She turns a neat phrase, and for awhile, it's enough to sustain you. But ultimately it's not enough.

The same review states, "As it wraps up, “The Flamethrowers” drifts; the final chapters are provocative but elusive. Not all the pieces are ultimately made to fit, which is intentional but also frustrating."

Elusive? Nope. That's just a nice way of saying that the book has no conclusion.

BTW - I read this in a book group. Of the 8 people who were there, only 1 finished it.

I had been looking forward to this book for quite some time; it received generally glowing reviews and was a NBA finalist, obviously. About two hundred pages into this novel, I just couldn't go on. I loved the opening, and I enjoyed the scenes from the Valera's early days with the motorcycle brigades, but there is very little plot to carry things forward, and there's way too much empty conversation about abstract art taking place at odd dinner parties, and a lot of these characters are just too plain weird to really identify with--they feel archetypal rather than human. Luckily I didn't buy this book, I checked it out from the library.

Having very much enjoyed Kushner's "Telex From Cuba," I was looking forward to getting into "The Flame Throwers." What a disappointment! I actually gave up after only 50 pages,after skimming a number of paragraphs and skipping ahead to see if things were going to get any better. No such luck. Kushner's initial prose for Reno is a staccato, "i did this," "I did that" monotone, and even potentially interesting situations are rendered nearly unreadable by extraneous verbiage. And to boot, I really didn't feel any empathy for the main characters, who seemed more "artsy" types than real humans.

There are four hundred pages of beautiful prose in Rachel Kushner's novel, The Flamethrowers. I found myself rereading some sentences to marvel at her selection of just the right words to complete a description or to convey an emotion. Protagonist Reno is a motorcycle racing artist who was named after the city where she was born. Kushner presents the life of artists, revolutionary politics, identity and ideas. The path isn't straight and narrow, and most art requires close attention. For those readers with the patience to pay close attention and who are likely to appreciate the beautiful prose, the payout will be a high level of satisfaction. Most readers will know after reading an excerpt whether the novel will be appealing and worth the effort.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

As with too many books that are lauded and prized by insiders, not readers, this is pretentious twaddle. Maybe there was an interesting story to tell here, but the author, intent on language over content, didn't seem interested in telling it coherently. Going back and forth in time was no problem, the lack of focus sure was. Awful, idiotic beginning leading to nothing doesn't help either, except to show off the author's research. Info dumps galore, if that's your sort of thing. Worst of all, not a realistic character in sight.

*update December 11th, 2013* this is a NY Times Book of the Year

1975-1977 and Reno is an artist in NYC looking to merge her love of speed and motorcycles into art. The SoHo lofts are just being converted to apartments; the East Village is in an uproar of radicalism. A very exciting and heady time, I vividly remember reading all about it in the NY Times and on TV while safely 40 minutes west of NYC.

Reno has an affair with an older man, Sandro, also an artist and the heir to an Italian tire and motorcycle fortune. The couple travels to Italy, Sandro betrays her and Reno is swept away in a tide of radical terrorism that I remember all too well.

Maybe because I lived that generation it didn't offer anything to me. However the poetic writing speaks to me.

I will try this author again.

I admired the writing and the author's erudition but instead of a novel, this is a proto-fictional pastiche of hyper-macho scenes and situations. I kept wondering if the author was at all sincere about anything her characters claimed to feel about each other. And was Kushner mostly (inadvertently or not) trying to appeal to a predominantly macho/male readership by including frequent references to pornography, guns, motorcycles and violence in the streets? I felt exhausted by the time this book came to an end and was relieved when it finally did.

A much-lauded book that received a rave review from James Wood in The New Yorker, this novel is centred around Reno, a young woman who has recently arrived in New York City in the mid-1970s, with occasional shifts in point of view and some interwoven narrative from World War I and the years following. The main narrative emphasizes the New York art scene, “People and their need to interpret,” and especially conceptualism (which sometimes “meant shaping your life around an activity and calling it a performance”) and the way it changes one's concept of "real life": “‘I became authentic ... Little by little. My performed life grew roots.’”; “I turned to walk down the road, feeling like I was performing the role of a girl walking down the road, because I knew he was watching me”). At the same time, the novel does not suggest that the abandonment of an older notion of ‘authentic’ realty is a bad thing.

There are many witty and acute observations about the art scene. One I particularly liked: “the blithe declaration Ronnie once made that he hoped to photograph every living person. Sandro said it was Ronnie’s best work and something on the level of a poem: a gesture with no possible rebuttal.” This fits in with Reno’s statement that “the problem of making art [is] the problem of believing in it.” Several interesting questions of how art is understood come up: “Minimalism is a language,” Reno thinks at one point, “and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself.” "I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse that artists such as Sandro wrote long essays about, and if you didn't know the discourse, you couldn't take them for what they were, or were meant to be." This way of looking at art speaks more generally to “the problem of making art, the problem of believing in it.” And, related to all this, is a funny riff on postwar Italian neorealism film, with Rossellini ignoring the new surreality of homeless waifs living in the bombed-out film studios to go onto the street to find people to play the homeless. “We must confront our reality directly, or so the idea went. And yet the idea—'reality directly'—was "was too incredible and strange to be dealt with by the neorealists.”

Reno’s conceptual art leads her to drive a motorcycle and, later, the world’s fastest car on the Salt Flats—emphasizing how speed is thematic to much of this narrative. In this concern with speed, the earlier events, which prefigure or are part of the Italian Futurist movement, connect with the more contemporary narrative. (Futurism celebrated the rupture with the past rather than seeking to heal it and worshiped “speed and motion.” The fourth “principle” of Futurism provocatively states: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”) The sections about futurism connect to the conceptual art of the kind Reno is engaging in—a natural step-child of Futurism because her project advances theirs by literally putting art into motion (or motion into art). Together the two narrative lines say quite a lot about time, change, and art.

Time is another of the large topics in the novel: there is much about work and the way work is a loss of free time (as in the account of early twentieth-century South American peasants trapped in the rubber plantation labour). America is seen as existing in the present (“‘They don’t have histories there. They barely know what history is!’”) vs. Europe (particularly Italy), which is anchored in history. That's why speed is quintessentially American: it is an act of pure present.

Ben Lerner, has an excellent review-essay on the novel (https://www.frieze.com/issue/article/a-trace-of-a-trace/) in which he observes "how subtly but thoroughly Kushner organizes her novel around the evolving (or devolving) avant-garde dream of dissolving the art/life distinction, and how she situates that dream in the historical context of 20th-century fascism, capitalism and anti-capitalist political struggle. All of these things meet in the 1970s art world where art objects are often just the (saleable) traces of the traces of experience. Kushner’s remarkable blending of personal and transpersonal histories and her beautiful, charged prose keeps the book from ever feeling sententious – but it has also allowed critics to ignore or reduce to character psychology Kushner’s dramatization of what remains a central problematic for contemporary art and artists." He concludes: "part of the achievement of The Flamethrowers is to frame the liberatory and dangerous energies that attend breaking down the frame that separates art and life. In a sense, this is the novel at its most traditional: Miguel de Cervantes warns us against mistaking courtly romances with real life in Don Quixote (1605); Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) updates that theme. Kushner’s novel is refreshingly traditional: historical research interacts with historically illuminating fictional creations (Mota Valera, Flip Farmer, etc.). Unlike recent works by, say, Sheila Heti and Tao Lin, Kushner’s novel does not itself challenge the art/life distinction; instead, it shows how fiction is peculiarly suited to tracking the dispersion of art into performance."

The Flame Throwers is a fascinating look into the life of Reno, an artist influence by speed, movement and motorcycles. I cannot overstate how talented Rachel Kushner is as a novelist. Her descriptive prose is lush, interesting, fluid and engaging. That being said, the plot of the novel was sometimes slow and plodding. In my opinion, I believe it was because the characters weren't always drawn strongly enough. One in particular, wasn't likeable (Valera) and I couldn't really relate to.

The novel, however, is well-researched and interesting look at politics, sex and the world of art during the 1970s.

Sometimes you read a book that you know is literary and good in that way and that if you were smarter, you'd probably like it more than you did but you're not and you didn't like it at all.

That's how I feel about Rachel Kushner's "The Flame Throwers".

The beginning seemed interesting enough as I was introduced to Reno, who is from Nevada. She is an aspiring artist who was most interesting to me as a kid/teenager when she was doing all kinds of tomboy things. She goes off to NYC and catches the eye of Sandro Valera, an Italian who is the heir apparent of an Italian motorcycle empire created by his magnetic father who is simply called Valera.

The setting is an exciting one for me in that it is the late 1970s, a time that is chaotic and weird.

So I went into the book thinking that I could handle it. I was naive.

Kushner's writing is wonderful. There are no two ways about that. She writes gorgeously and she gets you into the time and place of every scene.

That said, her characters didn't resonate with me and I struggled to care about them as they went through these scenes. I liked Reno at the beginning and by the end, I really didn't care.

But I think it was because I just didn't get this book and sometimes that happens.

This is the second book by National Book Award Finalist Rachel Kushner. The subject matter could not be more different from her first book. The book is the story of a young lady named Reno who is drawn into the world of wealth, revolution and motorcycle speed records by her principle love interest Sandro whose family owns a motorcycle manufacturing plant in Italy. There is a tremendous amount on depth to her well drawn characters. My only problem is that Reno and Sandro made me feel uneasy because of their total lack of goals and direction in their lives. This might be more a commentary on me as I am a very goal oriented person. That said, this is still a very good book.

Hmmm, what do I say about this book? It was on the NYT top six best fiction of 2013. Really? I am perplexed as to why. Did I miss something? Perhaps I missed key components of the story because my mind continued to wander while reading? The story didn't grab me; however, it tried to, but then it would ramble on into some convoluted diatribe. Want-to-be artists, Valera motorcycles and tire manufacturing, exploited Brazilian rubber tree workers who do not realize in the 1970's WWII is over, racing motorcycles in the Nevada salt flats, NYC, the '70's, Italy and the Red Brigade, WWII, Italian labor unrest and riots, free love, guns, exploited women, women without a voice, and macho men. Really - do you see a connection? I didn't but I tried. I kept looking but never saw it. Kushner wrote a "Cliff notes" at the end of the book - why? Perhaps because the story was so odd she assisted the committed readers who stuck through to the end of 400 pages to decipher what they had just read. Clearly Rachel Kushner can write. There were some well done sections which held hope for the story. But in the end the story just didn't work.

The downtown art world in New York, the world of land speed records and motorcycle racing, the world of street revolutions in Italy (and in art) - all of it linked to a jaded young woman, Reno, who lives for speed and danger, her ordinary life is just adrift, and the Valera family, wealthy motorcycle manufacturers. All of it's told in immaculate, chilled-out prose.

I disliked this book. Yes, I can see what other reviewers means about Kushner's carefully selected prose and originality but I found a lot of it just plain boring. I thought the conversations by the artists in New York were pretentious and very dull. (Perhaps they were meant to be.) I was more interested in the section which took place in Italy, especially as I was there in the 70s and I recognised the types of characters that were described in this section.However, I found it difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters who didn't seem like real people to me, not even Reno. I didn't understand the point of the book. What was the writer saying about these people? Were they like the flame throwers in the Italian army - brutal but unwieldy and easily destroyed as they were so cumbersome? Did she approve of the anarchic behaviour of the Red Brigades and looters in Rome and New York? I was really relieved when I finished the book and found it a real effort to read.

Some novels ask more questions than they answer. This is one of those some. So, I will try to answer a few questions that I pose to myself. Hopefully, that answers the most important question you may have – should I read this book?

Rule 1: If you do not like the main character who writes the majority of the novel in the first person, you would be best advised to not red this book. So who is she? A 20-something college graduated girl who flirts in New York’s art scene, dates men whose age is closer to her parents’, and has little ambitions because of early life’s misdirections.

Rule 2: If you love most anything Italian, you would be best advised to read this book. There is a lot of history surrounding 20th century Italy, and the details are great and often new to the American educated reader. Her details about cars, motorcycles, rubber factories and more are a result of some thorough premanuscript research.

Rule 3: If you love pithy quips by Mediterranean people (e.g. Zorba or the Fiddler), the father of the narrator’s boyfriend, as well as other men of this novel, pull through. Paraphrasing one of my favorites, “they do so badly in most everything, that is why they are artists.” Artists, as seen by the narrator in the end, are the cultural geeks which she is not sure whether she wishes to remain among in social or other circles. One of those asked questions which seem not to be answered.

Rule 4: If you like reading more for the writing skill than the story line, this would be a book that I advise you to read. This author is a writer. She wins awards. Deservingly.

Now that you have a few guidelines, you have reasons to avoid to indulge yourself. Hope this helped.

Definitely NOT worth the time or effort required to drag yourself through this book. I'm always suckered by effusive praise, "I didn't know what it could possibly look like for something to be a supersmart, sexy novel; now I know."---Not even close!!! Jumbled, with underdeveloped characters. I did like Reno's praise of Pat Nixon as a "ratted beauty-parlor tough".

There are too many worthy books out there not to ignore this one's awards and pick up something else.

The Flamethrowers was a challenging but ultimately rewarding read for me. Kushner's prose is beautiful; among the best I've read. But the main narrator (who I guess is called Reno, but I really only recall one character referring to her as that) is a bit of a blank slate. While it becomes clear why the author has made this choice later on, it made it tough for me to connect to her or the novel at various points.

The other issue I had with becoming fully invested in the work was that it at times feels like a collection of essays. I'm not talking about the occasional temporal shifts to the history of the Valera family/corporation. There are passages where one of the characters that "Reno" is observing will rant or wax about some topic or another. These are wonderfully written and contain smart points and clever turns of phrase, but sometimes left me scratching my head after a few pages. But, like the narrator's cryptic viewpoint, this does reveal itself to be thematically relevant later on.

Rachel Kushner has many valuable things that she says with this novel - about art, and gender, and identity...among other things. This review sounds a little more negative than I meant it to, but its purpose is to encourage readers to stick with a sometimes difficult read. I know that I'm glad that I did.

When I read reviews referring to the "Great American Novel" when talking about this novel I figured it must be at least worth reading. After getting through the first 23% (a glaring inadequacy of a Kindle is the lack of page numbers!) I feel like I have simply had the wool pulled over my eyes by the womens lib crowd who, like the gays, have so successfully infiltrated the media to single-mindedly trumpet their agenda. This novel is as far away from "great" as Peyton Place. It just employs the current fad (trope) of assigning male characteristics to an otherwise female character as a way to pander to the insane notion that women really are the same as men, or the "equal" of men, or would be if it weren't for the repressive efforts of a male-dominated society (as if male dominance is a plot and not the result of the fact that it is/was males who are/were responsible for the formation of said society. If the hero would have simply been the male that he should have been, this novel would not have attracted any attention at all. There is some good writing along the way, but not very much and a lot of it seems like the kind of stuff learned at literary workshops. Read a little of this and then read some John Updike and you'll quickly be able to see the relative levels of "wordsmithery". It's like watching Serena Williams and then thereafter Roger Federer - the difference in quality is almost embarrassing!

Once a generation, if we are fortunate, a writer like Rachel Kushner comes along and captures our imagination. I won't say that this book is not without its flaws ( not the least of which is its unsatisfactory ending) but I will say that this book contains some of the best fiction writing I've read in years: racing the Moto Valera on the Salt Flats, the villa in Italy, the riot in Rome and Reno's stay with the anarchists ( to name a few). Read this book because the writing is brilliant, really brilliant, and Rachel Kushner is only going to become an even stronger author as she matures. Telex from Cuba also recommended.

As many other reviewers have noted, Rachel Kushner writes beautiful, and The Flamethrowers certainly contains some of the most beautiful prose I've seen in a long time. Unfortunately, it never really manages to to rise above feeling like a very long impressionistic poem. And I think a large part of this is that there is a fundamental mismatch between style and character.

Reno, the protagonist and narrator through most of the book, is obsessed with speed. Yet the story and narration float, full of long digressions and detailed passages and characters giving speeches, and Reno remains a fundamentally passive character. So it never actually feels like Reno is a real character; she's just a beautiful cipher for Kushner to wax elegaically about art and gender and revolution and, yes, speed. I actually would have preferred this novel had it been a series of essays by Kushner rather than a novel; I would have at least been spared the tedium of a bunch of pompous New Yorkers and the letdown of her portrayal of the upheaval of 1970s Italy. When I'm promised revolutionary politics, I want more than for the main character to just tangentially glide through for a couple of chapters, as happens here.

In the end, I finished The Flamethrowers because it was due the next day at the library and I hadn't gotten to what I'd hoped would be the good part (the revolution). Without the deadline, it might still be lingering on my "to be finished" pile. As it stands, I thought The Flamethrowers was a relatively enjoyable, beautifully written, and at times thought-provoking (though Reno/Kushner's observations rarely rise much above cliche) read. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a hound for style. If you're looking for a good story and engaging characters, look elsewhere.

Here 's a highly hyped book that falls on its flaws. It's cool, hip, intellectual and detached - but fails to deliver interesting characters, and anything more than contrived narrative. Moreover, the 'heroine' seems to have the emotional pulse of someone on life support. Many reviewers have praised the author's elegant prose, and rightly so. However, she is much better at set pieces like dinner parties than conveying action (the tumult she tries to depict in street riots). (Her use of contemporary slang in a period novel is jarring, however.). The French novelist Michel Houellebecq is far better at this sort of thing than Kushner. His mordant wit and deadpan humor go along way in this high gloss, so-called post modern style. The Flame Throwers is mostly a flame-out.

It is audacious of Kushner to set her novel in the '70s of the Weathermen and the Red Brigades, a time still fresh in the minds of many living people but that she could recover only at second hand. The themes are of exploitation, violence, rebellion, yet the best parts are the quietest. There's a scene that's worth the whole book in which a group of bored, unlikeable people are sitting around at a party - maybe an after-party, it's hard to sort through all the drinking occasions - and one of them starts telling a story so vivid that it nails everybody in place. The storyteller is a known liar and nobody cares; he's getting at something truer than the lives they're living. It's a great moment. There are other fine moments of social observation, mostly around tables in Italy, that prove the writer's skills as a listener. The book can't sustain its peak levels, and it sometimes feels stitched together from parts, but they are compelling parts.

Picked this up in the airport where its really difficult to find a decent read: was pleasantly surprised:
as an artist myself, and this was about my own formative period, I found it authentic in capturing the feeling
and currents of the time: having also a connection to Italy personally, these parts of the novel again felt all
very authentic. I loved the "fem" aspect of this work, the strong yet naive female lead…and was titillated
by the thinly veiled references of certain characters drawn in the shadows of conceptual artists of the time period
of both the NY and italian art scene. Unique, sophisticated, entertaining.

The writing in Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers is exacting, the plot a bit nonlinear, evidencing tremendous effort and talent by the author to turn the right phrase, reveal just enough story, like a literary strip show, to keep you intrigued. At the same time she sets a high bar for the reader, this is no casual plot well told period novel; the beauty is in the nuanced language and insight into character. Take your time with this, savor it and it will stay with you well after you've finished it.

So what is it about? Flamethrowers weaves the story of Reno a motorcycle-riding, nascent "landscape" artist in 70s New York with that of her Italian boyfriend, an estranged member of the family that makes the Italian bike she rides, and late seventies radical Italian politics. But in the end it's about womanhood, fakery and courage.

Although it made many Top 10 lists, I found it meandering, boring and pointless. The main character never comes to life, as she simply drifts through the scenes. some of the writing is very good, other parts pretentious and self-absorbed.

I ended up DNF'ing this book after about 100 pages. I really wanted to like this book as the reviews have been great. But as with a previous book of Kushner's, Telex From Cuba, I find I can only get so far before giving up. The story of Reno seemed interesting, but the alternate chapters about the Valera family were so boring. And Reno's story just didn't move fast enough. Maybe someday I will pick this back up and just start in the middle of the book and see if it is more enjoyable that way. But not anytime soon, there are too many other books that captivate me much sooner.

As a college acquaintance of mine used to say as he held up many a course assigned, challenging tome, "This one's heavy sledding". Yep, this one's heavy sledding, but worth it.

Some of Kushner's creative choices puzzled me. Why begin the novel with a scene involving the founder of the Valera commercial empire, in a time and place far removed from the book's main action? Why interrupt the drive of the narrative by dropping in chapters about T.P. Valera's past? And why reverse the chronology of Reno's futile wait for Gianni with her later experiences on the night of the big New York City blackout?

And why is the book called "The Flamethrowers"? The literal meaning of the term is introduced in the first chapter, and mentioned, I think, just one other time.

Here are some guesses. I think `Valera' is what holds the book together. `Valera', whether in the form of a family member, the company, or the motorcycle, is present in every chapter. With the narrative flow compromised, something is needed to keep the novel from falling apart - which it did anyway for some readers. I also believe Kushner wants to make the reader constantly aware of the book as artifice.

Violating the convention of telling a story in chronological order pushes that realization onto the reader again and again, especially at the story's end. Her intentional violation of the flow of clock time gives the entire story a curious timeless, unreal quality - ironic, given her talent for vivid description. The emptiness that some of the readers complained about is there, and I think deliberate. A ghostly void pervades the novel. Kushner's genius as a writer is to make that nothing a something the reader feels as a constant presence.

As for "The Flamethrowers", I think the phrase can be taken both literally and symbolically. It can refer to many things: the war machines, the bomb throwing radicals, the rocket powered racers, and perhaps the artists' assaults on rigid conventions. And maybe the author's approach to writing this novel.

I enjoyed the book very much, and I really wanted to love it completely, since there were so many parts of it that I thought were fantastic. But something never quite came together, and that prevented it from being truly great.

Set mainly in New York's art district in the late 1970s, Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers" tells the story of a young girl, known only to the reader as Reno, after the city she comes from. She's a girl who loves motorbikes and photography, but struggles to find her place in the New York art scene. When she falls for the estranged son, Sandro, of the Italian motorbike manufacturer Valera, himself an artist in New York, Reno finds herself in situations she cannot control.

"The Flamethrowers" is a difficult book to describe. It feels unbalanced at times, with one of the main events not occurring until three quarters of the way through the book. It's also not easy to even say what it's about. It covers business, from the start of the Valera family interest in motorbikes told in another strand of the book which frustratingly ends mid way through the book, through the oppression of Brazilian rubber tappers in a small but perfectly written chapter, ending with the family business controlled by Sandro's brother in Italy facing the political labour issues of the period. Meanwhile Sandro enjoys the wealth which allows him to create art. Eventually these two collide and Reno is caught up in the middle, but she is a person who seems to go with the flow rather than making choices of her own. Yet somehow this imbalance in the book makes it all the more compelling. Add to that Kushner's often unexpected turn of phrase and I was gripped by it from start to finish.

In fact, it may well be the slightly unbalanced feel of the book that helps the reader to associate with Reno, a girl who is very much on the edge and not in control of her life. In some ways she's a cipher for events that happen around her but this doesn't detract from the book in any way. The differences between social and political disorder in Italy in the late 1970s are contrasted by rioting in New York towards the end of the book which, not unlike recent rioting and looting in the UK, seem to arise out of pure opportunism.

Often novels that feature the art world can border on pretension but this doesn't happen here. Kushner's artists are dreamers and raconteurs who seem to struggle to differentiate between imagination and reality at a time when there are real social issues at play. Similarly Sandro's mother and brother seem completely oblivious to the demands and needs of their workers in Italy. It is in managing this difference that Reno finds herself, often unwittingly.

Ultimately though, this is a novel that I admired more for the writing than for the plot development as such. Kushner covers a lot of issues, and it's far from clear at first reading what her message, if any, is. Like many very good novels, it's a book I've found myself thinking about long after finishing it, but I'm never quite sure what the message is. Kushner is a writer who gives a sense of space to her setting and in this Reno is cast adrift. The publishers note it's an "exploration of the mystique of the feminine" which I must say I never quite picked up on. For me, it's more about the difference between dreamers and those who take action to back their beliefs. Her style is captivating and compelling though in equal measure and she's a writer that is well worth checking out. Images from the book still flit through my mind long after reading. If you like writers such as Hari Kunzru, this is well worth checking out.

Forget the title and cover photo! While the heroine happens to set the world speed record for a woman on a motorcycle, that happens almost by accident. This is not a fast-paced story of a woman motorcycle racer. Rather, it is a brilliant, fascinating story that combines interesting historical facts about motorcycles, war, protests (and not protesting), social class with an enthralling character study of a woman coming to grips with her dawning sexuality, her social class, her role as a would-be artist, her search for love (while debating whether love is necessary) during the post beatnik (but not hippie) hipster NYC subculture of the 60s-70s. Combine that with an interesting love story forcing our heroine to choose between two flawed candidates--or reject both. Will she have the courage of her gradually developing insights? The protagonist (i can't remember her name--do we ever learn her name?) was interesting and in a way a take charge self directed woman but in another way so dependent and dominated. Kushner is good at showing how some women are mentally dominated (and some physically dominated) and this might be considered a woman's liberation type novel but I felt we never got into the "why" and "what makes her tick" issues enough to see a real self-awareness or even a real change. The leading male characters, although sketchy, were realistic and obnoxious womanizers, which I also guess is Kushner's point: all men are going to disappoint but what to do with your trembling heartstrings? There are many minor characters, all of whom are deftly conveyed in brief sketches.

The title and the cover photo led me to expect something faster-paced, more politically focused, and more of a story of events or at least of the emotional development of the protagonist. Despite all the time shifting (see below), the story does not rocket along but rather takes its time. This is fine--its just inconsistent with the title and cover photo. Yes, by the way, we do learn a little about flamethrowing in different situations but its hardly the focus of the book. The title and cover photo may suggest Lizbeth Salander of Steig Larsson's "The Girl With/Who ..." trilogy but this is definitely not what's happening here.

The main reason i gave this work five starts is the brilliant writing and creative plot, which makes the book addictive. I can't say I read it straight through but it was SO hard to put down when circumstances forced that. I did feel at times it was too "writerly"--too many high falutin' fancy words--but that was only occasionally. Overall, she really puts you into the scenes--either Kushner was there at the Bonneville Salt Flats, in the bowels of a tire factory... at a demonstration turned violent... in an Italian housing project taken over by protesters...in NYC ...and the other locations...or she did a great job of writing based on pure research. There is a lot of time- and scene-changing that i did not feel was better than a chronological presentation would have been. Looking back on it, I see her chapter titles are very descriptive and maybe i should have paid more attention to them when trying to figure out some of the scene and time shifting.

SPOILER ALERT: I really enjoyed reading this, except for the ending. I won't give it away but it was a real letdown after the dramatic events leading up to it. I almost gave it four stars instead of five because of the ending but overall this novel is a wonderful, insightful, creative story that creates characters and descriptions that really stay with you.

Considering how overburdened with similes this book is, it's fair to start my review with one: reading this book is like watching a tight-rope walker crossing a wire. For the first third it's precise and perfect, in the second third she stumbles forward and in the last third she tumbles off the wire to her demise. Rachel Kushner has obvious talents--her prose can light up the page--but constructing an entertaining narrative isn't one of them. The book is mostly surface dazzle: riffs and stories and digressions, the vast majority of them about people whose outrageousness distracts the reader from the emptiness of the novel. By the time Reno returns from Italy it's clear the author has lost control of her book. Shame.

Forget the title and cover photo! While the heroine happens to set the world speed record for a woman on a motorcycle, that happens almost by accident. This is not a fast-paced story of a woman motorcycle racer. Rather, it is a brilliant, fascinating story that combines interesting historical facts about motorcycles, war, protests (and not protesting), social class with an enthralling character study of a woman coming to grips with her dawning sexuality, her social class, her role as a would-be artist, her search for love (while debating whether love is necessary) during the post beatnik (but not hippie) hipster NYC subculture of the 60s-70s. Combine that with an interesting love story forcing our heroine to choose between two flawed candidates--or reject both. Will she have the courage of her gradually developing insights? The protagonist (i can't remember her name--do we ever learn her name?) was interesting and in a way a take charge self directed woman but in another way so dependent and dominated. Kushner is good at showing how some women are mentally dominated (and some physically dominated) and this might be considered a woman's liberation type novel but I felt we never got into the "why" and "what makes her tick" issues enough to see a real self-awareness or even a real change. The leading male characters, although sketchy, were realistic and obnoxious womanizers, which I also guess is Kushner's point: all men are going to disappoint but what to do with your trembling heartstrings? There are many minor characters, all of whom are deftly conveyed in brief sketches.

The title and the cover photo led me to expect something faster-paced, more politically focused, and more of a story of events or at least of the emotional development of the protagonist. Despite all the time shifting (see below), the story does not rocket along but rather takes its time. This is fine--its just inconsistent with the title and cover photo. Yes, by the way, we do learn a little about flamethrowing in different situations but its hardly the focus of the book. The title and cover photo may suggest Lizbeth Salander of Steig Larsson's "The Girl With/Who ..." trilogy but this is definitely not what's happening here.

The main reason i gave this work five starts is the brilliant writing and creative plot, which makes the book addictive. I can't say I read it straight through but it was SO hard to put down when circumstances forced that. I did feel at times it was too "writerly"--too many high falutin' fancy words--but that was only occasionally. Overall, she really puts you into the scenes--either Kushner was there at the Bonneville Salt Flats, in the bowels of a tire factory... at a demonstration turned violent... in an Italian housing project taken over by protesters...in NYC ...and the other locations...or she did a great job of writing based on pure research. There is a lot of time- and scene-changing that i did not feel was better than a chronological presentation would have been. Looking back on it, I see her chapter titles are very descriptive and maybe i should have paid more attention to them when trying to figure out some of the scene and time shifting.

SPOILER ALERT: I really enjoyed reading this, except for the ending. I won't give it away but it was a real letdown after the dramatic events leading up to it. I almost gave it four stars instead of five because of the ending but overall this novel is a wonderful, insightful, creative story that creates characters and descriptions that really stay with you.

Considering how overburdened with similes this book is, it's fair to start my review with one: reading this book is like watching a tight-rope walker crossing a wire. For the first third it's precise and perfect, in the second third she stumbles forward and in the last third she tumbles off the wire to her demise. Rachel Kushner has obvious talents--her prose can light up the page--but constructing an entertaining narrative isn't one of them. The book is mostly surface dazzle: riffs and stories and digressions, the vast majority of them about people whose outrageousness distracts the reader from the emptiness of the novel. By the time Reno returns from Italy it's clear the author has lost control of her book. Shame.

I'm not sure how it is even possible, but this beautifully written book was 100% lacking in the ability to draw me into a relationship with it or the characters or the story. I've read many of the positive reviews and don't see one that describes a relationship to story or characters. In fact, quite a few if the reviews describe the effort it took to finish the book. At 400 pages it's not that long however without a compelling connection with the content, it's about 399 pages too long. Many reviews account for the excellent writing and I agree on that score, however perfect ingredients do not make a soufflé rise. I advise you to ignore the hype and move on.

This novel introduces, Reno, an adventurous, gritty, curious, naïve, sexy twenty-something female from Nevada. She recently moved to NYC to pursue photography, where she meets an older artist Sondro Valera, a man who has rejected his wealthy Italian manufacturing family. She is first seen fearlessly racing her Valero motorcycle across the Utah salt lake beds. Despite this potentially appealing character, the novel disappoints.

The book is essentially a collection of a variety of scenarios, usually with artistic connections or in some cases revolutionary associations, which introduce any number of little-understood, odd individuals, most of whom seem to be leading lives of illusion. The book is undoubtedly commentary on such types and the art world; nonetheless, the disjointedness and the artificial, superficial, and vague nature of the settings limit the impact of the book. Inexplicably, after introducing a character Reno with so much edginess, the author practically walks away from her. There is little left for a reader.

A series of dense descriptive passages through which the main character moves like a sleepwalker. Glimmers of something real in the lyrically detailed accounts of rubber tapping or motorcycle racing or desert skies / Italy/ New York/the 70's art scene/radical scene almost brought the book to life--but we have to care about Reno and she was just not there. Sandro's bit at the end tacked on to provide some insight . . .did not work.

Everyone mentions the beautiful writing, but it seemed clunky and overdone. Actually, it is grammatically anachronistic. In 1975 there were still rules. Sandro would not have said something was "in shambles" rather that "a shambles." "Like" would not have been used as a conjunction. It was repetitive too--I lost count of the times Kushner found something "airy."

She's writing about a time I lived through, and it seems as fabricated as any traditional historical novel about, say, the abolitionist movement or the invention of the telegraph: didactic and weirdly off-key.

However, I read plenty of books that make grammatical mistakes and still engage, still make you care about the events and the characters. This just was not one. The good reviews are baffling.

I have to admit, I just don't see what all the hype is about this novel. The Flamethrowers is well-written, there is no denying that, but that is about its strongest point. Reno, the narrator, is not a likable or empathetic character. Frankly, there weren't any characters in this novel that I really cared about. There are some novels where the lack of likable characters is not problematic, novels where the prose style or the story is so imaginative or groundbreaking that it just doesn't matter. This novel is not one of those. The story itself is rather episodic--there is no overarching narrative; it just rambles on. This novel is well-written, but at the end of the day, it is a difficult read.

TELEX FROM CUBA by the same author is one of my favorites, bur there's nothing about this new book that I like. I pushed myself to page 75 and quit there. (Note: I originally gave it 1-star, but in fairness, edited it to 3-stars, considering I haven't read the whole book.) Slow start for me as I have little interest in a girl riding a motor cycle on the Salt Flats. I might have been hooked if I could get into the girl, but nothing about her grabs me, not even yet where she's all alone in NYC, just meeting Sandro. I'd like to feel her mix of grit and vulnerability but it's not there. The narrative prose, albeit well crafted, distracts me - too much of it I think. I got to the point where it's all disconnected. I did go back and try to pick up where I left off, and I honestly don't know what the heck she's talking about. Obviously, a good book for others, just not for me.

This novel illuminates ideas of what art truly is while incorporating extremely researched historical information. The question of what art is is something people need to think about in a most skeptic way as soon as possible in their life. Who has the right to determine what art is anyway? More importantly, what are people's motives for doing so? This novel gives great circumstances of people reinforcing their ideas on what they consider, in general, beautiful - but this could mean so much more. Before you finish reading this novel you will have asked yourself several times, "What is the purpose or art?"

This book has gotten great buzz and has the 1970s as a backdrop. Really wanted to read it, but found that I just could not get into it. The book is well written, but heavily descriptive and not character driven. As others have noted, there's a lack of character depth in Reno, the lead character who is a chick on a bike. Also long descriptive passages, and very light on dialogue. Dialogue's always been the driving force in the fiction I'm drawn to, so this was a major stumbling block. In its essence, this book is meditative in style, and some readers might not be able to be engaged. Unfortunately, I wasn't.

There were several things I truly enjoyed about Kushner's writing in this, her latest novel. First, her use of language to illustrate, to bring your attention to details that you might otherwise overlook, to draw you through scenes, is amazing. Second, her range of knowledge - from speed racing at the great salt flats of Utah, to rubber harvesting in Brazil, to the sociology of art in New York, to the social manipulation required to amass great wealth and create hierarchically dominant families, and finally, to WWII happenings in and around Italy - indicates not only being well-traveled, but also doing incessant research and close inspection while moving about the world. The writing is compelling, so smooth it is almost buttery. The narrator, while gaining experience in a variety of settings, also leads you to understand her naivete. Her mistakes in life add up.

I will agree with another reviewer that the book seemed more a collection of vignettes than a comprehensive life view, but I found it intriguing, and enjoyed the history lessons. I would actually give this 4 1/2 stars.

Some novels grab you by the throat. Others seduce you with their intelligence and artistry. Rachel Kushner's THE FLAMETHROWERS, her second novel, is decidedly in the latter category. An intricate examination of art, revolutionary politics and the risks some people are willing to take in life and love, it gains its considerable power through the accretion of closely-observed detail and Kushner's skill at translating that into alluring prose.

"The two things I loved were drawing and speed," says Reno, the protagonist and narrator of most of the novel. Her name, after her Nevada home town, is bestowed on her by a man she meets when she arrives, young, friendless and jobless, but with a passion to make art, in New York City in 1975. She's quickly caught up in the avant-garde art scene and becomes the lover of Sandro Valera, a minimalist sculptor who creates "large aluminum boxes, open on top, empty inside, so bright and gleaming their angles melted together." Sandro, 14 years her senior, a man who recognizes that "vital life was change and swiftness, which only revealed itself through violent convulsions" seems well-matched to Reno.

Kushner takes some time knitting together the threads of her plot, whose circuitous course and sometime languid pace require an attentive reading. In addition to her passion for art, Reno is a motorcycle racer, and the early chapters of the story find her at the Bonneville Salt Flats, trying to break a land speed record in a vehicle manufactured by the Italian tire company owned by Sandro's family. She has also come to the site to photograph the tracks of her motorcycle as a piece of conceptual art. The balance of the novel plays out in the territory between these two pursuits, as we learn more of the controversial story of the influential Valera family and Reno's uncomfortable relationship to it.

By the mid-1970s, when the novel's main action occurs, the antiwar turmoil of America largely has subsided, but the New York Kushner depicts so vividly is a place teeming with a sense of danger, teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. It's a city that largely would be unrecognizable to anyone living there today. These are the days before the cleanup of Times Square, when that scene still was blighted by peep shows, prostitutes and drug addicts. Reno is there at the moment the July 1977 blackout hits the city. In flat, chilling prose ("Robbed a Chemical Bank on Delancey Street; firebombed a retailer of Thom McCan Shoes"), Kushner also catalogs the activities of the real life anarchist group, the Motherf***ers, acts of urban terrorism that would be seen in a vastly different light after 9/11. Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg appear, at least obliquely, through their connections to some of the novel's characters, and Kushner's picture of the times is so realistic one almost expects Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe to join the action.

For a novel that begins with a killing on a World War I battlefield and ends 60 years later with Reno alone in snowy Chamonix, France, Kushner displays an impressive command of her story's diverse settings and subjects. She excels at extended set pieces, like her account of a left-wing political demonstration that turns violent in Rome or the smart, but often hostile, banter of artists and artistic hangers-on at a SoHo dinner party. Whether she's describing the harvesting of rubber in a Brazilian jungle or the peculiar mixture of boredom and terror that surrounds the effort to break land speed records in the bleak Utah landscape, Kushner fully inhabits these venues without ever striking a false note.

She is equally skilled at portraying her characters' inner lives, as she shows Reno waiting to race across the stark desert: "I'd spent half a day among those waiting on death and now I was in line for the long course and hoping I was not the sacrifice." And her snapshots of those characters in action possess a similar bite, as in this glimpse of racer Didi Bombonato: "He flicked his hands into open tens, shut fists, open tens. He jumped up and down in a controlled dribble like a prizefighter." Gems like these sparkle on every page and sustain the pleasure of Kushner's work even when the story's momentum occasionally flags.

Embracing the worlds of motorcycle racing, art and radical politics, THE FLAMETHROWERS sweeps us into the swirl of life amid a memorable group of characters to reveal what it's like to live on the edge or aspire to do so. "Life," one of these characters says, "was the one thing to treat as art." As Kushner does that, there are echoes of both Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, whose concerns and sensibility she seems fully capable of carrying into the next generation of American fiction. This is an audacious novel, one that showcases a brave and talented writer at the top of her game.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

Despite the fact that Kushner is an exquisite writer, I found myself struggling to connect to both the story and more importantly its protagonist, a young woman in the late seventies drawn to the world of motorcycles and art in New York City. Enough cant be said about Kushner's gorgeous prose, and it was that that made me try and push through. But I just found that personally it couldn't help me get to the end.

This is a strange book to review. "Reno" (we never do learn her real name) is at the center -- an unreliable first person narrator, who at 23 is more fearless than those twice her age. She loves speed, thrives on it. From slaloming through gates on a ski course to setting world records on the salt flats -- she is always racing toward some indistinct goal whose parallel lines will never converge. And yet, she is not as clearly delineated as those who surround her. Set in 1976, the story unravels as an impressionistic fable, alternating chapters with the history of her lover;s famiy and their development into an Italian conglomerate. There are vignettes interspersed throughout -- mostly involving those auxiliary characters -- some striking, some horrific, many funny. This is another novel in which art purports to play a major role but here seems to serve as mainly a device. While I loved the book, I could never get Reno fully into my sights, which left a vague sense of uneasiness. But still, it is amazing to read such a reconstruction of a long gone era by someone who wasn't even born at that time.

It gets off to a slow start, but the author has a good smooth style and this should keep you reading. However, it's true that not a whole lot happens until the halfway point, so hang in there and you'll find this definitely a good though not great read.

I had heard exemplary praise of this novel, yet waded in not knowing what to expect. I was not disappointed. The Flamethrowers dramatizes the New York art scene, with a backstory of Italian industrialists and their downfall amid mass labor protests, all in the mid-70s. It starts innocent, with a dream of motorcycles & speed, pads out with danger, daring & deception, ends with revolution & new beginnings.

Terrific writer. But why waste those words on those people? The New York scene of 1977 was accurately depicted. At the time I thought everyone was erudite and charming, now I know we were all just a**holes.

I had high hopes for this novel based on the hype. I fully agree with some of the other reviewers that Ms Kushner certainly knows how to write some absolutely great sentences.

The early bits on speed and racing, etc were exciting. Then a totally conventional love story broke out, ridden with cliches. Then there was the "plot". It's as if she wrote various plot lines on a bunch of index cards, shuffled them up and flung them on the table.

I like character, call me old fashioned. I could give a s*** about any of them by book's end.

Rachel Kushner knows how to write a fabulous sentence and fabulous sentences show up again and again in The Flamethrowers. She also knows how to create fabulous scenes, and like the sentences, those too are not infrequent in this novel. In terms of technique there is a great deal to admire here and The Flamethrowers often reads like the work of a young Don DeLillo.

But then there is the novel as a whole. If I were enamored of 70s NYC art and 70s European radical political groups, I might find something that resonates. But neither appeal to me. I do like motorcycles, as does the nameless heroine in The Flamethrowers. But pretty, speed and art loving motorcycle riders weren't my thing in the 1970s. I've never met an art loving motorcyclist, actually. I liked librarians back then and maybe that's why the heroine here seems unbelievable, an arty version of La Femme Nikita. The weight of the prose here often seems mismatched with the lightness of the subject matter.

I'm sure Rachel Kushner will have a long career. There will be many novels in the years ahead. Some, I'm going to hope, will knock my socks off. But this one isn't for me. While reading this, I was reminded of a story a longtime deli owner in lower Manhattan told me. One of his customers in the 1970s was an artist who went on to become a big name. The artist asked him to come to his studio nearby. The deli owner looked at the paintings. "That one looks like a bagel," he said unenthusiastically. The artist kicked him out of the studio and never came to the deli again. Unlike the deli owner and 70s art, I truly love well-written novels. With the Flamethrowers, the whole somehow doesn't equal the sum of the parts.

I started this with high hopes and it did begin rather interestingly but then, oh my, how quickly did it get weird and not at all appealing. Nothing was good about this book other than the hype to market it. Avoid it and go with something else to read.

Kushner is such an amazing storyteller, and so are her characters. Everyone has something interesting to say in this book, recounting events and descriptions so vivid and so thoroughly original that each story seemed to top the next.

This is a book for adults, and by that I mean, a book written for readers with some years under their belts, people who like sophisticated, nuanced relationships that don't end with a nice bow on top. Or maybe this is just sophisticated readers in general.

I felt older for having read it, and not because it's getting great praise (James Wood in the New Yorker) or nominated for awards (National Book Award), but because it's so smart and observant and interesting, offering situations and ideas so void of cliche.

I cannot do it the justice it derserves, but it was the most fascinating piece of literature I've read in years.

Ar first I was impressed with Kushner's expertise on the diverse materials she brings together in this ambitious novel. Then I began to notice the weird bungling that some editor should have caught. In this era of postcolonial sensitivity why would a white American woman have the presumption to try to represent the inner life of a runaway Amaznian Indian? She even presumes his thoughts are framed on missionary teaching of Catholicism--in Brazil!!!?? There are lesser gaffes as well that pile up and corrupt the book's credibility. Italians no matter their class do NOT serve cheese and crackers with drinks or as a first course. Wolves do not roam in the Lake Como region. Indeed Romulus and Remus were probably the last Italians to be in close proximity to a wolf. Also Kushner should know wolves live in packs. Having her characters get close to nature by looking at the nest where one wolf supposedly slept is a baffling error. Luisa Spagnuoli, contrary to her assertions, is not an expensive store and not known for its chic. It's a chain retailing moderately priced clothes for middle-aged women who eschew high style. I could go on and on but I'll stop here and say simply that her main protagonist Reno comes across as a selfish opportunist with no talent.

There isn't much plot in this novel, but it is a heck of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a "traceless art" created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. "Racing was drawing in time." Literally and figuratively.

This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in the subversive sect was animate, inflamed, ephemeral, breathing -- a mix of temporal and performance art and the avant-garde/punk scene. This was also an age of conceptual art, which grew out of minimalism and stressed the artist's concept rather than the object itself. Time was the concept of Reno's art, something to be acted upon.

"You have time. Meaning, don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit...I felt this to be true. Some people might consider this passivity but I did not. I considered it living."

The novel, narrated by Reno, is all about her observation and experiences as she comes of age in a revolutionary time. She lives in a shabby, run-down hole in the wall in New York--"blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint like a plaster death mask over the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling."

As she gets caught up with the underground movement in the East Village, called Up Against the Wall, Motherf....rs, and later with the Red Brigades of Rome, Reno is herself a conduit for the people she meets and gets involved with, such as her older, rebellious boyfriend, Sandro Valera, son of the Fascist-friendly mogul of Valera motorbikes.

Reno came to New York by way of Nevada, eager to demonstrate her art through photography and motorbikes. She's "shopping for experience." Sometime after a particularly moving one-night stand, and attempting to navigate her life and bridge her isolation and loneliness, she meets sculptor Sandro Valera and his friends, a group of radicals and artists who offer her exposure to working-class insurrection in this "mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place."

Reno was looking for a sense of identity, and she wanted enchantment.

"Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it."

The bridge between life and art, and Reno's invigorating speed of 148 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats, (where she went with her new friends to make land art), demonstrates the crossover between gestures and reality, and a liberating energy that was "an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed."

On the one hand, Reno seeks self-sovereignty, but on the other hand, she inhabits a male-dominated and often misogynistic landscape where men exploit women for artistic and political gain. When she visits Sandro's family in Italy, she is subjected to derision by Sandro's misanthropic brother and his sneering mother.

In another scene, a male photographer asks women to punch themselves in the face until they are battered, and then pose for him. Reno narrates this with an unemotional but subtle raillery, noting the incongruity of women on a pretense of independence. She acutely observes that "certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures." And, in Rome, the question of feminine mystique versus male dominance is addressed by a Red Brigade revolutionary radio broadcaster, when he states to women that "Men connect you to the world, but not with your own self."

Are women "meant to speed past, just a blur" as Reno speculates? And the more I think about that line, the more paradox it evokes.

Artists, dreamers, terrorists, comrades, iconoclasts, all populate this novel, replete with iconic images and fallen debris in a swirl of electrical momentum. New York and Rome aren't just scenic backdrops; they come alive as provocateurs-- firebrand cities with flame-throwing agitators.

Kushner is a heavyweight writer, a dense, volatile and sensuous portraitist of the iconographic and the obscure. Arch and decisive moments throughout the novel heighten the ominous tension that rumbles below the surface, and the reader wholly inhabits the spaces of Reno's consciousness, and those of the people she meets.

"All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment...And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulder like a stinking vulture...we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. That is how we'll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse. It's an act of love, pure love. It isn't prophecy. It's hope."

"The Flamethrowers: A Novel" by Rachel Kushner is a novel written in lyrical prose to the metric beat of a James Dean soliloquy.

The juxtaposition of the American city and the Italian city, during the turbulent 70's for both countries, only add to complexity of Reno's searching for where and who she is. Or should be in a world of art, motorcycles, and speed. And speed may get you to where you thought you wanted to be fast but what did you miss along the way?

I truly loved reading this book and it's words still echo inside my mind.

After several false beginnings I finally started THE FLAMETHROWERS. The book was very tough for me to engage with at first and though I was marginally hooked for a time by Reno and her life in the 1970's art world before the book was half over I found myself skimming to the end. Admittedly I have zero interest in Italian motorcycles and if I had known that topic would make up so much of the book I never would have chosen it but I was lured in to choosing it by the excellent reviews of Rachel Kushner's previous novel. I found the writing style of THE FLAMETHROWERS confusing and the main character and her life to be not at all engaging or compelling. Thumbs way down from me as I decided there are too many excellent books out there for me to spend any more of my time with this dud.

I loved this book. It is literature in its truest form. The book is very compelling on many different levels. Prose style is very visually evocative. Characters are well drawn without being sentimental. The time frame is interesting and vividly explored. It also covers a lot of ground in terms of the subject matter and explores relationships of various kinds, human nature, political upheaval, Italy, the US and class structure/cultural analysis. I highly recommend this author and this book in particular.

Not finishing a book is admitting defeat, and I hardly ever do it. But I absolutely hated this book, and despite getting three quarters of the way through, and trying to come back to it after a few breaks, I couldn't bring myself to continue. I didn't find anything interesting about it; the characters were hackneyed and one dimensional and the plot was just boring. I particularly disliked the whole motorcycle racing sequence in the beginning. Actually, it didn't get better from there. I just don't understand why it's been lauded by critics and my fellow book readers (another customer at a book store recommended it to me). Guess I'm too superficial . . .

The Flamethrowers is not a light, easy read. This is a brainy novel, placing setting and theme far above plot or character development in its hierarchy of importance. Rachel Kushner's writing reminds me of Michael Chabon's, as her undeniable skill with the written word and nuanced observations in an obscure historical setting are what set this novel apart from the crowd. I truly enjoyed her ruminations on art, class warfare, relationships, and how people adopt personas that are a baffling mixture of the real and the pretend.

But I also agree with several other reviewers who have opined that Kushner's execution of this novel has flaws that prevent it from achieving its full potential. The protagonist (known only as Reno) recounts her experiences with countercultural groups in New York City and Italy during the late 1970s in a manner that often makes her feel like a helpless observer. I found Reno's passivity in the middle and end of the novel to be especially disappointing, considering the individuality and bravery she displays in the early chapters. I also felt as if the many flashbacks interrupted the flow of the story, further fracturing its episodic plot.

So while I'm captivated by the ideas and themes in The Flamethrowers and appreciate Kushner's skills as a writer, I did not end up loving this novel as much as the first chapters made me think I would.

All the raves had me wondering, who is this writer and why hadn't I heard about her before? Robert Stone blurb got me really excited to crack this book open. It started promisingly, even with the simultaneous narratives. Kushner can certainly turn a phrase, and she is capable of some beautiful sentences. Then just about midway through the book, she starts trying to show off by throwing in all sorts of paragraphs that are ultimately boring, or unrelated, simply because that's what she's thinking about at that particular moment. She finally lost me, and I put the book down. Couldn't finish it, and I rarely ever not finish a book, even when I don't connect or even like a novel all that much. In sum, I felt she was trying to write like Pynchon, but she didn't have the craft to pull off a cohesive story. Maybe someday, but not this one.

I've enjoyed reading stories of revolutionaries that trace their path to action.  This has often been neighborhood, family, economic paths to realization of inequity in the reigning political system.  This story might instead be called The Accidental Revolutionary. The story takes place at the great salt flats in Utah where a land speed record is set by a woman, accidentally.  Her boyfriend where she lives in New York City, is Italian, an heir to an Italian motorcycle dynasty (interesting concept).  They are part of the community of artists in NYC and a larger part of the story takes place there.  When she travels to Italy with him, she ends up taking part in a labor revolutionary action, also accidentally.  There is certainly a Great Gatsby side of the story.  Mostly, for me, I just enjoyed spending time with these characters in these different settings and learning a little about their worlds.  I wasn't very taken with the characters, but I did enjoy the book and will definitely go back and read Kushner's previous book, .

I bought in the bookstore because it was so much fuss about this book and every magazine was saying how beautiful is her writing... It is already 2nd year I can not finish this book :) I put it away so many times, it bores me to death, it is slow and about nothing really and her writing does not impress me at all. I think it is one of the most overrated books of last 5 years maybe.

The first sections are taut, electric descriptions. Lusher is at her best when her character is on her bike, less so in the intricacies of the NYC 70s artworld or radical Italian politics. There is some very good writing here, but focus becomes an issue when love of motorbike speed intersects with artworld fripperies and Italian class warfare.

For me "Flamethrowers " is a rambling disjointed narrative with largely undefined characters. It's as if the author was attempting to write as if under the influence of LSD or some equivalent drug.
I must be missing something given the rave reviews of this book by the "pros." I gave it one star which I assume is the minimum rating in the store.com. Perhaps one has to be a motor cyclist to appreciate the book. I was unable to finish it.
If you want to read one of 2013's very best try "The Goldfinch."

I had to push myself to the end of this book hoping, as most readers do, that something would come of it and it would be worth the effort. Sadly, no. No plot to pull you along, leaden prose that has no interest of its own, vapid leading lady, the other characters opaque. There are a couple of times the narrative acquires energy: Stanley's monologue is one. But it is short-lived. I was hoping that she died in the motorcycle crash and the rest was just a bad dream by a non-existent ghost.

Loved this novel. Gorgeous prose and a protagonist I loved spending time with. I admired Kushner's ability to structure this novel, weaving in the past-- World War I in Italy and the 1970's New York art world, for example. If you prefer to linger with the beauty of the language as you read--and there are many glittering, beautiful sentences here--you'll love "The Flame Throwers." And you don't have to sacrifice plot and intrigue, or admirable dialogue. This novel has it all.

I had to push myself to the end of this book hoping, as most readers do, that something would come of it and it would be worth the effort. Sadly, no. No plot to pull you along, leaden prose that has no interest of its own, vapid leading lady, the other characters opaque. There are a couple of times the narrative acquires energy: Stanley's monologue is one. But it is short-lived. I was hoping that she died in the motorcycle crash and the rest was just a bad dream by a non-existent ghost.

Loved this novel. Gorgeous prose and a protagonist I loved spending time with. I admired Kushner's ability to structure this novel, weaving in the past-- World War I in Italy and the 1970's New York art world, for example. If you prefer to linger with the beauty of the language as you read--and there are many glittering, beautiful sentences here--you'll love "The Flame Throwers." And you don't have to sacrifice plot and intrigue, or admirable dialogue. This novel has it all.

At one point in this novel, both the author and her narrator, nicknamed "Reno" in honor of her home city when she arrives in New York, muse about the impossibility of explaining minimalist art: "the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse that artists such as Sandro [Reno's Italian artist boyfriend] wrote long essays about, and if you didn't know the discourse, you couldn't take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused."

After reading 'The Flamethrowers', that roughly describes my response to Kushner's novel, the first of hers that I had read. What was I reading? A novel dealing with themes such as life as performance art and vice versa? Of artistic quests tied into the quest for a place to be? A random assortment of individually fascinating anecdotes and episodes only loosely connected into something that didn't quite have a narrative arc? This is a novel that is too dense and carefully written to be described as rambling, and yet at the drop of a hat Kushner's characters embark on apparently random philosophizing or storytelling that must -- surely? -- have some kind of connection to the plot or ideas, and yet that ultimately seem to do nothing more than provide still another layer of context or background. Actually: forget about modernism. Reading this novel felt like staring at a Seurat painting close up for hours and then stepping back and trying to see the whole image. It's not possible, because the individual blots of color have taken over.

Ostensibly, this is a novel about Reno, whose real name the reader never learns. But then, so much of Reno is left formless and shapeless, to an oddly extreme extent given that she is the first person narrator. She appears to control her surroundings: when we first meet her, she is riding the very latest of motorcycles, en route to race across the salt pans in the desert and create an art project from her tracks. Fate intervenes, and nothing is quite as she intends. And that is pretty much a pattern that repeats itself, as she allows her interactions with and responses to New York artist Ronnie Fontaine, motorcycle business empire heir turned expat artist Sandro Valera, and potentially hardcore Red Brigade revolutionary Gianni. Toward the end of the novel, one character describes his fellow revolutionaries as little more than hardcore pinball players who can't use their real names when they set new record scores on the machines. I ended up feeling that Reno herself is the pinball, racketing back and forth and bouncing off different characters and situations, each collision propelling her somewhere new and different.

I admit that I followed Reno through her quixotic adventures and misadventures, even if it was more out of curiosity than compulsion, and found the narrative's weaknesses became less irritating to me when the setting shifts to Italy, at the height of the country's troubles in 1977, when kidnappings and murders of industrialists and politicians became, if not routine, than not unexpected. Reno is as out of place at Sandro's family home above Como than she was on the fringes of the art scene in New York, trying to 'make art', and little changes when she finds herself on the fringes (yes, once more) of the revolutionary scene in Rome.

So, why does this earn four stars? Well, in large part the command of language, ideas, sense of place and time is so impeccable. The vignettes here are startling in their intensity and impact. And three stars is simply too low a rating for such an ambitious, albeit imperfectly realized, creation. I was rarely bored while reading this, even though I equally rarely had any sense of why the author made any specific decision in terms of plot or character. It was ... interesting.

In some ways, I would compare this to watching a performance of, say, Swan Lake from the wings. From the audience, what you see is the grace and beauty -- almost ethereal and certainly dissociated from the effort that has gone into making it looking beautiful and effortless. From the wings, you become aware of the sweat, the breathlessness, the injuries and pain. Translated into book-related terms, that means never really being able to set to one side that this was a creation by Rachel Kushner, crafted for the reader to appreciate and admire, as opposed to a novel about Reno's transformative (or were they even transformative??) experiences in 1977 in New York and Italy. In spite of the first person narrative, I never felt as if I were living inside Reno's head, but always standing back and gazing at the text as if it were a work of art. And of course, that may be what is afoot: that this is a piece of something akin to minimalist art (hardly minimalist, given that it offers up nearly 400 pages of dense prose) that only cognoscenti initiated into the right language can fully appreciate and discuss intelligently. In other words, it will be great Art to some readers; the emperor's new clothes to others. The bottom line? This is certainly not a book for all readers, and if you're looking for a straightforward novel about this era and subjects, you may want to think twice before buying.

Took a few chapters to get into it, but this was such a pleasure to read. Enjoyed going along for this interesting and wild ride...felt like I was "right there" in these worlds that my sedate life will prevent me from ever experiencing. I am so glad I read this!

Reno is an aspiring artist who comes to New York in the 1970's because that's the place to start out in the art world, and because of her own sad history there's nothing keeping her in Nevada. Via a romance, she visits Italy and becomes involved in revolutionary life there.
Reno is an empathetic, well constructed character, and Kushner is an amazing writer, but it is disappointing how the storyline--American gets sucked into a revolution in a country not her own--so closely parallels Telex from Cuba, Kushner's previous novel. One would hope she could have come up with an innovative plot.

I read this book to the end because of a book club selection. Would not have finished it otherwise. There was a brief portion that finally had some action, but unless you love to read discussions among weird people, I would not recommend this book for most readers. It must be too esoteric for my taste.

While Kushner does write long, descriptive prose much of it was so esoteric it was barely understandable. I did not empathize with any of the characters that were not fully developed and one-dimensional. This is s coming-of-age story of an artist. The endless monologues by Ronnie, Stanley and Sandro were mind numging. Having lived through the 1970s I found nothing to learn from this book. I only finished it to find out what finally happens to Reno, and I do not even know that. The book had a huge gap. How did Reno get back to New York?

'The Flamethrowers' is without question one of the better novels I've reviewed since I joined the the store Vine program. Rachel Kushner's 2nd novel (first for me but no question that i'm going back to check out her debut!!) is a very unique and original novel, compelling and incredibly readable. It follows the exploits of a young female artist as she navigates life in 1970's Nevada, New York City, and Italy. The plot, which centers on the main character's adventures in the art world of NYC and then on to Italy, is deft and well constructed. The prose is fantastic, Kushner is a wonderful writer. I have almost no knowledge of the social unrest of 1970s Italy, but Kushner's writing made me feel as if I were there! Ditto for 1970s New York City, she nails the mood and feel of the time period perfectly.
This is definitely not summer beach reading, Kushner is chasing after some big themes about art, life and who we are as people. In my opinion, she offers some great insights. 'The Flamethrowers' is a great book, and one that will stay with you after you finish it! Highly recommended!

This book is HORRIBLE!!!! I don't get why it was on so many 'best' lists...it's basically unreadable...I got through about 100 pages and gave up...the story is bad, the characters are bad, the writing is 'meh'...I guess if you are a fan of motorcycles it might have some appeal but other than that it's just so bad...i'm glad I got it from the library instead of buying it!

Well-written novel. Seriously the author can turn a phrase. But I've personally read more enjoyable books this year, and this one just wasn't fast paced enough for me. The main character, Reno, in particular wasn't one that I especially empathized with or liked.

A book written by a woman that I think a lot of guys will enjoy as it is a pleasing tribute to speed and motorcycles. Kushner no doubt loves the subjects of speed, artistic inspiration and living on the edge. My beef with the book is that the character Sandro Valera is a WWI vet and the book is set in 1975. By my math, that would give him a turn of the 20th Century birthday, give or take a couple years. OK then, why is he being presented as the main character and Reno's older, middle aged lover? He's like 75 years old! I'm not done with the book yet but it seems to me this could have been avoided by making him a WWII vet and adjusting the story accordingly. For me, the anachronism casts a long shadow on the novel and my ability to willingly suspend disbelief.

I read about 40 novels a year and was ranks at the bottom, Not sure what the critics saw in this book except for unquenchable thirst for dysfunctional characters in absurd environments - the 70's NY art world,

Rachel Kushner is one our best writer working today. The writing in this novel is unbelievable, with passages that knock your socks off. The whole novel is like a dream, with some really strange, vivid people and places. I highly recommend this book!

I'm not going to spend too much time on this novel because it is a complete waste of time. Sorry, but it's true. I remember after reading Kushner's début novel, Telex from Cuba, which I greatly admired, thinking how difficult it was going to be for the author to follow up with anything approaching the vibrancy of it, because it was so heartfelt and rooted in autobiography and family biography. So it has proved.

Another reviewer has compared the novel to Seurat and his Pointillism. But Jackson Pollock is the artist of whom it continually reminded me as I wearily trudged through the dribs and drabs of splashed-on experience of our, hm, heroine, Reno, which is, don't you know, an anagram of Nero, who is famous - whether he actually did so or not - for fiddling whilst Rome burnt in a fire he may have set himself. Isn't that ever so profound?

The book is rife with these slapdash, inane globules of what one must suppose is meant to pass for deep insight, including "FAC UT ARDEAT" which is finally put in its correct context in the penultimate chapter with the line from "Stabat Mater Dolorosa" with its pleading supplication for one's heart to burn with love for Christ.

In any event, my heart didn't burn for one second during the reading of the book, of Reno's travels through the New York art world of the late 1960s early 1970s, and on to Italy and back once again to New York. The book lacks that essential quality that empowers the written word to so touch the ardent reader, the poetic.

I'm finished. There exist many people for whom Jackson Pollock remains a great artist and Samuel Delany's Dhalgren - of which this work reminded me quite a bit - a great novel. I am, mea culpa, not one of them.

My first lone star review in quite some time.

Well-written novel. Seriously the author can turn a phrase. But I've personally read more enjoyable books this year, and this one just wasn't fast paced enough for me. The main character, Reno, in particular wasn't one that I especially empathized with or liked.

An obtuse, self-conscious novel - hated it. I quit reading after 3/4 of the way through. I kept reading hoping soon I would start to like it or care about the characters, but that just never happened.

This book ties together New York in the 70s, a labor uprising in Italy, Minimalist art (think Dan Flavin, Donald Judd) and Land Art (think Robert Smithson), and motorcycles. Read it nonstop over a weekend and continued thinking about it for days after. Beautifully written. It’s not a tidy narrative nor an uplifting one, but it feels true to the characters and to life.