Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Summer whites, green gardens, Mississippi, white summer suits and seersucker suits, those were the sights. In the Garden District, Claude stopped and pointed out the jasmine and the cicadas in the night. That was his innocence to me. He had the sweetness of the town itself and broken my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor, as he himself would say, for he touched my heart, to such degree, that I had to steel myself, or my heart would break, like his, into a million pieces on the floor. For in Claude Collier I saw my very youth, a fateful green garden, parades on the Avenue, an orchestra on a bandstand, my youth in New Orleans.

Louise Brown is in love with Claude Collier, a young man from her faintly genteel social set in New Orleans. Claude's main character traits are his extreme kindness and compassion and a general tendency toward haplessness, toward nervous breakdowns. In fact, everyone in Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or maybe they just claim to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown because it is, as it still is, a fashionable thing to say, but for Claude Collier it is God's honest truth. It is, perhaps, like the southern Gothics of Truman Capote, a trait of New Orleans itself, and as Louise describes above, Claude is for her the embodiment of the city and her experience in it, which is what makes it such a tragedy when he runs off to the Northeast.

Structurally, Lives of the Saints is an odd, tricky book. The sections are typically quite brief, marked by bon mots and sudden revelations of character among Louise's New Orleans set. (It reminded me, actually, of Renata Adler's Speedboat, transposed to a very different setting and voice.) A reader gets the quick impression that plot is secondary to the adumbration of a particular place and time, and is happy enough to go along, because Lemann's evocation of New Orleans is so simply and beautifully drawn ("summer whites, green gardens"--sometimes it's as simple as that). But tragedy sneaks into the corners and sets the novel moving: Claude's brother Saint falls out of a tree and is killed. Lemann's prose is so simple (sorry, that word again) that I had to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. But it's this death that sends Claude and his tweedy father, Mr. Collier, both reading, and sends Claude off to New York and Boston, leaving Louise to pine for him.

There's really not much more to the book than that. There were times when I felt frustrated by the staccato style of the novel, by the way it seems to turn in place, but after the death of Saint, I was impressed by its humor and lightness of touch, and the way it balances the melancholy. And I was frequently struck by the loveliness of Lemann's writing:

And yet one felt such a melancholy or downright sorrow, as when there is something amiss, as when you wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning suddenly, before it is time to wake up, with the distinct feeling that something is wrong--something with this life you are reading is very wrong--except you do not know what it is. It is a nameless wrong. The nameless wrong follows you wherever you go but you can't put your finger on it.

Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann

...Now he became in truth a crazed and greedy butterfly, no longer pretending to know who he was or what he was looking for, dreading the weary moment when he must stick it in, dreading the moment when the lady must leave, but avid to have and have had, his tips becoming smaller as the money went, the girls giving him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches in his balls... What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn't remember te name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn't remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left hi ma liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by. When he wanted to eat out a whore, he'd say:   I want to kin kao you,   which means,   I want to eat rice you,   and then he'd point to her pussy --

"The journalist" of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories is on assignment in Thailand, which mostly means spending every cent he has on prostitutes. Unlike his rakish companion "the photographer," the journalist is a real romantic, finding something in these women that feeds some need that lies deeper than sex, although they fulfill that need for him, too. He falls half in love with nearly all of them, until he falls fully in love on a trip deep into the jungles of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have been lately on a killing spree. It's hard to say what makes this prostitute, Vanna, different from the others, except that she becomes a repository for these deep needs; her feelings toward him--as opposed to feelings toward the necklace he buys her or the money he gives--are inscrutable and ambivalent. But his feelings are strong enough that he marries her--despite having a wife back in the U.S.--or perhaps the marriage is in name only, a name given to the strength of those feelings. Naturally, when he's whisked out of Cambodia, he yearns for her, first in Thailand, then back in the United States, where he purposely wrecks his marriage out of jealousy and fear.

It's tempting to read Butterfly Stories as a companion book to Whores for Gloria, another book about a man deeply enmeshed with the local prostitutes. The protagonist of Whores for Gloria trawls San Francisco's Tenderloin District, not Southeast Asia, and though they can be irascible or even hostile, the prostitutes there have a kind of transparency that the journalist searches for in vain. In Gloria, the protagonist rarely even has sex, preferring to listen to the whores' stories, but the language and cultural barrier make it impossible to know if any of the Thai and Cambodian girls are telling the truth, or if they are, whether it gets lost somewhere in translation. Their opacity is at the heart of the book's tragedy; we know that the journalist will never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for both depends and is stymied by the exotic nature of Vanna and the others. Even in the flesh, she's a dream and a fantasy, and it's for the fantasy that he wrecks his life, upending his marriage and ultimately even contracting AIDS.

It's hard to say where Butterfly Stories might fall in a ranking of Vollmann's works for me. It's more standoffish and at-arm's-length than Whores for Gloria, and perhaps less satisfying by design. It's frustrating read--the guy is such a loser, and I can imagine that someone who picks this one up as their first Vollmann might be put off by the exoticizing and fetishism on display, though I think one more attuned to his work will notice the instability of that quality, if not the critique of it. Most disturbing to me was recognizing a small detail--the journalist, unable to re-reach Vanna, travels to the Arctic and falls for an Inuit girl--that seemed so like The Rifles that I couldn't help but wonder how much of Vollmann really is in here. (That's something he does quite a bit, I think--puts himself in the story in ways that are ambiguous, mixing himself in indeterminate percentages.) There's a nobility to the guy in Whores for Gloria, but what the journalist evokes is more along the lines of pity--a much more discomforting emotion. But it must be said that Vollmann makes it look easy, and if Butterfly Stories does not stand out among his works, taken in isolation it must be astonishing.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

In the sound of the shower or the tub, in the spray of water on the dishes in the sink, I heard the words that Mitsutsuka and I had shared, as well as all the words that we were yet to share. We'd only met up a handful of times, which made it harder to understand how I could feel like this. I didn't know the first thing about him. I couldn't even see inside my feelings far enough to know what they meant. Over and over, i asked myself if this had all been some kind of mistake. If I sat down with a cup of sake and thought about how weird it was that I spent so much time thinking about someone I didn't even know, I just wound up thinking about him anyway. I thought about him all the time.

Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night is about Fuyuko, a young fact-checker who lives a lonely and isolated life. She's awkward around others, and doesn't make friends easily. In fact, they mostly have to make her: first Hijiri, the brash editor who encourages Fuyuko to go freelance, and introduces her to alcohol for the first time. Then there's Mitsutsuka, an unassuming older high school science teacher whose life collides with Fuyuko's when, plastered and investigating taking courses at a local college, she ends up puking everywhere. (Fuyuko's alcoholism, unwittingly provoked by Hijiri, is a major theme in the novel.) Mitsutsuka is kind, shy, reserved--exactly the kind of person, one thinks, that might pull Fuyuko out of her funk. Her feelings for him are identifiable to us as romantic, but with her diminished experience, she struggles to make sense of them, fleeing into drink or just plain fleeing.

In the center of the book, Kawakami places a flashback that explains everything we need to know about Fuyuko. She recounts how, in high school, a seemingly gentle and thoughtful boy cast his attentions on her, calling her once a week on the phone. But the first time this boy invited Fuyuko to his house, he ends up raping her and then cruelly dismissing her. Kawakami describes this scene with a painful clarity that is difficult to read. But it's clear we're meant to see this as something as a key to Fuyuko's adult strangeness: how can she reach out to others, when doing so leads to such cruel disasters? Other than this scene, All the Lovers in the Night is a quiet and uneventful book, only as big in scope as Fuyuko's shrunken life. The three central figures are well drawn, and I especially liked the ambiguity of the character of Hijiri, whose social prodding of Fuyuko is somehow both supportive and menacing at the same time; a scene where Hijiri gives Fuyuko her old designer clothes, and Fuyuko looks at her new self in the mirror, was especially effective, when it might have been obvious.

One thing that struck me when I read this, and thinking back to Kawakami's book Heaven, about a boy who is cruelly bullied, is that she shares a lot of qualities with once and future it-girl Otessa Moshfegh. The protagonist here reminds me of the heroines of books like Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, recluses who shun, or are shunned by, a wider world in which they feel unable to operate. Kawakami's book is much quieter, even compared to Heaven there's nothing really here that's shocking or lurid. That compares favorably to Moshfegh, I think, even as I think the book itself will end up being not quite memorable. 

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

I cannot pretend that all these details which I am trying so hard to reconstruct from my memory are necessarily true, but I feel myself today driven by a compulsive passion now that we are separated to make these two people live before my eyes again, to bring them back out of the shadows and set them to play their sad parts as closely as possible to the truth. I want above anything else to make the two of them clear to myself, so that they will continue to live as visibly as two photographs might seem to do propped up on a shelf beside my bed, but I don't own a single photograph of either of them. Why am I so possessed by them? Of the Captain I have heard nothing for years, and Liza, whom I left of my own accord, I see only from time to time, always with a sense of guilt. It's not because of any love I feel for them. It is as though I had taken them quite coldbloodedly as fictional characters to satisfy this passionate desire of mine.

As a boy, Jim finds himself taken out of his boarding school by a mysterious figure who calls himself "The Captain." Jim doesn't mind going--he's one of those boys who seems to always be on the outside of the group, a victim for bullies. The Captain, it turns out, has "won" Jim in a backgammon game from his true father, a dissolute gambler known to Jim only as "The Devil." The Captain is Jim's liberator in many ways, but he makes it clear that he has no plans to be a substitute father for the boy, except in the sense that he changes his name immediately, from Victor. He quickly instructs Jim in a series of confidence games and petty tricks that reveal his true nature as a con artist and thief--the name change, in fact, is more in the way of a guise than a fatherly act. Ultimately, the Captain drops Jim off with his girlfriend Liza, who seems to have made a stray remark about wanting a child, a remark the Captain has gone above and beyond to fill. Jim ekes out a strange life with Liza, who never quite rises to the level of a mother, a strange and peripheral existence punctuated by the Captain's abandonments and returns.

I was immediately captivated by the beginning of The Captain and the Enemy. Greene thrusts us into the position of young Jim, trying to figure out the strange figure who has dropped into his life and transformed it, perhaps for the better, perhaps not. "The Captain" is a Greenian figure par excellence, a con artist and trickster native to the English underworld. If he's hard to figure out, it's because he doesn't want to be figured out. Never do we really understand what the Captain's grift is: is he a big-time criminal, or a petty one? The only thing that Jim seems to be able to say for sure is that Liza, his not-quite mother, is head over heels in love with him. Later, as Jim tries to make sense of the strange childhood he has had, this fact hits him with depressing clarity: in that household or any other, no one loved him as much as these two loved each other.

I was disappointed, then, by the second half of The Captain and the Enemy, which transforms something unstable and weird into much more common Greene fare. As an adult, Jim travels to Panama, where the Captain has been living, to inform him of Liza's death, but when he arrives, he finds that he's unable to do it--not out of tenderness but what seems to be a willful rejection of the shape of the life that the Captain forced upon him as a child. The choice of Panama seems to be inspired by Greene's friendship with leader Omar Torrijos, which he wrote about in Getting to Know the General. The intrigue that embroils Jim is obscurely related to the revolution in Nicaragua and Panama's peculiar importance to the United States, as well as the agitation over the return of the Canal Zone. The Captain is implicated now in some kind of international espionage, and his enemy is an English journalist--who may be a secret American--named Quigley. Is Quigley the enemy, or is it Jim, who is offered the opportunity to betray his father figure? It's all very Oedipal, but the intrigue is too blurry and the story too familiar; it made me long for the strangeness of the opening chapter.

Close Range by Annie Proulx

But he knew all about the place, the fiery column of the Cave Gulch flare-off in its vast junkyard field, refineries, disturbed land, uranium mines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous dams, the Amoco mess, railroads, all disguised by the deceptively empty landscape. It wasn't his first trip. he knew about the state's lie-back-and-take-it income from federal mineral royalties, severance and ad valorem taxes, the old ranches bought up by country music stars and assorted billionaires acting roles in some imaginary cowboy revue, the bleed-out of brains and talent, and for common people no jobs and a tough life in a trailer house. It was a 97,000-square-mile dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery. The ranchers couldn't see their game was over. They needed a hard lesson and he was here to give one.

My favorite story in Annie Proulx's collection Close Range is "The Mud Below," about a bullrider named Diamond Felts. (In a collection where characters have names like Car Scrope and Aladdin Touhey, "Diamond Felts" is basically Jack Smith.) Diamond comes from a family with higher expectations than bullriding, though as Wyomingites they're familiar enough that Diamond's mother can take him to see an old bullrider whose brain was turned to soup decades earlier by one bad fall. But Diamond will not be moved; his embrace of bullriding is a kind of middle finger to those expectations, and expectations of all kind. It's no coincidence that his childhood nickname is "Shorty": bullriding is a way of making himself a big man, at least for a little while. To underscore this point, Proulx describes with upsetting clarity how Diamond rapes his friend's wife in the backseat of their car. Women are like bulls to Diamond, like everything else: something to be mastered for as long as you can.

One thing Close Range is not is a "love letter to Wyoming." Though there's affection here for the landscapes and sympathy for the state's pioneers, ranchers, cowboys, and down-and-outs, Proulx's vision of Wyoming is mostly that of a remote outpost where people quickly grow desocialized and impotent. They lash out, like Diamond, or the rancher from "The Governors of Wyoming" (quoted above) who secretly works alongside an environmental activist to sabotage the fences of the neighbors. Or else they simply burn up, like the hard-drinking waitress of "A Lonely Coast." These stories are nasty, none moreso perhaps than "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," about a young man in a terrible railroad accident whose brain damage makes him expose himself to women, and the pioneer chuds who are all too happy to use such indiscretions as an excuse to shoot somebody or cut them up. This story is set in the 19th century, but Proulx seems to suggest that things have changed little since then.

The stories in Close Range are often very complex, like mini-novels, and in my experience each one took ten or fifteen pages just to sort of understand the basic outline of what was going on. Sometimes this is frustrating, and other times she uses it to great effect. But I think it's instructive that the strongest stories in the collection have a real singularity of purpose, like "The Mud Below" and the collection's most well-known story, "Brokeback Mountain." The gay cowboys of "Brokeback" barely have the inner resources to understand the feelings they share for each other, and to the extent they're able to articulate them, it is to express a (justified) fear that they're putting their lives in danger. A happy ending is disclosed from the very start, because it just isn't possible in this Wyoming--that, at least, is something the pair understand. Like most of the other stories, it's bleak and cynical, but has an honest ring to it, and that's an improvement, I think, on the twee-ness of The Shipping News, the only other thing I've read by Proulx. The title, Close Range, suggests multiple possible meanings: the opposite of an "Open Range," that is, the closing of the myth of the Wyoming cowboy--but also the distance across which a bullet might hit you in the gut.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon

When I leaned over the side of Nikawa that Saturday morning to check the hull, a mural of cumulus sky lay across the slick river, and from the clouds suddenly appeared a countenance smiling down on me, a bearded one. If I'd believed the Engine of Creation had a human face, I might have taken the visage for it, but it was only I, who soon dipped my hands into the river and shattered the firmament and myself, then held perfectly still towatch the fractured sky and a man's mug slowly return as if the river knew precisely where each piece belonged, and all was seemingly just as it had been, but it was an illusion of the reflection, another trick of the river, for in that minute the water took to return to a mirror I was that much older, the clouds had puffed noticeably into new shapes, world population increased by 162, the planet sailed another eleven hundred miles through the ether, the solar system traveled seventy-eight hundred miles closer to the Northern Cross, and the tectonic plate the Missouri flows across had crept microscopically closer to Siberia. A stilled river is an illusion of the human situation where stasis is only a concept, but a flowing river is a traditional metaphor for the way of all tings. Mountains suggest fixity, but rivers give continuance.

The "River-Horse" of William Least Heat-Moon's book is the Nikawa (which means that phrase in the language of hte Osage), a C-Dory boat that Heat-Moon plans to take from one coast of the United States to the other. It's a daunting, perhaps impossible task, possible only with the judicious use of portages, but Heat-Moon is intent on spending as much time as possible on the water, without use to shortcuts. It's a route that takes them from New York up the Hudson to the Erie Canal, across the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers, over the Continental Divide, into the rough waters of the Snake and Columbia. There's not a lot of leeway for error: a day or two lost, and the Nikawa may miss the date of the snowmelt in the Rockies that provides enough water across the Missouri for a boat to travel. But America's rivers are highly regulated things, chopped to pieces by locks and dams that prevent easy movement, and where the authorities let the boat pass, Nature may throw up other roadblocks: rough shoals, rocks, and terrible weather. It is, in short, an insane thing to do.

But it is a way of really seeing America. Heat-Moon explains that he'd seen every county in the United States except for a handful in the Deep South, and traveling by river is a way of reacquainting oneself with the country, getting a different view. And as we're often reminded, it's the original way that America's representatives acquainted themselves with their new nation: as he travels the route of Lewis and Clark, Heat-Moon re-reads the explorers' journals. (I was struck by, among other things, how the part-Osage Heat-Moon interacts with the Native Americans he comes across on the trip, reenacting in a way the movement from the metropolitan coast to the west, which remains Indian Country in many ways.) And as they go, the river becomes a metaphor not just for America but for the shifting nature of things, as expressed in the passage above. Only late in the book does Heat-Moon confess that his traveling has resulted in yet another divorce, and that in essence his wife told him that the choice was between his river journey and her--and he, of course, chose the river.

River-Horse is a different animal than Blue Highways, a travelogue I loved, though certainly more than one reviewer must have noted that the river must be the original "blue highway." It's a much more solitary endeavor, for one, more engaged with the landscape than the community, though Heat-Moon makes up for this by taking a passenger along this time, a worldly-wise friend he terms "Pilotis," who, lucky for the writer, is always ready with a bon-mot. But from time to time, Heat-Moon and Pilotis get off the river into the small towns that once were the lifeblood of a kind of public transit system now little-used, and Heat-Moon gets to make use of what I feel is the real strength of his writing: an uncanny ability to capture the quirks and speech of strangers. The motto of the Nikawa is "Proceed as the way opens," and the travelers on it have reason to return to it many times, avoiding any number of near- and not-so-near-scrapes and setbacks, but ultimately making it to the other side of the country.

Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

"You are not dreaming, Zaliwe," says the mop, shimmying out into the light.

The voice is still my mother's. Climbing an octave on the third syllable of my name like she'd spent the whole day laughing and didn't have anything left in her chords to finish the word. Amama could fill up a room with her laughing voice alone. Where mine was kapenta in a bowl of water, hers was tilapia, large and filling. You couldn't look away form her if you wanted.

My favorite story in Zambian writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento's collection Obligations to the Wounded is "Mastitis," about a new mother who's having a real bad time. Not only is she struggling to produce milk for the baby, her mother has just died, and her husband seems to be having an affair with another man. Abandoned and frantic, she considers suicide, or just perhaps contemplates her own death as a way of resolving her troubles. Then, her mother's voice appears in the kitchen to advise her. Her mother's ghost is invisible, but real--look at the way it twirls the mop--and little by little, it coaches the narrator in the act of massaging her breast to provide milk for the baby.

"Mastitis" combines several of the novel's larger themes--motherhood, sexuality, the generational differences between Zambian families, especially emigrants--into a single story. It ought to be messy or overstuffed, but I thought the story succeeded on the strength of these storylines being woven together into something persuasive. Where the stories are simpler, they seem one-note. For example, a story about a young Zambian exploring a trans male identity, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother, seems to repeat and reconfigure an earlier story about a young Zambian exploring her same-sex attraction to a friend, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother.

Much stronger, I thought, was the opening story "Azubah," about an emigrant in America who travels back to Zambia to take care of her mother, who is in the grips of dementia. In her addled state, the mother admits that her own father sexually abused the protagonist, something the protagonist had psychologically buried. This story, I thought, like "Mastitis," brought a complexity to the relationship between generations that other stories lack.

With the addition of Zambia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 120! Still about 75 to go. At a rate of one a month, that will take me about six years.

Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but its rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection!

What do we really know about ourselves? This is a fundamental question of philosophy, I suppose, but as Walker Percy shows in Lost in the Cosmos, it's also a fundamental question of pop psychology. The whole book takes the form of a pair of "quizzes" that allow you to select the belief closest to your own--about the self, about religion, about sex, etc.--with the promise that the results will illuminate something about your life. We've moved on from this kind of book since Percy wrote it, but you still see traces of it everywhere, in Buzzfeed quizzes and horoscopes and Meyers-Briggs types. If Lost in the Cosmos has something resembling a thesis, it's this: despite years of scientific advancement that has transformed our understanding of "the Cosmos," we really know very little about our own nature.

How much of this book is serious, and how much is tongue-in-cheek? The quiz format lets Percy have it both ways--he doesn't have to make any genuine claims about the self or human nature, ones which might expose a kind of amateurishness or oversimplification that often seems to be lurking here. Are these "dyadic" and "triadic" diagrams supposed to mean something, or are they just a joke, meant to resemble the kind of bullshit that happens when you try to diagram the undiagrammable? But the method also enforces his contention that we actually know very little, the author himself included. And though the parody lacks some bite in 2026, it can be very funny, as Percy spins little Percyesque stories about priests and football players and stuff like that. I can't say that I ended up understanding myself or anything any better after reading it. I can't even say I understood the book itself. But it was certainly a gas.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The flamethrowers could have been from a different century, both brutal and ancient and at the same time horribly modern. The flame oil in the twin tanks they carried was five parts tar oil and one part crude, and they had a little canister of carbon dioxide and an automatic igniter and a belt pouch with spare igniters. The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines. He surged forth, a hulking creature with huge tanks on his back, a giant nozzle in his hand, hooked to the tanks. He was a harbinger of death. He looked like death, in his asbestos hood with the wide cowl, and he squirted liquid fire from a magnificent range--fifty meters--into the pillboxes and trenches of the enemy and they had no chance.

The narrator of The Flamethrowers is a young artist from Reno whose work revolves around speed: she takes photographs of landscapes through which she has passed, by foot, or ski, or, as is the case in the beginning of the novel, by motorcycle, having shown up to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats where world speed records are being chased. One of the novel's most arresting scenes involves the narrator in a fiery crash, from which she emerges not seriously dinged up, and which results in her perversely being given the opportunity to ride a Valera company machine that will make her the fastest woman in recorded history. She may or may not be aware of the similarities between her own work on speed and that of the Italian Futurists, who embraced speed as an ideal at the same time they embraced Fascism. Among those futurists was a young soldier named Valera whose legacy includes the motorcycle company that produces both the narrator's bike and her boyfriend, Sandro Valera.

The bulk of The Flamethrowers centers on the New York art scene of (I think) the 1970's and 80's. Sandro is an artist himself, and introduces young Reno (as she's sometimes called) to a world of provocateurs and gallerists, some of whom make a more permanent impression on the narrative than others. Kushner treats this world as faintly ridiculous, as surely it was, but also deadly serious. Some of these artists have emerged from the world of radical politics where bombs and art are seen as equal tactics. Some of them are just poseurs, and it's hard to tell exactly which are which. As the scion of the Valera Motor Company, Sandro fits uneasily among them--Kushner makes sure to emphasize that the company's exploitative ways didn't end with Mussolini by including a section from the perspective of a Brazilian rubber worker. After a disastrous sojourn to Italy where she's scorned by his well-to-do family (and cheated on), Reno absconds with Sandro's groundskeeper, who turns out to be a member of a Communist cell whose clandestine activity will upend Sandro's life.

The Flamethrowers is hardly a perfect book; I'm not even sure it works on the whole, but it did make me wonder why Kushner's debut, Telex from Cuba, was so limp. Many of the same traits of that novel are on display here: the gratuitous POV shifts, the whiff of extensive research. But I thought this novel succeeded at doing something the other clearly attempts, and fails: it brings together several disparate-seeming subjects and themes in a way that connects them persuasively. At the heart of the novel is the way that us and them are enmeshed. Sandro's attempt to escape the distasteful elements of his family's legacy by entering into the art world fails because the art world is also enmeshed with the realities of capitalism and exploitation. The Italian rabblerousers whose provocations set off the novel's climax are like the flamethrowers of the Italian army that fascinated Sandro as a kid: a purgative force. To the extent that their nozzles are also pointed at themselves may not be foolishness but a kind of honesty and self-sacrifice.

That said, Kushner has a way of writing around things that leaves me feeling as if I've read about something, but not really read it. This is the third of her books I've read now, and in each case I find that there's something missing, for me, at the heart of them; I walk away wondering what it was that I really read about. I think it's actually easy to locate that missing center here: it's the protagonist, whose attraction to Sandro and artistic ambitions mask a kind of inner vacuity. She's our point-of-view character, who frames all our judgments of the "characters" we meet in the New York scene, but that invisible eyeball quality leaves her a little invisible. Her artistic project, for example, is so quickly abandoned it felt like something of a red herring. The best parts of the book are when Kushner breathes a little life into her: when she crashes her motorbike and when she runs away from Sandro. Still, Kushner has a real knack for detail and anecdote, and there are elements here--the Futurists, the Bonneville Salt Flat stuff, the movie Wanda--that I really love. So I enjoyed reading it.

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

The battle raged. The hornets harried and charged him from every direction. Some tried to slip through the folds of his suit to reach his flesh, others violently flung themselves against his helmet, and he saw their eyes up close--red, as if injected with blood. Their stingers pierced the stitches of his garment and the veil of his helmet, narrowly missing him. But Sidi had always been incredibly dexterous. He was the son of the mountains and the hills, accustomed to its animals and insects. His mind and movements were still sharp, protected from the weight of his years by the nectar produced by his girls. They were watching over him the same way he watched over them.

Sidi is a beekeeper in North Africa who produces some of the region's best honey. His secret is love: he calls his bees "his girls" and watches over them with an intense fervor. But his girls, and his livelihood, are threatened by the arrival of a new predator, the giant Chinese hornet, which can tear an entire hive apart in a matter of minutes. At the same time, Sidi's unnamed country is dealing with a predatory upheaval of its own. Having just cleared the way for its first-ever elections, the polls are led by a group of religious fundamentalists who wear all black. The fundamentalists are intent on winning the election, whether that means providing food and clothing to potential voters, or rounding up apostates in the desert and cutting off their heads. 

I fear there's not much to say about Tunisian author Yamen Manai's The Ardent Swarm. It is no more or less than this obvious metaphor: the fundamentalists in black are the hornets who have arrived with the threat of violence and destruction. (There might be something said, however, about the way the novel analogizes the fundamentalists to a threat from "outside," as something that has been imported from somewhere else--not a homegrown danger, even as it presents one local character who is seduced by the fundamentalists to join them.) It's a nice touch that Sidi, who lives in the hills like something of a wild man, is and remains more or less ignorant of the fundamentalist threat. Sidi and his allies are taken up instead with their solution to the hornet problem: a trip to Japan to carry home Japanese queens. These bees are the only ones to have invented a strategy to defeat the hornets; they surround them in a ball and basically smother, or overheat, them to death. This is "the ardent swarm," and what it suggests is that if the citizens band together, perhaps at the ballot box, they can defeat the threat of a fundamentalist takeover. The novel wisely lets that remain to be seen, though it's curtains for the hornets.

With the addition of Tunisia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!