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.