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.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can't always do it while it's happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, which ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raul, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them.

Rachel Kushner's debut novel Telex from Cuba captures the lives of Americans living in Cuba as the civil war broke out in the 1950s. They come from all walks of life: they're rich, like K. C. Stites, whose father runs one of the plantations of the United Fruit Company, or middle-class, like Everly Lederer, whose father comes down to serve as a manager there. Even the lower classes are able to get in on the exploitation of Cuba's resources, like Allain Hatch, who finds a haven in Cuba away from the laws of the United States, where he's wanted for a killing. To these characters Kushner adds a real-life French arms runner named La Maziere, and a beautiful prostitute--conspicuously named "Rachel K"--who is reputed to be Batista's favorite, but who is really in league with Maziere and the rebels. All of these characters have their role to play in the revolution, whether rebel or victim, and all have their lives upended by the sea change that transforms Cuba.

Telex from Cuba is scrupulously researched, finely detailed, and boring. I thought it bore the hallmarks of a debut novelist's pitfalls: there's too much research, for one, not sifted through enough to give a singular impression. There are too many characters and too many points-of-view: K. C. gives a first person account, rife with patrician resentment at the loss of his birthright, but Everly, La Maziere, and many others get their turn in the third person limited seat, including about a dozen white-collar Americans and their wives whose roles in the novel I found difficult to get straight. Any one of these might have made a good novel--I thought this particularly about the irony in K. C.'s first person narration--but on the whole, they turn into a real mash. Things that ought to be huge, like the Stites' family's son Del joining the rebels, recede into the background in favor of images and symbols of dubious importance, like an abandoned Pullman railway car.

I rather enjoyed The Mars Room, which pulls some of the same point of view tricks, but without feeling overstuffed or encouraging impatience. Maybe the fact that it's mostly set in prison--a naturally confining space--helped. But this one didn't work for me.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

I don't plan on living a long life.  Or a short life, necessarily.  I have no plans at all.  The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don't exist, and then your plans are meaningless.

Romy Hall is serving a lifetime sentence for killing a disabled man--her stalker.  She killed him because she was afraid for her son, Jackson, and in the blackest of ironies, it's this act that means she'll be separated from her son forever.  Not just physically, but legally, spiritually; her parental rights are terminated, meaning she doesn't have a right even to know where he is or if he's all right.  This is perhaps the greatest indignity of her prison sentence, but it's not the only one.  How about the time when, upon arriving at prison for the first time, she helps deliver a baby despite the explicit orders of prison guards, and ends up in "ad seg," solitary confinement?  You'd be hard pressed to find a more explicit symbol of the way that the carceral state robs the dignity of women in particular.

It's hard to read The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner's new novel, without thinking about Orange is the New Black.  I imagine that for most people, including me, the Netflix show is the first and only artistic depiction of women's prison they've known.  Like Piper Chapman, Romy is more literate than her cellmates (look at her chat with the prison tutor about Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son!), a fact that's meant to build a stronger sympathy with the reader, who is, after all, a reader, and to provide context for Romy's highly attenuated eye.  Here, for example, is what she sees in a mattress lying against a tree:

We were at a stoplight past the off-ramp.  Outside the window, a mattress leaned against a pepper tree.  Even those two things, I told myself, must go together.  No pepper trees, lacy branches and pink peppercorns, without dirty old mattresses leaned up against their puzzle-bark trunks.  All good bound to bad, and made mad.  All bad.

But unlike Piper, Romy really does come from poverty.  She's raised in a down-at-heels part of San Francisco, peopled by junkies and pimps, feeling miles away from the technocrats and the hippies of popular vision.  Though the novel begins with Romy's transfer to the Stanville prison, about half of it is filling in this back story.  She's exposed to violence at a young age, and learns early on what men will do to women they have power over, even twelve-year olds.  She's a stripper at the title club, but not a stripper with a heart of gold, or a cartoon.  Like her coworkers, she's someone who's learned to exploit the broken operation of the male gaze to her own benefit, even as it seeks to victimize her in ways large and small.

Does Romy deserve to be in prison?  Certainly the account of her crime, which appears at the end, casts into doubt the urgency of her claim to self-defense.  But Kushner is interested in other, more complicated questions: for example, how does the carceral state use the narrative of absolute responsibility to minimize the context that makes up the lives of those it punishes?  We can't understand Romy's crime without the context of her stalker's stalking, which only makes sense in the context of the broader ways in which men punish women in America, a dynamic that the prison only exacerbates.  Kushner explores these questions subtly and thoughtfully, but tips her hand a little in the thoughts of Gordon Hauser, the prison tutor, who thinks:

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things.  There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death.  And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools.  There were large-scale acts of it, the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

Button Sanchez committed an awful crime, beating an Asian student to death.  Hauser is convinced she didn't see him as a person, which hardly exonerates her.  But the prison only doubles down on what Hauser sees as the root cause of violence, denying Button's personhood.  It's a little on the nose--on the button, maybe--to compare the Stanville prison to the Iraq War, but the point is a solid one.  Button's act of violence pales in comparison to the systemic violence that is incarceration, and in America we fail to reckon with that measurement on a daily basis.  "It added new harm to old," Hauser writes of the prison system, "and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about."  The brightly-colored sisterhood tropes of Orange is the New Black, even though it often makes sharp criticisms, lack the essential tonal darkness that our prisons deserve, and The Mars Room delivers.

Kushner's writing is full of excellent, powerful detail.  Here's just one little bit that I liked about a totally minor character:

He only left the house himself one evening a week, Sundays, when he worked as a volunteer security guard at the Red Cross.  He made a big deal about it.  Always took a briefcase with him, and said it held important documents that he needed to study for his next Daytona run.  It wasn't really a briefcase.  It was the emptied container for a backgammon set.  Once, Sammy opened it.  It was filled with candy bars.

It's funny, it's real, it's specific.  What a terrific image is: the backgammon set full of candy bars.  She does that throughout, sketching each individual life with a careful and empathetic eye, and a sense of how absurd life can be.  During the long bus ride to the prison, one prisoner waxes poetic about how they're going to miss the Bloomin' Onion at Outback.

But as a whole, the narrative sags.  It takes a hundred pages just to get Romy off the bus and into the prison.  The novel is peppered with accounts from other characters, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third: her cellmate, Sammy, the crooked cop, Doc, in a men's prison somewhere, and especially Gordon, the tutor.  Kushner also splices in some sections from Ted Kaczynski's journals.  And while I think I get why--Gordon lives isolated in the mountains, like Kaczynski; Romy imagines those same mountains are a kind of Eden just out of reach; neither Gordon nor Kaczynski can understand isolation in the way Romy can because their isolation is her Eden, etc., etc.--it seems like a lot of pages to make what seems like a convoluted observational loop.  The Gordon sections are especially frustrating, because as interesting as he is as a character, his presence ends up a narrative dead end for Romy.  As a result, the time spent in the actual prison with Romy is relatively short. 

The end gives a flash of narrative drive, but it doesn't quite ring true, in a novel that spends so much time milling about in the fine details.  Forget it.  Life sentences don't have narrative drive.  As Kushner writes, "[L]ife does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes."