The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

This is the New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year. It is the Guardian Best Books of the Year. It is shortlisted for the National Book Awards. The year is 1977 and Reno - so called because of the place of her birth - has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world - artists have colonised a deserted and industrial SoHo, are squatting in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. She begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged heir of an Italian tyre and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in 1977. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow. The Flamethrowers is a fearless novel, an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake the terrorist. In the centre of it all is Kushner's brilliantly realised protagonist, a young woman on the verge.

• ISBN10: 1846557917
• ISBN13: 9781846557910
• Publish Date: 6 June 2013 (first published 2 April 2013)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 January 2015
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Harvill Secker
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[viking2917]

Flamethrowers was all the literary rage awhile back. I couldn't get excited enough about it to buy it but I signed up for Scribd and found I could read it as part of my subscription.

Reno is a very young female artist with a thing for motorcycles. Sandro is a mid-40s heir to a motorcycle industry fortune, but he hates being part of it. They get together in 1970s New York City.

From the title and the press and the blurb about radicals, I was expecting either a novelization of something Patti Hearst-like, or an "older man teaches younger woman the ropes" kind of thing. It didn't really seem to be either. Reno was an appealing but confused character - I wanted to just say "would you stop being such a dope!".

While the writing was very high quality and I enjoyed the book, I confess I don't really see what the frenzy was about or why this was a National Book Award Finalist, I just didn't think it that amazing. I found it good but uneven. Your Mileage May Vary.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Reno is a young artist from Nevada who moves to New York with the ambitious dream of making it in the art world. In a new city she finds herself as an outsider; lonely and spending her weekends watching the people of the city. She intends to turn her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art, ironically moving to the east to create art about her life in the west. Eventually she finally makes it into the New York art scene only to find that it is full of more posers than artists.

Rachel Kushner’s second novel The Flamethrowers seemed to get a lot of book buzz when it first came out but I don’t know anyone that has read it. I was walking through my library looking at all the random books they have when I came across this one and decided I will try it. This may have been a mistake, it was a tough start; I failed to find something to keep me interested to begin with and that struggle continued throughout the entire novel. In hindsight I probably should have put the book aside and tried again later but it was a library book so I forced myself through it.

I am struggling to work out if the book was the problem or if it was just the wrong time to read it. This is a particular problem, I can see glimpses of morbid beauty throughout this novel and for all intents and purposes this should have been the type of book I would enjoy. However I feel no desire to try and reread this book to find out who was at fault.

I spendta lot of time feeling disconnected from the plot, but I have to wonder if this was intentional. The Flamethrowers is a novel about the unspoken rules of modern society; how we should act in order to fit into the social circles. The need to belong runs high through this book but this is more than just social status. There are insights into art, reputation, sanity, love and life that play a big part in that ultimate class/social struggle.

I felt like this book was constructed along the lines of Midnight Cowboy but set in the world of Andy Warhol. Replace the word prostitute with the word artist and you pretty much get the idea of what to expect from The Flamethrowers. However, this felt more like a social satire on the art world, poking fun at all the poseurs and the art scene. The idea that Reno felt the need to move to New York to pursue her art career places a big part in The Flamethrowers and is what led me to suspect this was a parody.

Weirdly enough, trying to gather my thoughts and understand what happened in the novel in order to write this review gave me more insight than reading the book. The book felt like a constant state of confusion which my brain had to sort out later. There was something there in this novel but sadly I never connected. I would love to find someone who loved this book to understand what I missed.

This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/11/02/the-flamethrowers-by-rachel-kushner/