Rachel Kushner writes immersive, gritty, true-to-life tales—the kind of thing we might watch on A&E, if the train wreck were also insightful. She’s written novels about women’s prison and, most recently, an anarchist collective in rural France. The Flamethrowers, from 2013, involves land-speed records on the salt flats of Utah, the art world of late 1970s’ New York City, and a workers’ movement that exploded across Italy at that same time. **There’s a lot to love here: Flamethrowers tries hard to be cool and succeeds, in a deliciously deadpan way, the way anything worthwhile takes both effort and knowing when to quit.
“It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarrassing,” our main character claims. She’s a motorcycle racer and land artist who wants a great deal, but never blows her cover. Known only as “Reno,” her birthplace, she hunts love and other material from New York to an Italian villa, to Rome, to the Alps, and back. The whole book is written from behind this screen of art-world cool, offering glimpses, leavings to the imagination. All the while, we wonder if Reno actually has the key to conquering these male-dominated worlds, or if she’s just a pawn.
“Doggedly following rules emphasized that one did not belong,” another character reveals to Reno about midway through. “Anyone can be a success,” says Reno’s friend. “It’s so much more interesting to not want that.” It feels like Kushner is out in front of her character the whole time, moving goalposts, but there’s still an eerie sense of real personhood to Reno. She becomes an embroiled witness, a willing vehicle for other people’s stories. She’s the ultimate outsider insider.
Throughout, Kushner pens juicy little stories-within-stories, including a great volley by a character named Stanley Kastle, who may or may not be Sol LeWitt. The breaking melee of a Rome demonstration is another, as is a confabulated tale of trans-oceanic travel – they’re riveting sections.
The women here are barmaids, ex-prostitutes, China girls—anonymous faces used for film calibration—and gallerists functioning as servile muses; one says she offers her services for free “when it’s useful” to male artists. Reno stands out for her gumption, but is still very much arm candy for one Italian Minimalist, in particular. She’s a demon on a motorcycle but admits to being scared silent at art-world parties.
“You just seemed too young,” one of her love interests says. “And you were. But honestly, I don’t even know if you’d be different older. I like you. But there’s something you never seem to get.” It’s a crushing moment for her, but then again, who wants to “get it” when “getting it” is serving as handmaiden to liars and posers, or even serving as an alibi for violence?
Reno’s own land art remains sidelined in the book, back-burnered during her time in New York. She wields power, but only by dint of her youth and beauty (“A young woman is a conduit,” says her lover, the Minimalist. “All she has to do is exist.”). At the same time, what a live wire she is, a creature of glitz and daring. The Flamethrowers makes clear what we lost in silencing women for so long, whole landscapes of insight. “But maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur,” Reno reflects. “Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.”
Kate Oden is a freelance translator and writer who also reports for the Valley News. She’s currently at work on a novel.