What Do I Call This Thing?

The Flamethrowers a novel by Rachel Kushner.  Scribner.  383 pp.  *****

Rachel Kushner is a writer who is so riveting line by line that you forget to step back and ask yourself what you’ve been reading.  Then your wife asks and you say, it’s about an art student in New York named Reno (named for the city she’s from).  She arrives utterly alone and has trouble getting by (it’s the mid-seventies, when New York was more dangerous than it is now), meeting people and finding places to live, but eventually hooks up with an older artist named Sandro Valera, who takes care of her.

He’s wealthy because his family owns a motorcycle manufacturing company in Italy (chapters in the present alternate with chapters from the past which show how the business came about, through Sandro’s father), and that’s a lucky coincidence, because not only does Reno love motorcycles and the sheer fact of speed, she wants to go to the salt flats of Utah and try to set a speed record there, then photograph her tracks as an art project.  The straight line that her tires will make.  Not sure how interesting an art work that will make, but hell, it was the seventies and people were doing a lot of weird things.

We see her begin this quest, but she has a horrific crash (quite early in the novel).  I, at least, was afraid there wasn’t much left of our protagonist.  Crashing a motorcycle at close to 200 miles an hour?  But she only sustains a leg injury, and subsequently sets a woman’s speed record for driving in a car, something around 300 mph I believe, though the car itself was designed for a male racer and capable of much more (?).  Eventually she makes it back to the city, and Sandro has her crashed cycle put back together so she can make her way around town.  Money seems to be no object for the man.

It’s only when you’re telling all this to your wife that you realize how wildly unlikely it sounds.  When you’re reading it doesn’t seem that way at all.

This power couple continues to function in the New York art world, interacting with various patrons and other artists.  Sandro is the black sheep of his family because he has abandoned the business to go off and be an artist, and he doesn’t share their conservative politics.  We don’t notice—at least I didn’t notice—that there are any number of women in New York who seem friendly with Sandro and seem to know him well.  Someone other than Reno might have been suspicious.  Eventually Sandro has to return to Italy for a Board meeting, and Reno decides to go along.  That was maybe her first mistake, but it was also a path to self-knowledge.  Or at least knowledge about Sandro.

There was a lot of labor unrest in Italy at the time.  In fact, there was about to be a nationwide strike.  But the Valera family is oblivious to that, or at least contemptuous of it; they feel they’re protected and don’t give a damn.  Sandro’s mother—to whom he feels some loyalty, because his father is dead—is condescending and venomous to Reno, not even a good hostess.  Reno endures a number of days with this woman, and the time crawls by.  Soon a female cousin shows up, and though she isn’t all that attractive, she is sexy and provocative, and has known Sandro since they were young.

The whole family goes to the board meeting and Reno stays back, which seemed like a good move at the time, then she changes her mind and gets a chauffeur to take her to Rome, where the meeting is happening.  There, by chance, she sees something she shouldn’t have, and is so disgusted, and furious, that she goes with the chauffeur back to his place, where he is a major part of the labor unrest.  It’s dangerous, potentially violent stuff.  But those folks are more Reno’s people than the Valera family.

If all this happened in chronological time, it might not have worked, but Kushner stages the episodes in such a way that we only discover the background details eventually, finding out that Sandro wasn’t the faithful person Reno had thought he was.  By that time she’s back in New York, doing everything she can to inhabit the art world while avoiding Sandro.  But as we eventually realize, the real suspense of the novel has to do with something that happened with the chauffeur, a man named Gianni, when Reno went off with him.  And the ending of that part of the plot is a desolate one indeed.  It makes things that happened in New York look trivial.

I don’t know if this sounds like something you want to read, but believe me, it is.  Line by line it’s a page turner, however unlikely it all sounds.  And in an afterward, Kushner lets us know that her initial impulse was to write a novel about the year 1977, one I remember well[1].  I must say, though, I was oblivious to a lot that was happening in my country and around the world, if this novel is any indication.

So who are The Flamethrowers, since we’re on that subject?  They were men who, during World War I, could visit death on the enemy in a unique way, by shooting flames at him from a tank they carried on their backs.  On the one hand, they were lethal.  On the other hand, they were sitting ducks for marksmen with rifles, so they could do a lot of damage if they could get in position, but often they couldn’t.  They were the favorite World War I fighters of Sandro’s father, who had a collection of toy soldiers made out of paper.  But his older brother, as older brothers will, made fun of his preoccupations, doused the paper soldiers with gasoline, and lit them on fire.  The flamethrowers went up in flames.

Why did Kusher choose that title for her novel?  I’m still trying to figure that out.

[1] I had just decided to leave a teaching job that I’d had for six years in order to give myself more time to write.  My first novel had not been published, but I was persevering.  That second one would be published three years later as Football Dreams.