Inspiring Older Readers
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
In the interests of full disclosure I want to say at the outset that this is a book I failed to finish – hell no, it’s a book I barely got half way through. When Kushner’s novel was published in 2013 I think it’s fair to say that the critical reception was pretty positive – enthusiastic even – until a few dissenting voices started to be heard and now it seems the book divides the critics.
Those fighting Kushner’s corner argue that it’s a dazzling, daring tour-de-force that eclipsed the other fiction of that year. Take for example this from The New Yorker:
"Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner), is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story. It is nominally a historical novel (it’s set in the mid-seventies), and, I suppose, also a realist one (it works within the traditional grammar of verisimilitude). But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading. "
Blimey.
Contrast this with Talitha Stevenson writing in The Guardian:
"One swallow does not make a summer; one good quality does not make a good man; and not even a thousand good similes make a good novel. Though The Flamethrowers contains such fertile subject matter as political activism, motorcycle racing, the New York art scene in the 1970s and fascist Italy in the 1940s, Rachel Kushner's blazing poetic gifts still fail to give it life."
I always like it when there’s a petty squabble going on between reviewers because it usually means there’s something interesting going on – so I went to the book with quite high expectations.
It might be worth just giving you a flavour of the plot summary that I read on Wikipedia before I tried to read the novel and you’ll probably appreciate why I was drawn to it:
“In 1975, a young art school graduate from Reno moves to New York City hoping to become a successful artist. She meets an older, more established artist, Sandro Valera, the heir of Moto Valera, an Italian tire and motorcycle company. He and his friends nickname her Reno. In 1976, with the reluctant approval of Sandro, she takes one of the Moto Valera prototype motorcycles to the Bonneville Salt Flats where she intends to race and then photograph her tracks as part of an art project. Reno crashes the bike but is adopted by the Moto Valera crew who help her set a record to become the woman with the fastest racing record in the world.
The following year the Valera crew ask Reno to join them on a promotional tour in Italy. Sandro reluctantly decides to accompany Reno and the two spend two weeks with Sandro's family in their villa in Lake Como before the promotional tour is due to begin. However plans for the tour are put on hold when the star of the promotional tour, a professional racer, is kidnapped. Reno also finds Sandro kissing his cousin, Talia, and runs away to Romewith the Valera family mechanic, Gianni, who introduces her to a group of young radicals. Reno is swept up in part of the Movement of 1977 and participates in riots. She later helps Gianni illegally cross the border into France.
Back in New York Reno moves out of Sandro's apartment and concentrates on her art. She learns that Sandro's older brother has been kidnapped by revolutionaries and tries to contact him but realizes he is already seeing someone new. After his brother's murder Sandro finally returns to Italy where he will succeed his brother as the head of the Valera empire.”
Kushner’s cast of characters is set in the 1970s (always interesting for someone my age) and involves motor cycles and the rather pretentious and heartless New York art scene – not a bad cocktail I would have thought. But I just hated every minute of it. It seemed to me to be over-written in an attempt to create texture and I simply didn’t believe in the characters – especially Reno, the woman through whose eyes the story is told. Stevenson in her review describes her as ‘weirdly guileless’ and this is, I think, an excellent assessment.
I say all this conscious that giving it up 180 pages into a 400 page book means that I may have missed the pyrotechnics others have seen in the novel but, frankly, if its failed to convince me by that point, life is too short and there are way too many other books for me to struggle on with something I’m just not able to tune into.
So, in the critical debate about this book which is, I have to admit, heavily weighted in favour of Kushner I find myself on the side of those who were much more sceptical about its qualities. I would urge you though to take a look for yourself because, after all, neither side has right on its side – just opinion.
Terry Potter
April 2018