REVIEW: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Reno, the narrator of the novel, is an aspiring land art artist and has moved from Reno to New York to pursue a career in art. There, Reno meets Sandro Valera, an artist and self-exiled, disillusioned heir to the Italian motorcycle empire, Moto Valera. She also meets his friend and photographer Ronnie Fontaine and Giddle, a waitress who “performs” life. Countless other characters litter this grey, metallic, neon, uninspiring New York. Stanley Kastle is an artist whose assistants now handle his ‘art,’ making him redundant, and his wife Gloria, put simply by Sandro, “requires servicing.” There is Helen Hellenberger, a gallery owner and her minions — aspiring artists who go from pushy hawkers selling their work to urbane artistes. And as Reno mentions, there is an unspoken rule to not ask what these people were before — the past is a tryst with fiction but the present is real; until that too, of course, becomes the past.
Reno gets a job as a “China girl”— models who up till the ’90s were reference guides to achieve colour balance in films. She flashes across millions of movie reels and just before you begin to recognise her, she disappears. The voyeurism here is reversed — it is not the audience watching the China girl, but her watching the audience — always silent, always inert, and always set apart by her inability to experience the theatre. This is the defining feature of Reno herself — a strangely empty narrator, who works like a filter to narrate the stories of others. The narration is porous, to the point of being lifeless.
Some critics have criticised Kushner for adopting a weak narrator whose function is to reflect the masculinity around her. This interpretation is too simplistic — the narrator does demonstrate agency, notably when she is one with her motorcycle. As an outsider to practically everything in the novel, apart from the bikes, Reno’s wide-eyed wonder, and at other times observation-as-narration, are in some cases justified — a 20-something who is discovering a city which has as many layers as it does neon lights is a grand experience, but that’s reality. Fiction, and holding a reader’s interest, requires the fictional world to pop out of the pages, and unfortunately the New York of this book is sterile and uninspiring and the characters fall flat in the leap to pretentious chatter.
The other problem with the novel is its pace. Clearly, an immense amount of research has gone into this book — parts of it are set in Brazil’s rubber plantations; during Mussolini’s regime and the autonomist riots and clashes in Italy; in the ’60s when anarchist gangs ran riot across New York; and in Utah, where Reno competes in land speed racing. But The Flamethrowers is oversaturated with information — observations and character sketches tread dangerously between rich backgrounds and vertigo-inducing word overload. It is textbook postmodern with references dotted throughout but no real thread to connect.
With so much weight in the novel, the challenge is to move at more-than-a-glacial pace, and while some portions are beautifully balanced, the novel mostly gets lost in its own minuteness of focus. There are pages upon pages, for instance, devoted to Reno’s description of her otherwise very short motorcycle crash. There is an entire chapter (which reads like a news bullet feature) about an anarchist group in New York. There is tedious reading about a land speed racer who was a childhood hero for Reno. No amount of research is a substitute for a gripping story, and that is what The Flamethrowers lacks. It has immense potential — a thrilling ride through explosive junctures in revolutionary times but none of the flair to pull off a captivating story which, at the end of the day, is what the pleasure of a novel is all about.
There are, however, chapters halfway through the book, when Reno and Sandro visit his family home in Italy, where the narrative loosens up; it loses some of its self-consciousness and warms up to the reader. Perhaps because the characters here are more accessible than the ones in New York: more human, more open with their frailties and history and that breathes life into the writing. Either way, as soon as Reno is back in New York (and this time with heartbreak thanks to the philandering Sandro), we’re hit once again by the metallic din of ice-cold people.
If you can move past these jarring experiences, the novel’s success lies in the pathos of its central motif — the flamethrower: fire, burning as living. The Flamethrowers begins with the epigraph fac ut ardeat, meaning ‘made to burn’. In World War I, the flamethrower was a weapon used by the Italian army, in particular the Arditi (assault group). The young Valera (Sandro’s father), the other narrator, was one of the Arditi who gives himself direction, saying: “Don’t despair, and get yourself a bicycle with a combustible engine.” To burn is to live. Machines burn — the motorcycle with its speed, guns with their roar — and people too burn — their entire existence is based upon violent upheaval, whether it is around or within them. The novel’s driving force is encapsulated perfectly in these lines:
“A youthful recognition that vital life was change and swiftness, which only revealed itself through violent convulsions. Sameness was a kind of stupor, a state of being in which people thought the world had always been as they knew it and would always stay that way ... To know that life meant cataclysmic change, exceptional and monstrous to most people but not to them. They embraced the monstrosity of it.”
Change and speed are the defining features of this novel, which embraces turbulence as a way of life; indeed as life. The characters thrive in constant stimulation; imagination and action surge together in a nonstop back and forth of story upon story weaving through the novel. The ruckus of action echoes with a crazy babble of warring voices in The Flamethrowers as humans and machines, as well as the book itself, compete for some illusive fulfillment, which, disappointingly, is all too fleeting.
The Flamethrowers
(NOVEL)
By Rachel Kushner
Scribner, US
ISBN 9781439142004
400pp.