The opening chapter of The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner is perhaps the best thing I’ve read in quite some time. In it, we are introduced to our protagonist through the overlap of two worlds: the first is art, specifically the New York scene of the early and mid 1970s (she is described as a land artist, using photographs to record events of interaction with the surrounding landscape); the second is motorcycles, as she is on her way to the desert flats of Nevada, where she will ride a new model bike on the same tracks where land records are threatened and set each year. It’s fantastic stuff: deeply ingrained in each world, finding authority in the details of language and behavior, and painting her character in crisply defined movements.
The rest of the novel is quite good, but never quite recovers the energy and electricity of the opening salvo. It traces her relationship with an older Italian artist, one of the heirs to the company that made her motorcycle (but whose fortune was really made in rubber sourced from Brazil and turned into tires for the near-infinite demand during World War II). The novel is very conscious of the complex contradictions of capitalism, making stops not only in Brazil, where indigenous workers are endlessly abused in the pursuit of rubber, but also spending a fair bit of time back in Italy, where factory strikes carry an ever-increasing threat of violence against both the workers and the factory owners themselves.
The book, however, is much more about the personal than the political: it is a story not so much of lost love, as of duplicitous behavior, of the cost of maintaining a facade for the world, whether that facade is emotional detachment or performance art. It is not a book of happy endings, but it is a moving voyage, well -executed and engaging to read.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Create authenticity. Kushner’s ability to embed details in her descriptions and, more importantly, in her character’s actions immediately conveys a sense of thick reality to her settings, from the mechanics of riding a motorcycle at high speeds to the rules of engagement for the production of modern minimalist art. It’s so hard to do that without either (a) limiting your writing to only those things you know well or (b) sounding stiff and forced. As someone who writes about impossible futures, (a) is not an option …