With every book I read, I learn not just more about the world but more about my mind and how it receives or won't receive language. Some books rushing through me like a wind, some pooling in my soul, some remembered not at all for plot but for their mood. Some saying,
Stay awake, stay awake, there's so much here.Rachel Kushner's
The Flamethrowers challenged me. I was in awe of how deeply Kushner had imbibed her material—motorcycle racing, 1970s art, rubber trees, Italian gangs, ennui, Nevada salt flats. I was perpetually aware of a story happening at some distance, beyond me, beyond my full capabilities as a reader. Long passages of extreme brilliance. Some interludes with their own internal logic. A study of a time and a place and a certain kind of people. A triumph, in many ways, this book. But perhaps I more fully admired its parts than its whole.
I would like to share here a block, a favorite part. Kushner can write magnificently about almost anything. Here she is writing about the process of becoming. Her acuity is breathtaking. This passage, and many others, reads like notes to a novelist. I study it. I value it. I share it.
... he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn't spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through puberty and became more readably "girl." The person I was before I became more readably "person." We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal "me." I wasn't so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.
I am focusing hard on the corporate work these days—doing the projects that arrive, finding the projects that don't even know they need me yet. Beth the Marketeer. Beth (yes, some of them call me this) the Machine.
We do what we must.
There'll be little time for my own literary work during these days, and so I look forward to easing my mind away from work pressures with books I bought or acquired long ago and never had the time to read. Books like Rachel Kushner's
The Flamethrowers, Kevin Powers'
The Yellow Birds, Ruth Ozeki's
A Tale for the Time Being, Louis Greenstein's
Mr. Boardwalk, Jayne Anne Phillips'
Quiet Dell, Katherine Boo's
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Violet Kupersmith's
The Frangipani Hotel, Jess Walter's
Beautiful Ruins, Tea Obreht's
The Tiger's Wife.
I owe these writers my time. I feel like less than me because it has taken so long. If it still takes me a terrible (not beautiful) forever to report back on these books, know that I am doing all I can.
So far, I can tell you this: 50 pages into Kushner and I'm in awe.
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers is a complex, well-written, interesting, energetic sort of book that pulls in threads from all over the place and somehow manages to weave them all together into a coherent story. But be warned, it is one of those sorts of stories that doesn’t have a definite ending. There’s an ending, but it’s not the kind that wraps everything up, it’s more like the sort that gathers together a few of the main threads to a place from which the story could leap out again and keep going.
The book gets started with two stories. First we are thrown into the midst of Italy during WWI and a man named Valera salvaging a headlamp from the motorcycle of his fallen comrade and then whacking a German soldier over the head with it and killing him. We later learn that Valera becomes a wealthy man, head of a company that makes motorcycles and tires.
Next it’s 1975 and we are riding a Moto Valera motorcycle to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah where Reno, our narrator so-called because she grew up in Reno, is planning on riding the motorcycle in a time trial as an art project. Reno, aged about twenty-one, moved to New York to become an artist. She is interested in speed and motorcycles and her boyfriend happens to be Sandro Valera, youngest son of the Valera we meet in the first chapter. But Sandro is an artist and doesn’t want to have anything to do with his family. Pushed into it by his best friend Ronnie, Sandro agrees to get Reno the newest, fastest version of the Moto Valera. During her run across the salt flats, Reno makes it up over 140 mph, gets hit by a gust of wind and crashes. She survives with only minor injuries, is adopted by the Valera team who is there from Italy so Didi Bombonato can break the world land speed record. Events conspire to keep that from happening but Reno ends up getting to drive his car and finds herself holding the land speed record for women.
Back in New York she is rightly proud of herself but Sandro can only scowl because the Valera team has invited Reno to visit Italy and make some publicity appearances. Again Ronnie pushes Sandro and gets him to reluctantly agree to take Reno to Italy. The trip ends up being a disaster in so many ways –snobby family, betrayal, riots and kidnappings. And then it’s back to New York and the art scene where some of the repercussions of Italy continue to reverberate.
In some ways this is a coming of age story. Reno is young and inexperienced and sometimes seems to just go along because she doesn’t know what else to do. But she isn’t stupid. She’s a keen observer. Before Reno became interested in art and motorcycles she was a competitive skier. Sandro gives her a hard time after dinner in Italy one evening for letting an egotistical novelist who hadn’t skied in decades tell her about the right way to sky. But as Reno says,
Sandro didn’t understand why I let this old man go on at length as if I’d never been on skis, but my experience had nothing to do with Chesil Jones. It wouldn’t have interested him one bit. He didn’t bring up skiing to have a conversation, but to lecture and instruct. I’d seen right away he was the type of person who grows deadly bored if disrupted from his plan to talk about himself, and I had no desire to waste my time and energy forcing on him what he would only will away in yawns and distracted looks.
There is a lot of this kind of behavior from men in the novel. Even Sandro himself while encouraging Reno and her artistic aspirations manages to belittle her at the same time. Late in the book Reno comments why she liked one of the radicals she fell in with while in Italy:
I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men liked to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.
Even though this is a coming of age story and Reno definitely gains much in the way of experience during the telling, there comes in that unsettled ending. She’s definitely changed from the beginning of the book. She recognizes that the answers she had been waiting for to the questions that had been governing her were not going to come. She understands she needs to stop waiting and move on to the next question. But while she may be moving on, we are not left with the impression that she will be more active in her search for answers, that she will do anything other than wait. Then again, perhaps she will eventually take charge of her life instead of drifting from one experience to another.
The critic James Woods suggests The Flamethrowers is a contemporary rewriting of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. I haven’t read Flaubert’s book so I can’t agree or disagree. But I agree when Woods calls the book vibrant and “brilliantly alive.” The Flamethrowers is only Kushner’s second book and it is not a perfect. It is, however, an enjoyable, well told story that makes me excited to see where Kushner goes in the future.
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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has released its list of 2013 Fellows, and the list includes a number of literary winners.
Kiran Desai, Adam Johnson, Rachel Kushner, Ben Marcus, David Means, Terese Svoboda and Colson Whitehead were all named fiction fellows for 2013. The nonfiction fellows included: Joshua Foer, J. C. Hallman, Bill Hayes, Sylvia Nasar, Carlin Romano and David Rosenberg.
We’ve rounded up more literary winners below. Here’s more from the committee: “This year, after considering the recommendations of panels and juries consisting of hundreds of distinguished artists, scholars, and scientists, the Board of Trustees has granted Fellowships to 175 individuals.”
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