The Flamethrowers

As with Rachel Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, I liked the framework of The Flamethrowers more than I liked the actual book. This one, her second novel, is a look at artists and revolutionaries in the 1970s, in New York City and Italy.

The book is mostly narrated by a woman known only as Reno, her home town. As the tale starts she is motorcycling across the Bonneville Flats. She will land in New York and hang with the artist crowd, acquiring a boyfriend, Sandro Valera, who is the son of a man who built a fortune making motorcycles (and tires). She will also cross paths with revolutionaries, such as the former members of an anarchist New York group called The Motherfuckers and The Red Brigade in Italy.

This sounds better than it plays out. Mostly this is due to the meandering quality of the book. Every once in a while I'd be reading and it would really grab my attention with some sterling prose, such as: "My uncle Bobby, who hauled dirt for a living, spent his final moments of life jerking his leg to depress the clutch while lying in a hospital, his body determined to operate his dump truck, clutching and shifting gears as he sped toward death on a hospital gurney."

But just as often the pace would just go flat, and my attention would start to wander. There's a wonderful section in which Reno is staying at Sandro's mother's villa, and she is mercilessly badgered by the old woman. But then, after catching Sandro in flagrante delicto with his cousin, impulsively joins the estate's driver on some sort of militant action that just kind of blurred by for me.

The book occasionally breaks into the third person to relate the story of Sandro's father, who started the company. This just bogs the book down, at least until the end, when Sandro is a young man. We learn the origin of the title, when young Sandro is fascinated with a weapon: "But then his father told him the flamethrowers were a hopeless lot. Their tanks were cumbersome and heavy and they were obvious and slow-moving targets and if they were ever caught they were shown no mercy. That's not a thing you want to be, his father said, after which Sandro continued to love the flamethrowers best, to reserve for them a special fascination, in their eerie, hooded asbestos suit, the long and evil nozzle they aimed at enemy holdouts. But he didn't know if his interest was reverence or a kind of pity." Since Kushner derives her title from this passage, this must be profound, but its profundity escapes me.

The end of the book sees Reno back in New York. The blackout occurs while she is watching a porn movie in Times Square, specifically Behind the Green Door, which pops up occasionally throughout the book. We get this information: "No one buys popcorn for a porn film. They didn't sell it. I passed through the lobby curtains into what looked like a regular movie theater, red vinyl seats, slightly sloped floor, a stained screen, smaller than I respected. Sparse audience, all male, each with a safety buffer of empty seats around him. A few glared at me, rustled bags, which long people were for some reason required to do in movie theaters, to rustle bags no matter what genre of film, Chinese opera or Mature Audience Only."

Reno rides her motorcycle through the darkened, dangerous streets, witnessing looting on a grand scale. This section is particulary haunting, and I think comes closest to what she was intending, as explained in her afterword about 1977 New York: "a period that has long fascinated me, when the city had a Detroit-like feel, was drained of money and its manufacturing base, and piled up with garbage."

I think the key to why this book isn't as gripping as it could have been--it took me a long time to finish a not-very-long book--was the central character. I'm interested in why she wasn't given a name, which lends to her formless shape. We don't really know enough about her--she reflects those around her, and is by default the least interesting character in the book.

I give The Flamethrowers three stars out of five if only because it is momentarily brilliant, almost making up for its lack of purpose.