Lighting a fire on the 1970s
By Cristina Garcia |
May 5, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
In "The Flamethrowers," her frequently dazzling second novel, Rachel Kushner thrusts us into the white-hot center of the 1970s conceptual art world, motorcycle racing, upper-class Italy and the rampant kidnappings and terrorism that plagued it. It's an irresistible, high-octane mix - and a departure from the steamier pleasures of her critically acclaimed first novel, "Telex From Cuba." The language is equally gorgeous and Kushner's insights into place, society and the complicated rules of belonging, and unbelonging, can be mordantly brilliant. None of the characters in "The Flamethrowers" are quite what they seem, fabricating pasts as nonchalantly as they throw together their art. Above all, they hunger to be seen, to distinguish themselves from the ordinary. One artist, responding to the question of why he invents, defends his florid lies as "a form of discretion."
Speed is another operative element in the novel; speed -- "an acute case of the present tense" - and its necessary correlative, time. It's the speed of the fastest motorcycles on the planet, the dizzying trajectories of artists in a capricious world, the precipitous rise and decline of fortunes, reputations, social status, sanity and, perhaps most acutely, love. It's also about time slowed to the flip side of speed, to an utter, velvet stillness: "an operatic present, a pure present."
At the heart of "The Flamethrowers" is Reno, a young artist from Nevada who, after a childhood of downhill skiing and racing dirt bikes, moves to New York with the vague idea of making it in the art world. "It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West."
She is beautiful, of course, and lonely, and not a little lost, spending the better part of her first Sundays in the city watching the chauffeured limousines of Mafia bosses, "lined up like bars of obsidian-black soap," clogging the street in front of her Little Italy tenement. Reno is a modern Henry James heroine - a rough-riding Daisy Miller, say - who wanders far from home and submits to what turns out to be a very unsentimental education at the hands of reputed sophisticates.
After she catches the eye of Sandro Valera, an older Italian artist and estranged scion of a motorcycle-and-tires empire (he fashions high-sheen metal boxes popular in New York art circles), Reno's life, predictably, heats up, at least on the surface. Their romance is interlarded with - and often hijacked by - the story of Sandro's father, referred to throughout simply as Valera, as if there could be none other. A former radical and World War I veteran of a motorcycle assault battalion with the Arditi, famous for deploying flamethrowers against their enemies, Valera has journeyed to the pinnacle of social and economic success on the backs of the peons he virtually enslaves in the remote rubber tree forests of northwestern Brazil.
But the delights of Kushner's writing cannot entirely compensate for the novel's ultimate loss of momentum. This is due, in part, to the ill-fated couple's unsurprising denouement, but it also results from the confusing sequencing in the last third of the book. While the narrative is supposedly meant to achieve a kaleidoscopic 1970s effect, it succeeds more in draining the well-earned energy of preceding scenes with too much back story, superfluous events and overwrought explanations.
That said, there is still plenty of enchantment to go around in this generous, ambitious and original novel.
Speed is another operative element in the novel; speed -- "an acute case of the present tense" - and its necessary correlative, time. It's the speed of the fastest motorcycles on the planet, the dizzying trajectories of artists in a capricious world, the precipitous rise and decline of fortunes, reputations, social status, sanity and, perhaps most acutely, love. It's also about time slowed to the flip side of speed, to an utter, velvet stillness: "an operatic present, a pure present."
At the heart of "The Flamethrowers" is Reno, a young artist from Nevada who, after a childhood of downhill skiing and racing dirt bikes, moves to New York with the vague idea of making it in the art world. "It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West."
She is beautiful, of course, and lonely, and not a little lost, spending the better part of her first Sundays in the city watching the chauffeured limousines of Mafia bosses, "lined up like bars of obsidian-black soap," clogging the street in front of her Little Italy tenement. Reno is a modern Henry James heroine - a rough-riding Daisy Miller, say - who wanders far from home and submits to what turns out to be a very unsentimental education at the hands of reputed sophisticates.
After she catches the eye of Sandro Valera, an older Italian artist and estranged scion of a motorcycle-and-tires empire (he fashions high-sheen metal boxes popular in New York art circles), Reno's life, predictably, heats up, at least on the surface. Their romance is interlarded with - and often hijacked by - the story of Sandro's father, referred to throughout simply as Valera, as if there could be none other. A former radical and World War I veteran of a motorcycle assault battalion with the Arditi, famous for deploying flamethrowers against their enemies, Valera has journeyed to the pinnacle of social and economic success on the backs of the peons he virtually enslaves in the remote rubber tree forests of northwestern Brazil.
But the delights of Kushner's writing cannot entirely compensate for the novel's ultimate loss of momentum. This is due, in part, to the ill-fated couple's unsurprising denouement, but it also results from the confusing sequencing in the last third of the book. While the narrative is supposedly meant to achieve a kaleidoscopic 1970s effect, it succeeds more in draining the well-earned energy of preceding scenes with too much back story, superfluous events and overwrought explanations.
That said, there is still plenty of enchantment to go around in this generous, ambitious and original novel.
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