The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
This book feels very literary to me in that it’s full of a lot of different things, but if you asked me what it was about, I’d have a hard time answering. About a girl who dated a rich man? About poseur artists? About speed? About motorcycles?
The main character is a girl named Reno (I’m not sure what her real name is) who is named as such because of the town of her origin. She loves motorcycles and skiing, though she’s not old enough to be much of an expert in either. She considers herself an artist, but she’s an artist in New York in the 1970s, a time and place which I’m sure many people consider “exciting” and I consider “the nadir of art.” These artists are all sizzle, no steak. Reno’s boyfriend Sandro is a well-regarded artist who makes aluminum boxes that even his own mother doesn’t understand. His equally well-regarded artist friend Ronnie makes contemptible films of women who have beaten themselves in the face. It’s all about the high concept, about being hard to understand, about being inaccessible to the masses, an art that has nothing at all to do with actual craft, skill, practice or honing a talent. In short: they are the kind of bullshit artists I despise.
But maybe that’s what novels are for, to spend time with people you despise, so you can get to know them but not have the displeasure of meeting them in real life. There are plenty of contemptible people in this. The rich are contemptible in their manners and their lack of regard for the people they enslaved and destroyed to make their money.
The men are contemptible in their casual and period-accurate misogyny. In one scene, a man who barely skiis explains skiing to Reno (who won many awards for the sport), tossing in a cavalier attitude of “women are not meant for skiing.” Even her job, as a “China Girl” (woman who holds up color bars for color calibration) doesn’t seem like a real job, she’s a nameless interchangeable pretty face. Reno seems to be either a placeholder woman, an interchangeable woman, or a woman either regarded or punished by other women on the basis of whom she is or is not the girlfriend of.
Reno is the only forgivable person in this, her feckless lack of personality excusable because of her youth. Everyone else, I felt either a smidgin of pity, or pure contempt. Just when I learned enough about a character to start to like him, he’d go and, say, enslave a tribe of Indians, or fuck his cousin, and I’d sigh and sort of pull back.
This book feels like period photographs of a squalid, ugly city. It’s interesting because it’s different, and because you can see the seediness without actually getting too close, but it’s also sharply rendered vignettes of people I deeply disliked. I hesitate to call them all villians, because villians actually strive to accomplish something meaningful, whereas these people just keep getting older and sadder without ever growing up. Well done picture, really ugly subject.
