While the rest of us were out doing normal, non-geniusy things like shopping for bath salts or watching reruns of Freaky Eaters, Rachel Kushner went and resurrected a story we thought had been told to death: the novel about the young artist who moves to the big city. What’s worse is that somehow this new book is even better—clearer, sharper, funnier, sexier—than her last novel, 2008’s National Book Award–nominated Telex From Cuba. It’s called The Flamethrowers, and it’s about motorcycles, art, slave labor, both world wars, land-speed records, cinema, language, and all the different kinds of revolution that there are. It behaves like a play, thundering along in three acts—the first act is set in New York, the second in Italy, the third returning to New York—and it is powered by prose so gorgeous it cannot be represented here with any justice (though I will try).
In the summer of 1975, a young woman who goes by the nickname Reno moves from Nevada to New York with the vague idea of breaking into the art scene. She is miserably lonely at first, and her loneliness heightens her formidable perceptive powers as she watches from the fire escape of her Little Italy apartment: Smoke bombs on the Fourth of July become “concentrated dye blooming through water,” and the “long, wispy antennae” of a smashed cockroach on a sidewalk are seen “swiping around for signs of its own life.” She sleeps with the windows wide open and calls disconnected numbers more than once.
Soon, though, she finds herself in love with a handsome, wealthy artist 14 years her senior, a man named Sandro Valera…