Make it Burn

Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers. And unfortunately, Utah.

It has been a rough month so far, in the world of book bans. This month, Utah banned 13 specific books from school libraries statewide, ordering them to shred their copies.

That’s assuming the librarians spent their meager book buying budgets on ACOTAR to begin with. Or that they have Judy Blume’s Forever (1975) in active circulation. Librarians reading this: what are the chances?

Sure. Don’t let the kids read about the 1970s. Let them think they invented sex. Nevermind they can learn about soft swinging from near-peers on TikTok and coming soon, on Hulu: Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

But this isn’t really about sex. It isn’t even about books. It’s about whether these librarians (mostly women) will comply.

I’ll be writing more about this topic and choosing a destination for my paid subscribers’ contributions to legal challenges to these very demure, very mindful sickening laws.

In the meantime, thanks to my new paid subscribers since my last post: Melissa, Bradley, Juliana and Ann. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please join them.

2013 was a great year for me personally (my daughter was born) but a terrible year for my reading life (see above). Though I read few books then, I did read reviews as a proxy for them, and remember being entertained by the polarizing conversation about The Flamethrowers.

A finalist for the National Book Award in that year, The Flamethrowers was lauded by James Wood in the New Yorker and by other critics for its realism and the vibrance of the multiple stories and histories it conjures.

The novel’s present day is 1977. The story is set between Soho, where artists take over abandoned industrial properties for their studios and living spaces, and Italy, primarily the clandestine headquarters of a leftist militant movement in Rome. But it also brings to life speed racing at the Utah salt flats, the frontlines of WWI with the Italian Arditi, an expat’s life in colonial Alexandria, and a slave’s desperation on a Brazilian rubber plantation.

Kushner turns research plus her own varied experience—as a kid who grew up around motorcycles and rode one around San Francisco in her 20s until she had a serious accident, as an art critic who studied political economy at Berkeley, where she was on a ski racing team, as the partner to an academic with connections to Italian cultural figures—into bold, look-at-what-I-can-do, literary art.

Moreover, it’s a novel about storytelling. A photographer and filmmaker, narrator Reno is naturally tuned to observation and listening. She’s building the patience and instincts of a documentarist who must captures hours of real footage without knowing when exactly the true story will emerge.

The older male artists and former activists she’s fallen in with are more than willing to oblige this tendency. Throughout the novel, Reno captures the richly textured digressive monologues of several of them, at once boring and entertaining in their extreme detail. The wry humor with which Reno tolerates them, her perceptiveness about others’ responses to them, gives the reader more insight into her character than anything specific she ever tells us about herself.

The effect is a novel so broadly cast and yet so densely imagined that it ends up feeling even more expansive than its 383 pages.

The praise and personal attention The Flamethrowers brought to Kushner made critic Adam Kirsch grumpy. He panned the book in a piece for Tablet magazine, insinuating the acclaim was due not to the novel’s merits but to the novelty of a woman writing a “macho novel, by and about women.”

He called it “too stylish” and “self-consciously cool,” with no evidence for these claims beyond his own discomfort with its ceding of the story at times to various performative monologues and its treatment of certain topics—motorcycles, industrial exploitation, terrorism— he apparently considers the entitlement of male writers.

Kirsch insisted that a novel (by a woman) that prioritizes these things above providing insight into its characters’ psychology, is flawed by “always insisting on its own mystique.” Projecting much?

As a follow up, Laura Miller asserted in Salon magazine that male reviewers were scared by the authority with which Kushner takes on “the temper of the times, and turns it” in The Flamethrowers, a book Miller considers the first contender for Great American novel written by a woman, or with a female character at its center.

Locked into the critical volleying at the time, I felt that I’d spoiled my chance to experience the mystique of The Flamethrowers for myself. To read it and not love it would be to side with the enemy.

Now, at more than a decade’s distance, here’s what I think: The Flamethrowers is indeed a novel of reversals. But the supposed gender reversal is not the most interesting one.

Kushner wryly anticipates and dispenses with gender-based criticisms of her project. At the outset, as she prepares to race the brand new bike Sandro gave her across the Bonneville Salt Flats Reno thinks, “A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”

Yes, the perspective connecting all the various timelines and stories within the novel belongs to a young woman. Wide-eyed Reno, a recent art school grad and Western transplant, allows herself to be nicknamed for the town she’s from by the group of older NYC art world insiders she falls in with by chance. Among them, Sandro Valera, an estranged scion of an Italian motorcycle and tire fortune and the love interest, enables her access to these worlds.

And so, with a flick of the throttle Kushner frees herself to take on broader questions of social relations not limited to gender. It’s a novel concerned with voice vs. silence, passivity vs. agency, caring vs. using, ideology vs. art. Yes, these dynamics are part of an individual gendered daily experience of life, but they’re also significant to displacement of the status quo by movements, politics, and the economy, over time and distance. The Flamethrowers considers these themes on at every level.

Take the unusual visual afterword, entitled “A Portfolio Curated by Rachel Kushner.” The author shares and explains some of the images that sparked her inspiration for the novel, and which lend atmosphere throughout, starting with the cover. It features a photograph of a woman, war paint under her eyes framed with girlish fringed bangs. Over the photograph itself, where her mouth is, someone has placed an X made of band aids. “A creature of language, silenced,” Kushner explains.

And who is silenced in The Flamethrowers? Yes, Reno at times, by the more bombastic male characters—though ultimately she reverses this silence. Remember, she’s the storyteller.

The dedications point in another direction, too. The first dedication is to Christine Mitchell, a filmmaker and friend of Kushner’s. Film is Reno’s medium, and it’s also the medium of a number of other artists within the book. The second dedication is to Anna, no last name. The author told The Paris Review this refers the uncredited 16-year-old pregnant drug addict at the center of an iconic 1970s Italian vérité documentary. Anna’s story is continually interpreted and interrrupted with digressions from a cast of iconoclastic, pontificating characters who paint a bleak and angry portrait of the social climate in the country at the time. Kushner watched it multiple times while writing The Flamethrowers.

An Anna-like character appears in the novel, at the time of the biggest reversal in Reno’s trajectory. She’s left Sandro waiting at his family’s villa in Bellago after a betrayal, allowing their groundskeeper Gianni to take her to Rome. There she discovers Gianni is a clandestine operative within the factory workers’ movement threatening the Valera family’s security and legacy. In the movement’s flophouse/headquarters, she encounters an Anna-like character known merely as “the runaway” by the filmmakers, who care only about their footage.

Though Reno’s excited by the atmosphere of intrigue, rebellion and violence, and moved by how the rebellion accepts and cares for her as an outsider, the filmmakers’ callousness toward the runaway girl makes apparent that exploitation is not exclusive to the realm of industrial capitalists. No movement can claim the moral high ground for long, it seems.

The runaway’s mistreatment makes Reno skeptical of the miltants’ cause, but not so much that she resists passively serving the means to a violent end, and Gianni’s inconclusive disappearance.

Sandro’s brother Roberto, the face of the Valera company, has been kidnapped. As he remembers Roberto’s childhood cruelties toward him, the reader learns that passivist Sandro once fantasized about the flamethrowers, a band of purely offensive Italian shock troops who shot flames into enemy trenches in the name of futurism and progress. Learning the reversal of their fate—most who were not picked off by the Central powers were killed by their own commanders—pains him. Many of the Arditi who survived, like Sandro and Roberto’s father, became industrialists and Fascists.

Now in a reversal of fate beyond their control, the descendants of those once lauded fighters are targets of a violent offensive by groups who hold the more progressive future vision. The novel highlights the reversals of fate that befall movements, the inability of those who agitate for a different future to predict the ways their tactics will play out, how fates may circle back.

It’s a book about so many things, including how impossible it is to know someone outside of observing how they respond to the people and experiences arising in the moment. Those you love, and least of all your enemies.

The story of Reno and Sandro plays this out at the personal level. In the first chapter of their story, Sandro, fourteen years older, advises her to take her time in becoming an artist. As a young woman, he perceives her as “a conduit. All she has to do is exist.” Reno paraphrases his words and they become her own thought about this wait-and-see stage of her life:

“You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be true. Some people might consider that passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

Many of the stories and timelines explore this concept of passivity—apparently there’s a lot of waiting involved not only in getting started in life and dating, but also in most jobs, including mechanical maintenance and making art, and in rebellion.

By the end of the novel, it’s apparent Sandro is the one who has actually been Reno’s conduit, to the art world but also to a sentimental education and an awareness of the limits of knowledge she has about others—and herself—that changes her velocity.

When we last see Sandro, he is the one waiting patiently, at the request of flight attendants, for a delayed flight. Meanwhile, Reno is moving on. She’s learned something about the limits of passivity from her experience with the Italian operative: “I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”

I’d recommend this book to readers who like a nuanced, thoughtful novel rich with insights—about love, freedom, capitalism, art— to flip over in your mind when you can’t sleep at night.

Fans of Joan Didion’s fiction and non-fiction and fans of Roberto Bolano’s barely-there narrator Arturo Belano of The Savage Detectives will recognize similarities in this book.

If you love an immersive and stylish historical fiction that makes invented celebrities and “facts” feel real, this book does so in a spectacular way. It really feels like the 1970s, but relevant at the same time.

One of my most anticipated new releases this fall is Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, out September 3 from Scribner. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Creation Lake is a novel about an American woman sent to infiltrate an anarchist collective in France. She seduces her way into the commune and in turn becomes entranced by the mysterious figure of Bruno Lacombe, who mentors the young activists by email. It has been described as “high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.”

What do you think: should it be on my September reading list? I’m even more curious about it—the main character is a monkey wrench to the monkey wrenchers— now that I’ve read The Flamethrowers.

• Have you read The Flamethrowers or any of Kushner’s other books? What did you think?

• Do you read the reviews before you read the book? What’s your limit?

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