*spoilers ahead*


Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers weaves a coming-of-age story with the New York art scene in the 70s, an anarchist movement in Italy, and the theme of speed in relation to motorcycle racing. I love braided narratives that tether disparate ideas together because they always produce two stories: the literal one in the text, and an abstract one that branches out of the fictional world and into the real world, one that can only be articulated by asking questions about the author and her intent. What Kushner has done here is create an immersive world that leads the reader down multiple rabbit holes. You’ll be constantly tracking down what the story is really about—The Flamethrowers is like two mirrors facing each other, creating a tunnel of reflections and different realities. What is real? What is imagined? What is good? What is bad? The one thought I had after finishing each chapter: wow, wow, wow. Part of the fun in reading this is making sense of the inevitable afterthoughts that drift in after each chapter.


“She was on her way down, or up, or down, and not looking for friends. She wasn’t shopping for experience. She was trying to survive. I was the one shopping for experience. I who remembered her and everything she had said to me, and that was enough. It was enough that I remembered her.”


Kushner’s characters are so brilliantly written. Reno is fast on a motorcycle, but her actual presence in life is fleeting too. She never stays too long in one place or with one person. Her youth allows her to be passive without being immature—a privilege that Sandro, as an older man, does not have access to. Reno is restless, living within her own timeline. Sandro’s reputation precedes him. He hails from the wealthy and famous Valera family, a fact that seems to define and haunt him throughout the entirety of the story. He’s static, preserved in time as a constant. Although he cheats on Reno—an occurrence implied from the beginning—you can’t help but feel a pang of pity for him. He is kind in ways, cruel in others, which makes his character truly one of the most complex that I’ve come across in literature. I loved both of them, and I could tell that Kushner had a crystal clear vision of who they were.

I also liked how her side characters made constant appearances and shifted into different roles as the novel progressed. For instance, John Dogg, who initially seems moronic, becomes a lauded artist by the end of the novel. Reno makes an observation that everyone, even Sandro, forgets that their own success is usually preceded by the humiliating eagerness to be successful, as soon as they achieve their goals. In a way, these characters are versions of each other at different points in the past, present, and future. They also happen to be men, which I’m sure is not coincidental. Kushner seems to hint at the misogyny that coats male instincts. But the role of misogyny in the story is not black-and-white—none of the ideas touched on really are. At times, it is difficult to tell whether the characters are simply mean by nature, or if their meanness has a subconscious agenda behind it.


“His father had said to him, ‘As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.’ ‘You mean you  do,’ Sandro had said. ‘Yes, I,’ his father said. ‘That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.’”


Ronnie, for me, was significant because Reno meets him before Sandro, is intrigued by him even when she dates Sandro. While this book is not a romance, it is romantic because the desire to be loved is a universal experience, and not including even an acknowledgement of this would render the story unrealistic. There is a chapter that describes how Ronnie and Sandro first meet—at the Met, they were night guards, and bonded over a statue of a slave girl. It seems that the statue is a symbol for Reno herself. She is caught between the attention of these two men who survive the story without prominent character arcs. And while I initially thought that Ronnie was the more noble of the two, I’ve come to understand that he was polite and kind out of necessity—because Sandro laid claim to Reno first. Had their roles been reversed—Sandro meeting Reno at the bar with Nadine and Thurman; Ronnie becoming her boyfriend—I could see them slipping into each other’s roles just as easily. They are, in essence, twins: two sides of the same coin.


“The truth was the thing I had sensed but pushed aside, because it was too obvious to accept.”


It goes without saying that Kushner is a talented writer. She has a gift for creating the most beautiful and precise environments that backdrop action scenes. My favorite scene in the whole novel has to be, without a doubt, the one where Flip Farmer sails through the Salt Flats, unable to curb the speed at which his vehicle moves. The whole moment spans across a handful of minutes, but Kushner slows time down to accommodate the stillness inside the car and Flip’s thoughts—there is a dichotomy here of outward speed and inner quiet that sets the mood for the rest of the story. It was phenomenally executed.

I really enjoyed reading The Flamethrowers. The structure was interesting, and the interweaving of photographs added a nice touch of realism. This was my first Rachel Kushner book, but I am excited to read more by her.