The Flamethrowers: A Novel

Kushner has taken an intriguingly disparate set of subjects - the New York art world, the world of land speed records and the political unrest of 70s Italy, and woven them into the rites of passage story of a girl from Nevada nicknamed Reno and her initiation into the Bohemian milieu of New York, where she meets Sandro, an artist who has largely rejected his part in the family business that has made him rich. Reno is something of a blank cipher whose actions lead her into situations quite passively, but the set pieces are vivid and brilliantly painted. I was left wondering how many of the component stories were factual and how much was imagined, but it adds up to an impressive and readable whole.

I was very disappointed in this acclaimed book. It takes place in both the art world of New York and in Italy when much protesting is going on. however, i cared so little about the characters and felt they were so poorly presented that i found the book very tedious and unrewarding.

When I read the synopsis of The Flame Throwers before requesting it from Early Reviewer program, I thought i couldn't go wrong. A motorcycle girl who spends time in New York City and Milan - what could go wrong? Unfortunately, the novel did not live up to my expectations. Overall, the book is not cohesive and the characters are not fully developed. Individual episodes are well-written and interesting, but when placed together they didn't do anything for the unity of the book. Also, many of the characters lacked substance and seemed like one-sided, stock characters. I enjoyed the Bonneville Flats, Valera factory and riot episodes, but the entire novel fell flat. Maybe is should have been a series of related short stories....

Most of my friends hated this book. They were there how dare she write about it. But I think this had one of the strongest openings of any book I have read in years. I loved it. The language was precise but lyrical and the seamlessness of the art and the metaphor , the way speed and danger were interwoven was immaculate. My worry was could she sustain it and she couldn't although the book is still brilliant. It turned into a triangle romance and while it was good the art world aspect somehow receded in its power and we were left with a book that didn't break out of that mold. Still she can do these big scenes with all these characters and the fascinating "I' in the middle. Have to go back and study how she did it. I also personally loved her use of the pictoral as inspiration.

Just finished the last of the five free books I brought home from the ALA midwinter conference.
The Flamethrowers
The Dinner
And Sons
The Woman Upstairs
In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

The Flamethrowers was the best of the bunch.

The year is 1975 and Reno--so-called because of the place of her birth--has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world--artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. (Cover description)I listened to this and it was OK. I got lost in parts, didn't feel a strong connection to the characters, and found parts of it kind of vulgar.

Joy's Review: Set in New York and Italy in the 70's art milieu, this book vividly written with incredibly realistic strange characters. The narrator is a young woman who mostly allows herself to be swept along by those around her from rich pretentious arty types to Italian revolutionary terrorists. Can't wait to read more from Kushner; this book has the most vibrant language and descriptions that I've read in a long time.

The beginning was propulsive and stunning. Unforgettable. Unfortunately the rest of the novel doesn't live up to that, for me. But how many could write something like that? My advice is to pick up the book and read until the motorcycle wipes out. It's brilliant writing.

This was beautifully written, but the story itself was slow and downright dragged in places. The narrator seemed so detached from the events she described that it was hard to grasp any sort of depth of her character. Flamethrowers doesn't really shine because of the storytelling, but Kushner's talent still made this an overall enjoyable read.

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end, at it's best it was stunning prose and vivid images, but long stretches meandered around in unclear ways. For me it was also a wonderful and nostalgic evocation of Soho and downtown in the late 1970s.

The narrator is a young woman who grew up in Reno, came to NYC to become a modern artist, hooked up with an older Italian man Sandmo who is a major force in the New York art scene and also the effectively abdicated heir of an Italian industrial giant that makes motorcycles and tires, among other products. Her wanderings then take her back to Nevada to race on the salt flats, Italy where she accidentally ends up in large-scale protests, and back to New York again on time for the blackout. Over the course of this the novel traces love, betrayal, politics (especially radical Italian politics) and modern art all in the late 1970s--with flashbacks to Sandmo's father and a wide range of other territory covered as well.

Fascinating story set in the mid 1970's New York art scene, as well as the Italy of WWI and II as well as the western deserts of the U.S. Through the lives of Reno and Sandro, two lovers from comletely different worlds, we experience the complex relationship between family, life, history, and self-identity. Great read.

In one word this book is gritty. Even the descriptions are gritty. Reno, the main character so-called because that is where she is from goes to New York sometime between 1975-1976. The novel takes place over two years and individual dates are not that important. Reno wants to create art through film. While she finds a job has a skin tone girl she experiences the characters running through Soho during this time. Now this is New York before gentrification when Times Square had XXX movie theaters and muggings were normal. This is not pretty uptown Broadway New York with carriage rides through Central Park. Reno meets up with some minimalist artists. She has a relationship with one Sandro Valera, who is from Italy and whose family owns a motorcycle and tire factory. She goes to Italy and ends up among the Red Brigades before returning to New York alone. Her two years as told in this novel are not pretty. This is the make believe world of up and coming art. The galleries are the ones in Chelsea. This is new, experimental art. Experience matters more than talent and sex trumps everything. Reno experiences many thrills in this novel. She races and meets all sorts of characters, but there is no love. I am sure that this was Rachel Kushner intention. She wants the reader to experience all the newness and uncertainty that Reno does and so emotions are left out of many human equations in this novel.

There was some good writing here, and a few times I felt my interest picking up a bit, but I really disliked this book. I didn't like the NY artists and the Italian underground folks weren't very appealing either. Phew.

I received a copy of The Flamethrowers via the Goodreads Giveaway. Rachel Kushner has a way of writing that is unique and stays with you after you read this novel. This thought-provoking tale takes us through the journey and life experiences of Reno, a naive young woman who is seemingly lost and looking for direction. From her roots to New York and beyond to Italy, Reno meets head-on with life altering circumstance that begin to build the person she had yet to find in herself. The characters within the novel are built by Kushner with great detail and intimacy. Such vast variance between one character and the next brings a twist with each turn of the page. There is no doubt that Kushner is well researched and my only complaint is that I felt that I did not know enough about the era and the geography to which the novel is based. The novel leaves me with the reminder that life offers endless experiences and we are forever vulnerable and influenced with each passing moment and those whose paths we cross.

Well, I have been reading this book for some time now, and still haven't managed to make my way though it. It is tedious and rambling. The idea of this book turns out to be much more interesting than the actual book itself. I was looking forward to reading about the New York art scene in the late seventies with a dash of European glamor thrown in. This just didn't deliver. Much better books keep drawing me away so I am finally going to give up.

Incredibly well-written, some well-drawn characters (including the narrator Reno, who I enjoyed ambling after), at times very funny (also sometimes sad or depressing), but there were also some times when things really slowed down and I had a hard time not wanting to read aheadGreat look at New York in 1970s

I ended up DNF'ing this book after about 100 pages. I really wanted to like this book as the reviews have been great. But as with a previous book of Kushner's, Telex From Cuba, I find I can only get so far before giving up. The story of Reno seemed interesting, but the alternate chapters about the Valera family were so boring. And Reno's story just didn't move fast enough. Maybe someday I will pick this back up and just start in the middle of the book and see if it is more enjoyable that way. But not anytime soon, there are too many other books that captivate me much sooner.

I see know evidence of a sophomore jinx in Rachel Kushner's follow up to her National Book Award finalist first book but the subject of this one couldn't be more different from her first. It follows the life of Reno, a young lady who is drawn into the world of high speed motorcycles, wealth and revolution by her principle love interest Sandro whose family owns a motorcycle manufacturing plant in Italy. The characters in the book are well drawn but my struggle with them is that Reno and Sandro seem to be totally without direction and goals in their lives. This is a struggle for me as I want to scream at them GET A PLAN! Still, the book is very well written and ambitious.

I've spent over a month trying to tackle this book. I'm halfway through and I'm giving up. I can't connect with any of these characters. I don't understand their lifestyles or their motives. The one story line I like is about the older Valera, but it is such a minor part of the book that I can't get through it just to read more about him.

Brilliant, but only in parts. Reminded me a lot of The Marriage Plot, with its brilliant dialogue and excellent writing drawing me in, but the obtuse themes (e.g. Futurism) pushing me away. When it's good, skewering the art world or describing a daring world-record attempt, it's really very good - but it didn't quite work as a whole for me.

Rachel Kushner is unique in that she is the only author ever to have her first 2 novels both nominated for the National Book Award. This was a very well written book in terms of the author's use of language. I enjoyed her creativity and some of the tangents her characters would go off on. She reminded me a little of Jim Harrison in her style. The story was interesting but I felt a detachment in the main character. Her inward dialogue(almost the entire book is told through her and in the first person) showed a gap between that how I think she was perceived by the other characters. I don't hold this against Kushner but I really did not like the artists in the New York 1970's art scene. Although reviews of the book made it sound like she was involved in the Italian youth revolution in the 70's it was just by circumstance and not by ideology. All in all this is a worthwhile read just for Kushner's prose and creativity. I will try to eventually read her first book but it can wait.

This is a book that is not quite a novel about the art word, not quite a story of the Italian Red Brigades and not quite a love story. In the end, it is the best coming of age story for a person and a generation I have read in a very long time. As a writer, Rachel Kushner is nothing short of mesmerizing. Kind of like a Robert Stone without the bathos and funnier. I loved this book.

So well written, you can sense the mood, envision the surroundings and feel the vibrations of the characters. The twentieth century settings: the New York art scene and the worker protests in Italian, are described in a way that enlivens your imagination enough to think you know, exactly what it was like to have been there. It is a slice of life story that pulls you in and carries you with it.

Much of this book just isn't very good, indeed, it's quite bad. Much of this book is also great, not in the sense of 'very good,' but in the sense of Great American Novel. A more tech-savvy reviewer could insert a Venn diagram here, but I'm limited to words: there's too much overlap between the 'great' bits and the 'not good' bits. Really great Great Books manage to be both good (i.e., competent) and great (i.e., fascinating) at the same time, viz., Muriel Spark at her best. Failed great books are often great (ambitious, intellectually stimulating, timely but also timeless) just when they're also bad, viz., early Dostoevsky.

Since FT is meant to be great, I'm judging it next to later Dostoevsky, which is ridiculous, but also the only way to take the book as seriously as it wants to be taken.

So consider the atrocious banality that Kushner stoops to time after time (perhaps to perform the banality of the philosophy of time embedded in the novel): "time had stretched like taffy, the night a place we would tumble into and through together, a kind of gymnasium, a space of generous borders." "This was a different Italy from what I had experienced during my two semesters in Florence" (a phrase, or one like it, repeated ad nauseum, lest we forget the oft-stated fact that the narrator spent two semesters in Florence). "There is the woods, his cashmere scarf wrapped around my neck for extra warmth, I felt like everything was going to be okay" (just one of many passages that seem to have migrated from the 50 Shades of Grey side of the border). "I never would have guessed that nay of the bad news would have an impact on me" (migrated from undergraduate writing seminar; this kind of foreshadowing returns again and again, as in Helen DeWitt's 'Lightning Rods,' except in LR *it's satirical*, unlike this rubbish: "I wouldn't have guessed that his silence would be so effective. It grafted me in. To a way of proceeding. Of not knowing where we were going except someplace in Rome, not knowing where I would stay or what I would do").

That last sentence brings me to the lauded prose, dazzling, sexy, glorious, urgent, etc etc... It's just possible that I'm showing a real bias against American-style prose, which makes a mockery of my constant protestations that there's little difference between U.S. lit and other forms of it. But take the first paragraph of chapter four, of whose ten sentences all but one start "I [verb]", and the one that doesn't is one of those fake 'look at how literary this book is, following speech patterns and stuff' sentences ("...a way to make an impression on him. *Then I'll call.* I knew no one else..."). Now, there's a point to all this I'ing; it shows the narrator's loneliness. But much of the book is written in the same way, only with a different pronoun at the start of the sentences, or, at best, a concrete noun of some description. As the novel develops the writing improves, primarily because there's more dialogue and so fewer of these awful, sub-Hemingway sentences, as well as less reportage from the immensely boring and yet also implausible Reno. Which leads me to...

Verisimilitude, there is none (unlike unnecessary inverted word order)--Reno, just an aw-shucks girl from Nevada, does the following things in 2 years: moves to New York, sleeps with a famous artist despite not knowing his name; makes friends with a woman pretending to be a waitress who is really an artist living as a waitress for the sake of art (Sartre alert); gets picked up by a different famous artist who is friends with the first one and ends up living with him; sets the land-speed record for women; falls in with a group of Italian Autonomists; accidentally seduces their heroic leader; fails to help him escape across the border to France (not her fault); has the stunning intellectual insight that she needs to find an "open absence" and "move on to the next question." Which would be impressive if she had the looks of [insert your favorite movie star here], the intelligence of Hannah Arendt, the charisma of Ayn Rand, and the talents of both Virginia Woolf and Ai Miyazato. Unfortunately it is merely incredible. She really is just an aw-shucks girl from Nevada, with no discernible talents (though she can work a camera and motorbike), personality or attractions. Even that would be fine if

i) the sections of the book that focus on her were written in the third person, but they're in the first person, and there's very little indication that the implied author finds his/her narrator to be implausible or ridiculous in any way.
ii) she weren't set up as some kind of Greek Goddess who can, as I said, go at 300 miles an hour, slip easily between radically different groups of people, and effortlessly conquer the penises of men. All men.

Interlude: Alison Bechdel suggests that one way to judge books is to see whether female characters have conversations that are about something other than boys. This is the 'Bechdel Test', and it's both funny and smart. There needs to be another test, which I hereby name the 'Evans Test.' Here, you judge a book according to whether the main character can have a relationship with a man or woman (depending on which genitals they like the shape of) that is not sexual or romantic. Reno fails, despite the fact that she never actually hits on anyone. And speaking of the Bechdel test, the female characters are all either Reno, bitches or skanks, and if Kushner's first name was Robert, he'd be rightly consigned to hell by angry women readers. I'm not sure that Kushner herself will escape it.

Then there's the cliched intellectual sentiments--that the poor Italian proles are welcoming and genuinely live out their political beliefs (by giving Reno food, for instance; the value of ideas and politics in this book often boils down to whether they turn their holders into the kind of person who gives *HOT* young women whatever they want) whereas the New York artists are too cold and detached. Yes, the poor are wonderful, whereas the rich are unbearable. That is precisely the effect of poverty on people: it opens their hearts, makes them generous, inclines them to accept outsiders.

The book's 'X' motif is tiresome, beginning with the description of a photo in which a gun barrel is "one long half of the letter X", in other words, there is no X there at all, it's just a diagonal. Other examples: Reno and Sandro's first date is him fingering her and then him saving a drowning man, and these two events "crossed to form an X, and the X pinned us together"; Reno skis an X into a frozen pond and photographs it; a man encourages characters to watch a porn movie that's "Trippel X". Just in case you didn't notice, it's, like, sex and violence and art and stuff? And, like, growing up and coming to a crossroads about this stuff? And making your mark, like, knowing your place in the world and stuff?

*

Now, reboot, because there are some truly fantastic, wonderful things about this book. Kushner takes on the difficult task of writing a serious book about camp people. The clash between the 'authenticity' of futurism/bikes/speed/revolution and the fakeness of artfulness/art/irony is well drawn and not simplified--there are good characters who are sincere (Gianni), and good characters who are ironic (Ronnie). A couple of examples of this opposition playing itself out: Sandro chooses love, suggesting that he isn't really living it, whereas Reno doesn't experience "love as a choice," and requires "sincerity" from her friends/lovers. Sandro plays with guns and treats them like art, whereas the Autonomists use them as tools to defend themselves from fascists. You get the point. This is a serious, timely issue, that Kushner treats with great sensitivity and great intelligence.

There are terrific minor characters, too, particularly Chesil Jones, notable American novelist, who is pretty much embodied Mansplaining, and utterly hilarious. The aforementioned Ronnie, who tells endless nonsense tales about himself in order to tell us the truth rather than to hide it, is wonderful and very moving.

And so I came to the end of the book. Stream of consciousness. Verbless sentences, and pompous. Words posing as thought. Individuality? None. Rhythm? Negatively absent. How much longer? Time-lines of one man stand only so much. Revelation! Sad post-coital emptiness.

I will read everything that Kushner publishes from here out, in the desperate hope that she develops into the real thing; I would have felt the same way after reading, say, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist in 1916, another ridiculously self-important Bildungsroman, the ending of which ("When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets") I've come to read ironically just to save myself the pain of rolling my eyes too hard, although when younger I found it a call to arms. So I choose to read all that silliness about open absences and blah blah blah as Kushner showing us that Reno hasn't changed at all, and is still just a twit, whereas she, Kushner, has great things ahead of her.

Addendum: I just read a review in which Kushner described one of the aims of the book--to have her narrator perceived by the men and even women in the story as nothing other than a pretty little piece of tail, but have the reader see her depths more clearly. That's a pretty great idea, and does make me think better of what she was trying to do. On the other hand, I wonder if the task is just impossible: Reno's 'flat' outer life just isn't distinguishable, I think, from what Kushner intends to be her full inner life. Great idea, possibly impossible to execute well.

Tremendous writing and imagery.

Reno is an artist and motorcycle racer who moves from Nevada to New York and becomes involved in the Village art scene. Her boyfriend, an older man, is a wealthy Italian with many great qualities, but monogamy isn't one of them. The novel also includes the story of his industrialist father's involvement in WWII as a flamethrower. Although there is some terrific writing, the varied points of view and time frames are confusing, and of dubious intent.

The first two thirds were a complete knockout - vibrant writing, fascinating characters and a few stunning set pieces - but the last bit dragged on a bit and things wound up a bit aimlessly.

When I read the synopsis of The Flame Throwers before requesting it from Early Reviewer program, I thought i couldn't go wrong. A motorcycle girl who spends time in New York City and Milan - what could go wrong? Unfortunately, the novel did not live up to my expectations. Overall, the book is not cohesive and the characters are not fully developed. Individual episodes are well-written and interesting, but when placed together they didn't do anything for the unity of the book. Also, many of the characters lacked substance and seemed like one-sided, stock characters. I enjoyed the Bonneville Flats, Valera factory and riot episodes, but the entire novel fell flat. Maybe is should have been a series of related short stories....

Some great passages with unique descriptions and turns of phrase. But about 100 pages too long... that last quarter of the book took me from "this is great writing!" to "who cares?"

Maybe I am not in the mood but i could not finish it. Found it incredibly boring