I love the cinematic flow of this book , with a young female lead character, Reno, who passes through life leaving few marks. She is a recent art school graduate from Nevada who moves to New York in the late 70’s where she becomes immersed in the ferment of an art scene full of poseurs and prodigies (think Andy Warhol’s Factory and the high tide of bohemian types taking lofts in Soho). As we start the book, her mind is on the traces in the Bonneville Salt Flat she hopes to film after she pushes

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 passiv...

The really liked Telex from Cuba, so I bought this book even though the plot didn't interest me. It took me 2 hours to get to Page 32 where this sentence appears: From a placid childhood that faced the African sea, in which every young boy's game was a set of silhouettes against a clean division of water and sky, vast and limitless, a sea smooth and convex as a glass-maker's bubble, stretching and welling as if the aquamarine water were a single molten plasma. I did not read any further.

Reading this was like sitting in the back of a cab. You're pretty sure you're headed SOMEWHERE but the way is circuitous, confusing and sometimes nonsensical. It drives just like a cab, quick accelerations that slam you into the seat and jarring stops that throw you into your seatbelt, none of it for a good reason. Maybe, you think, this kind of slam start/slam stop driving has a purpose? Maybe saves gas? Maybe cruel fun at the expense of the rider? Maybe simple distraction...oops...car ahead, s...

Strangely disjointed and somewhat disappointing. There are a few (a very few) parts of this that work so well--just really genius bursts of writing; effortless capturing of setting, emotion, or human experience. Unfortunately, they're deeply embedded in long stretches of clunky prose where nothing, literally nothing, happens. The chronology and the two stories don't work either. I can't see a reason for developing Sandro's father's story, except to taint my already perspective on Sandro. I don't...

What could be more American than a tall blond chick from Nevada riding an expensive Italian motorcycle on the Salt Flats of Utah? I'm actually serious about that question. At least when considering this novel as an important piece of American fiction. Why I'm stressing that, I'm not entirely sure since I'm still trying to digest what Kushner has accomplished. I suspect Kushner is tapping into speed, light, space, ambition (and a bit of Huck Finn with a getaway vehicle), and calling this combo, w...

I was 25 at the time, looking for something, anything, when my brother told me he was moving out of town. I couldn't think of anything more important than playing the kid sister card and tagging along wherever he decided to go. Our other brother had broken free a while ago, our parents had moved to another state, and here was the idea that my last attachment was leaving me behind in a place I probably hated more than any of them put together. I had a job, I had a relationship of about seven year...

Her Name is Reno and She Dances on the HandSometimes a cigar is only a cigar. Sigmund FreudOur protagonist Reno hails from Reno, Nevada. She's in her early 20s, loves motorcycles, goes to NYC in 1975 with a nebulous plan to create art incorporating her need for speed--not the drug. She hangs out with a number of artsy narcisisstic tarts and farts, each of whom loves to blow hot air. After many vapid verbal volleys among these SoHo denizens, our girl becomes involved and moves in with an Italian

okay, so...wow. this is a bold, smart, meaty book. laura miller (linked below) referenced "...the novel’s categorical instability" and i totally agree with this assessment. several times, while i was reading the flamethrowers, i found myself thinking (and once, even saying out loud): "WHAT IS THIS?" (not that it matters, i don't think.) the book is many things, and in taking on so many subjects, it is definitely ambitious. it's literary. it's post-modern. it's realist. it's historical fiction. i...

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 a...

2.5/5Quite early on in The Flamethrowers there is a scene where the 23-year-old female protagonist Reno is giving her motorcycle a run on the Bonneville Salt Flats. There is nothing particularly memorable about this scene, and I don't have much of an interest in speedy motorbikes nor barren salt flats. And that was that I thought. Will soon be forgotten. Once I truly got into the novel.100 pages in - despite me liking the New York art scene of this era - I can't stop flashing back to Reno on the...

I really, really enjoyed Kushner's "The Mars Room", but I found "The Flamethrowers" pretty underwhelming: Too many ideas that were insufficiently connected made for a convoluted novel that left me pretty cold. Additionally, it shows that the parts about Europe were written by an American, as Kushner throws around historical and cultural developments that might be well researched, but their depiction lacks vividness and a feeling of sincerity (not that an American generally couldn't pull that off...

I had a second opportunity to review this title and it was published in Volume 16 of the online journal Avatar Review. The link is here. Below is my first attempt after reading the book.--------------------------”The flamethrowers with their twin tanks, and their gas mask were Sandro’s favorite of the assault company dolls. The asbestos sweater and balloon pants and gauntlet gloves you could outfit them with so they could not carbonize when they set a woods on fire. A woods or bunker or enemy ma...

No matter how young and hip you think you are, every so often, some cultural product that you don’t get at all gets rave reviews and some measure of success, indicating that the world has turned and left you behind, transforming you instantly into an aged grump who mutters things about “the kids these days.” Well, now I’m telling The Flamethrowers to get off of my lawn.This book is covered with glowing reviews (albeit from authors like Karen Russell - another cultural product I don’t get - and D...

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in th...

The Flamethrowers follows Reno, a would-be-artist (nicknamed after her hometown) who moves to New York and, through a relationship with an older, wealthy Italian artist becomes a peripheral member of the city’s vibrant art scene. Though she spends her days among quirky, artistic people, Reno only makes half-hearted attempts at work of her own; rather, she spends the bulk of the novel acting as a sort of mascot for her older, morally corrupted friends. When Reno does attempt to an art project of

The critic James Wood in his review for the New Yorker pin-points it perfectly:"Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner), is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story. It is nominally a historical novel (it’s set in the mid-seventies), and, I suppose, also a realist one (it works within the traditional grammar of veris...

I remember when John Banville won the Booker Prize someone remarked that despite the enormous cultural changes in our world British writers were still writing about art historians. The New York art scene seems to serve a similar function for American writers. I’ll confess here that the New York art scene bores me. And globally speaking probably lost any real influence with the demise of Andy Warhol. New York’s cultural relevance after Warhol is its street life, most notably rap and graffiti. Kus...

I've been looking forward to reading this--just started but already I'm caught up. The chunkiness of the prose, the good crunchiness of it--just the choice of words, with shape and weight and texture--has me, the great tactile metaphors, I hear this book, I taste it. Snap, crackle pop. ***********************Loved this book--the speed of it, the description of things as well as emotion, the machinery of the world. I adored the way she recalled the Seventies to me--its grunginess, the blackouts,

I loved The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. It is is satisfying I. So many different ways. Reno (the only name we ever have for our heroine which is not her name but the name of her home town which a man decides to call her by. There: one theme already. It's the 1970s, and there's lots of political activity and cultural activity but feminism has not reached Reno's life. She rides a motorcycle for art and is having an affair with the scion of the motorcycle company, a successful older artist, wh...