Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner review – the last days of the Americans

Kushner's first novel is an epic and enjoyable look at wealth tainted by loss in expatriate Cuba

In Rachel Kushner's second novel The Flamethrowers, a woman comes off a motorbike at 140mph and is not killed. She does not break a single bone. She has also – as though by accident – set the record for the fastest woman on the planet. Reno is the opposite of a tragic heroine; undamaged, not just by machinery, but by the machinery of fate. She is unburdened by the smallness of her life or the difficulties of her own psychology. Sex is not a problem, shame is an irrelevance. This last is in part due to her willingness to become the girl in the picture, to be relaxed in the face of her own fetishisation. Reno sees no limitations, she is uninterested in her own pain and hugely, endlessly, interested in everything else.

To be a reader at the centre of this interest is to feel more alive with every sentence. Kushner's prose in The Flamethrowers is all speed, energy and verve – you begin, almost, to want a little dullness. But there is no doubting that Kushner knows what she is doing with the slightly empty characterisation of Reno – a writer this brilliant and this self-aware does not leave an accidental blank.

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