The Flamethrowers in Around the World in 80 Books

Feb 25, 2014 Sera rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fiction, favorites, own, kindle

Kushner's The Flamethrowers reminds me of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch in that they each provide a fresh and modern way to tell a story. Each book has also polarized readers into love it or hate it camps. Fortunately for me, I have fallen into the love it camp for both.

Kushner writes in a direct, clear and forceful style and tackles a story that readers don't often get a chance about which to read. At the center of the book is a woman nicknamed Reno. For almost the entire book the story is told f ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Sam rated it it was ok

Shelves: 1-contemp-literary, reviewed, read-2013

In The Flamethrowers, a young woman from Nevada heads east to become an artist. It’s 1970s New York. She becomes enmeshed in the art world out there in the city. It’s a world that’s full of characters with outsized personalities, making art and blurring the line between performance and life. The protagonist drifts along, at the side of her older boyfriend, Sandro, who’s an established artist and also a member of the rich Italian family that produces tires and motorcycles. Eventually, our narrato In The Flamethrowers, a young woman from Nevada heads east to become an artist. It’s 1970s New York. She becomes enmeshed in the art world out there in the city. It’s a world that’s full of characters with outsized personalities, making art and blurring the line between performance and life. The protagonist drifts along, at the side of her older boyfriend, Sandro, who’s an established artist and also a member of the rich Italian family that produces tires and motorcycles. Eventually, our narrator will find herself in Italy, caught up in the whirlwind of class wars and factory uprisings. Interspersed in between Reno's story are glimpses of the life of Sandro’s father as a young man who grows into the owner of a powerful company.

The Flamethrowers reminds me of the limitations of these star rankings. Sure, I’ve given it two stars, but it seems so reductive—it doesn’t capture how I really liked that Rachel Kushner was being ambitious. She had a specific vision for what she was trying to portray, and while it didn’t resonate with me, I can appreciate it. And it doesn’t capture the fact that there were a number of passages and set pieces that struck me as brilliant, especially the parts detailing Sandro’s father and his rubber tapping business in Brazil using what’s essentially slave labor. Or each of the weird but funny anecdotes that Sandro’s friend, Ronnie, regales us with at various points in the novel. Nor does it capture how intriguing I found the idea of “China girls”—anonymous women whose pictures featured at the start of film reels as a way to help process the film colors --and what it says about how society regards women.

In isolation, the passages on these subjects are fascinating, engrossing, and evocative. But they don’t cohere into a satisfying whole for me. Often times, it seems as if the book is so focused on these (great) ideas that it ends up forsaking the story in favor of them. Moreover, the narration, through the eyes of this young woman, this empty vessel, is rather bloodless, so I could barely care to appreciate her observations and experiences. Despite all of my reservations, though, I’m glad I read the novel, even if at the end, it wasn’t one whose story I enjoyed very much.
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Dec 20, 2020 Mansir rated it liked it

The best worst book of the year for me or maybe the best written hardest book to enjoy. I finished which says a lot for me but it just didn’t congeal or really connect for me.

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