Book Reviews: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

I was talking to a friend recently who gave me the wonderful idea of putting some of my book reviews on Substack (thx Lauren! ) I think this is a way I can hold myself accountable to posting more consistently and not just when I have an idea for a piece or an essay. So here are some reviews for books I’ve read recently and if you’re interested in more of my book evaluations please feel free to follow me on Storygraph (this is where I post most consistently) or Goodreads. So to start off, I’d like to give a quick review of one of my two favorite reads of the year. I’ve largely tried to hide spoilers by hiding them in the footnotes section, but if this is too unreadable or if anyone has suggestions for this please let me know! I wasn’t able to find a spoiler tag/text option for Substack specifically and my markup skills are lacking.

I read this book over the course of a week, but fell into a pace of desperation towards the end as the momentum of the plot coincided by the library’s desperate reminders that my time with this novel must come to an end.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

There are a variety of interconnected stories in The Flamethrowers and ill be trying to look at them both in isolation and unity. 

Reno 

Reno is an incredibly sympathetic protagonist, but I never found her pitiable. ¹

(Older & Younger) Valera 

As much as I want to hate Valera ( I do hate Valera ) I also see him as a product of his time and environment. The Valeras and their fascist roots are not meant to be sympathized with, only explained. These passages I struggles with the hardest- the racism, the horrific capitalist exploitation, the violence; yet all of these things become necessary to paint the picture of what Italy was trying to rebel against at the time. It was not as simple as Mussolini fell and then Italy was no longer fascist, it was decades of cultural wars to regain rights and allow some sense of hope for the people who lived there.²

The Motherfuckers 

This chapter is interesting both in its ties to meeting Ronnie, and the relation these people have with the cast of this novel but also as isolated chapter surrounding the revolutionary actions of a failed anarchist collective in NYC. You can never quite root for The Motherfuckers in the novel, violently misogynist and misguided they engage in acts both admiral (freeing, clothing, equalizing) and despicable (murder, sexism, assault, etc.) I really appreciated that we started in the after, meeting Burdemoore long after The Motherfuckers reigned in NYC and seeing the anachronistic (yet not without reverence) role he takes in the group. Burdemoore is treated with a certain level of pity and yet in the retrospective of his time in 60’s NYC we are revealed to the fact that Burdemoore’s existence was in fact very radical and very extreme. The reader is then only more amazed (if they didn’t already know) that the UAWM was a real anarchist collective operating out of the LES at the time. In this chapter you’re almost given a tour of the city in the retelling of the UAWMF’s attempt’s to tear it down. The only aspect that gave me pause was the explicit hatred of women in the fiction UAWMF doctrine, when looking at the real group’s actions they often collaborated with feminists (most notably Valerie Solanas) and while notably had as much to say about “fuck the pigs” hardly said much about women at all so its hard to understand the interpretation. You’re also left wondering how much of Burdmoore and Fah-Q are derived from the true known UAWMF group, as neither quite fit the description of Morea. To be explicit I’ve always kind of liked the UAWMF’s history, and as much as I know about the attempted assassination of Warhol I’ve never been able to find Warhol that much of a sympathetic character (and largely agree with the assessment that he did a lot of damage to art practice in society as a whole, I mean he really paved the way for Koons and that whole deal.)

The novel, in general 

The book has a visual quality to it, outside of literally being peppered with inspirational images the prose is very visual, it is sometimes more concerned with the scene than what lays behind it. Sometimes there is this feeling that the author is setting up a visual play, and the reader is guided where to look scene by scene. ³

Fac ut Ardeat 
 
Made to burn. A running theme, and the through-line of the novel. The Motherfuckers attempting to burn it all down. The literal burning of rubber, manufacturing and riding motorcycles. The violence of war. The burning of self, faced with one's past. 
 
The role of women 
 
The women in this book are oppressed, the author is clear about wanting us to see this and every interaction with a man reminds of this. Reaction to oppression, even when used to a female characters advantages is still in negation or reaction to this oppression and fit fell with this women in bikinis and guys with guns wild west painting of the New York Art scene at this time. The women can choose, to use this oppression to their advantage in some way or to remain in subservience. They are not respected and they are dismissed. The novel largely surrounds the 70’s art world and canonically it was, as most eras of art, completely dominated by men so I found this appropriate for the storytelling.

History 

It was clear that Kushner finds more importance in the storytelling of The Flamethrowers than the historical accuracy, and almost ironically jokes about this throughout the novel in snippets surrounding “the things Ronnie says don’t have to be true.” The importance of the telling in conceptual art, when sometimes the telling is more-so the art than whatever physical manifestation is left behind. Lying is fine as long as the story is interesting, and everything is done for the plot. The lies that matter and the lies that don’t largely depend on the context of the situation and the novel presents us with various examples. 
 
The lies that don’t matter: The phoniness and veneer of the art world, the stories that people construct of themselves 
 
The lies that matter: when engaging in revolutionary political act, when cheating (?) 
 
The novel has a nice push and pull between this idea of veneer and reality, of innocence and maturity, of choosing to believe or choosing to not see.

The novel largely is concerned with the events in NYC and Italy (Milan, Rome) in the ‘60s and how those two locations related to one another. Reading Kushner’s afterword about naked women and guns while also having read the defining modernist essay by Clement Greenberg one can start to place this novel in time and place. The setting of NYC with the parties so mentioned, knowing Andy Warhol is beginning to create pop art while purists like Serra rely on fervent masculinity a la Pollock to create and sell work. I think we are meant to draw many parallels between Serra and Valera specifically. In this way I also can appreciate this novel as a sort of abstract expressionist fan-fiction. I love the way Kushner uses historical knowledge of the reader to enhance the work, but is completely willing to change aspects of the story to suit the novel’s needs. These artistic movements, abstract expressionism and late modernism engage both against fascism but within the confines of it, because art within the market is inherently bourgeois.

Conclusion 

I found the Flamethrowers incredible, memorable, and sympathetic. I appreciated having the art history knowledge to guide me in my reading, some college courses I took in abstract expressionism in NYC specifically really guided my interpretation of the work. The relevant historicity of the work, but also the malleability of the author to change and alter with explicit regard for the art of storytelling made this novel shine.

Spoilers Ahead! All the spoilers for this review are contained in the footnotes so skip if you aren’t interested.

1. She is too young to experience what she does, and the men she surrounds herself with take advantage of her and then resent her for letting them. Meanwhile she tries to reclaim some power, and what results is story. Reno is also early on used as a tool to show us what women are allowed in these worlds. What they have to face and what they have to suffer- it is not enough to acknowledge 'ah yes they were oppressed' you had to look to others in ways to free yourself and potentially end up damning yourself to pain in the end.

2. In one world we are allowed to see Valera as a king- in the New York art world he is respected and revered for his vision and yet in his home and birthplace he is a failure and a coward. The reader almost feels sympathy hearing how he is treated by his father and brother (especially knowing his father’s capabilities in the chapters surrounding his life ) and yet then he props himself up as more than a some of his failures. He engages in his own levels of exploitation and falsities and is a coward until the end.

3. Some scenes that really rang this true was Ronnie observing the protagonist, or when Sandro cheats on her in the Valera plant.