Book Talk: Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers"
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Kushner recently stopped by the Free Library for a reading of her bestelling novel.
I was a good hundred pages into Rachel Kushner's 2012 novel The Flamethrowers before I knew where I stood with it, what it was doing, and why I couldn't put it down.
The world it depicts is both more real and more artificial than either the one we live in or the standard "this-is-a-story" world of the novel. Characters do things like play recordings of themselves speaking for guests at a dinner party, resulting in a soliloquy that goes on for almost an entire chapter and then trails off suddenly. Its narrator, more than once, recounts detailed experiences of films she has seen. People get their rocks off by firing guns filled with blanks at one another's crotches. You can't tell who is for real and who is faking, who is telling the truth and who is lying, and it's hard to get a handle on which events are comedic and which are tragic. It's one of the best releases in the past couple years.
I'm not alone in my praise: it has been highly praised and widely sold despite, or perhaps because of, its idiosyncrasies – The Flamethrowers is not neatly-plotted or emotionally manipulative, nor does it attempt to solve even a tiny corner of the Great American Situation, or any kind of situation, really.
Instead, we see a sharp, specific slice of life through the uncompromising eyes of an unnamed narrator in her early twenties who has a knack for finding herself in interesting places at interesting times. This style of narration gives full justice to the hyper-real, stranger-than-fiction edge the world has for a particular sort of very observant young person. It also provides an unassuming canvas for the book's very particular settings: the 1970s New York art scene, motorcycle racing on the salt flats of Utah, the intersection of a worker's revolution and family drama in Italy.
At a Feb. 10 reading at the Philadelphia Free Library, one young woman in the audience asked Kushner if she considered her narrator to be a "girl on the verge." Kushner clarified that while The Flamethrowers could be read as a coming-of-age story, she personally considered her characters to end where the novel ended.
She cited the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni as an early influence, referencing a brutally existential body of work that purposefully leaves both the viewers and the characters themselves without any firm sense of resolution. It almost didn't need to be said – The Flamethrowers shares so much sensibility with European films from the 1960s that anyone who has watched Breathless once would get it. It's all on the page: the jump cuts, the sly satire that is equal parts homage and resistance, the meandering plot, the moments that stop just short of being strictly believable.
Like that era and style of filmmaking, Kushner's book is never meant to portray reality, although it is about real things. It is always a book, an object, a deliberate piece of work. This is the thing that is ultimately so impressive about The Flamethrowers – everything it does is done on purpose and in accordance with no rules but its own.
