For years, Sandro has lived in blissful self-imposed exile in New York City, far from the dirty capitalism and class wars of the family business. Once in New York, Reno is quickly taken up as the lover and protégé of the hot Italian art star Sandro Valera, an heir to a sprawling motorcycle and tire manufacturing company. The only problem is that some of these gassy, ego-filled jousts and monologues go on for pages and pages and greatly tried my patience. Kushner is spectacularly adept at replicating the conversation-as-swordplay, the philosophically vague, artistically dubious, alcohol-infused conversations that take place wherever two or more artists are gathered together – especially if there is a fawning audience. Everyone around them – the gallerists, the collectors, the groupies – are pawns in a game in which cunning and callousness are just as valuable as artistic ability. In Kushner’s version, the male art stars are identified mostly by their grandiose sense of entitlement, their eloquent if largely empty theories, and their auras of success. It’s helpful to think of it as a finely observed exposé of a time that is usually seen as a shining moment in the ascendancy of New York to art world dominance. But at its heart, The Flamethrowers is a New York novel. The landscape is powerfully evoked, bit characters are deftly sketched and discarded, and the pace is quick, energetic.
The brief section that takes place in the American West is Kushner at her best. But in addition to hailing from faraway Nevada, Reno has two more strikes against her – she’s naive and she’s female – and she soon learns that the role she is expected to play is to compete for and sleep with the male artists. Reno is an aspiring artist and motorcycle aficionado who moves to New York City to take on the art world at more or less the very moment when money and power are starting to dictate the terms of New York’s increasingly vicious and competitive gallery scene. It takes place in the 1970s at the Bonneville Salt Flats (the Utah location where world speed records are routinely made and broken), the New York City downtown art scene, and various locations in Italy. The Flamethrowers is a thoroughly engaging and finely written, if utterly conventional, novel. And that’s the case with the woman known only as Reno, the protagonist in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Scribner’s 2013). In fiction, when someone is known only by the name of the place they came from, it’s often a sign that they will never be anything but an outsider wherever else they go.
0 kommentar(er)
