When Reno falls in love with an older, successful Italian artist, Sandro Valera, her uneventful life suddenly becomes dramatic - she finds herself at gallery openings, encountering art stars, poseurs and hangers-on. She lives alone in a dingy downtown apartment, “about as blank and empty as my new life.” She has only one friend, a sardonic waitress who calls herself Giddle, and whose opinions and anecdotes prove highly unreliable. Becoming an artist seems less like a vocation than a distant, hazy promise. But in truth, motorcycle riding seems to her true passion, the locus for her risk-taking: “It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being,” she says. This is a story of losing one’s innocence and finding one’s place in the complex social and political contexts of the time.As an artist, she has big ambitions: Reno hopes to make her name among great land artists such as Robert Smithson.
Her prose is sharp and her characters are sublimely real, complemented by vivacious dialogue. Kushner’s narrative stays brilliantly alive despite a less than electric denouement. Reno’s story is cleverly entwined with nominal doses of history, from the radical New York artistic scene of the 70s to the Red Brigades and proto-fascists of Italy, and the riots that ensued. She falls in with the welcoming group of militants, and it is at this point that the simmering political menace of the novel finally goes up in flames. Later, after Sandro abandons her in Rome, Reno finds herself in the midst of a violent demonstration led by Italian radicals. As it happens, it’s a Moto Valera that Reno rides and this convenient coincidence helps to set up the story’s darker subplot. A year later, she arrives in New York, where she falls in with a rather outrageous group of artists, and finds herself girlfriend to Sandro Valera, an estranged scion of the Moto Valera motorcycle and tyre empire. This racing turns out to be a catalyst for her art she wants to photograph the traces her bike leaves in the earth.
We first encounter Reno setting records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Flamethrowers is set in the mid-70s, and the novel’s narrator, nicknamed Reno (it’s where she’s from) is a young woman obsessed with speed, motorcycles and, to a lesser degree, art. This would certainly explain why I find myself captivated by Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers – her second and much-lauded novel. It’s possible that, in another life, I lived in New York, rode a motorcycle and was in love with an Italian artist.
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