Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner’s first novel, was set in the American colony in Oriente Province in the years leading up to the revolution. It described a place in which many had very little and a few had a great deal: indentured plantation workers and Castro’s rebels but also anxious American housewives, dissatisfied middle-managers and the vulnerable children of mining and sugar-cane executives. Not only the miserable of the earth were miserable. Capitalism, imperialism, oppressive gender roles: Kushner was equally fired up by them all, and where better than 1950s Cuba to show their universal depredations? But the novel managed to be political without being ideological: the characters are determined by the conditions they labour under, just not in the way dogma tells us they ought to be. Those who suffer most aren’t the only ones who suffer.
For The Flamethrowers, her new novel, Kushner has chosen another politically and culturally charged pocket of 20th-century history. The story – it spans more than sixty years – deals with the rise of Futurism and its subsequent shift into aggressive capitalist industrialism; the New York art world in the 1970s; the Red Brigades’ concurrent ascent in Italy; even a rubber tapping operation in the Amazon. The novel has been the subject of much talk since its publication in America. In the New Yorker, James Wood noted the ‘eerie confidence’ of the storytelling. ‘It ripples,’ he said, ‘with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales and hapless adventures.’ In Salon, Laura Miller said it had ‘authority in spades’, making it a contender for the traditionally masculine prize of Great American Novel. The confidence of the performance, the novelistic wizardry, was what impressed the early reviewers; and, predictably, what frustrated the later ones. In the New York Review of Books, Frederick Seidel damned the book as ‘hysterically overwritten, desperate to show how brilliant it is, a fatiguing endless succession of arrestingly clever similes to describe personalities and situations, similes, similes, cleverness, cleverness’. All the critics, as well as wanting to weigh in on whether it was or wasn’t a Great American Novel, have pronounced on whether it’s ‘persuasive’ or ‘artificial’ (Seidel), or on the ratio between its ‘reality level’ and its ‘fiction level’ (Wood), or on the quality of its invention, or the soundness of its realism. These are standard questions to ask of an ordinary ambitious novelist.
But Kushner isn’t only a novelist. She is also a regular contributor of sharp criticism to such free-thinking American publications as Artforum, and however good her stories and sparkling her prose, she has other aims in her novel too. Its subject is inequality – economic, social, sexual – but the art world, with its attendant performances, is always there to complicate it. Politics and art are always connected in The Flamethrowers: they complement and resist each other, and they do so, crucially, in a story that focuses on a young woman, an artist in her early twenties, whose defining characteristic is that she is impossible to pin down. She is known only as Reno, after her hometown. It’s 1977, and she’s left Nevada – a ‘hard-hat-wearing, dump-truck-driving’ kind of place – to begin a career in New York. But then she comes back west to ride her motorbike in the land speed trials on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. As a girl, Reno recalls, she asked a racing-car champion called Flip Farmer to sign her hand, and then protected the autograph ‘for weeks’, by wrapping it ‘with a plastic bag
Her scheme mirrors that of Sandro’s late father, the Italian industrialist T.P. Valera, who joins a gang of motorbike-riding Futurists as a young man in pre-First World War Rome. (Their stories are told in parallel.) Like Reno, he knows that a bike is about more than just speed. Recalling a girl he once liked being whisked off on an older boy’s motorbike, Valera remembers her ‘delicate feminine foot that had been carried away on a smoke-puffing beast’. It is only now, with a bike of his own, that he feels ‘the foot belonged to Valera, an appropriation that had something to do with being virile, metalised, and part of a group of men also virile and metalised.’ Machinery means power: the need for humans is eliminated. As a fellow Futurist announces, in the mechanised wartime utopia ‘women will be pocket cunts
Becoming metalised, metaphorically, also appeals to Reno and many of the people she encounters in the art world. To survive among the downtown cognoscenti you have to be hard, opaque and detached, more self-sufficient machine than yearning flesh. Like T.P. Valera, who is ‘embarrassed
The problem with flesh, unlike metal, is that violence can be done to it. The deliberately awkward cadence of the heading of the first chapter, ‘He killed him with a motorbike headlamp (what he had in his hand)’, which recounts T.P. Valera’s ‘braining’ of a German soldier in 1917, anticipates the title of the song Sandro and Reno later dance to, the infamous Crystals single ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’. As they dance, Reno feels as though she ‘was trying to sing along with a song I didn’t know, mouthing each word just after hearing it sung. I didn’t care. Sandro was a good dancer; it was part of his role as the older man, the teacher.’ A kind of violence is done to Reno here: through the chilling lyrics of the song itself, which Kushner quotes (‘If he didn’t care for me/I could have never made him mad/But he hit me/and I was glad’); through her trying, and failing, to follow those lyrics; and through her finally deciding not to worry about it too much, thanks to Sandro and his over-helpful ‘hand on my waist
Images of the China girls, it turns out, are ‘collected and traded like baseball cards’ by male technicians and projectionists. The girls’ allure, Reno thinks, ‘was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind
For Kushner, performance is always connected to politics. A friend of Reno’s abandons her life as a Warhol Factory hanger-on to wait tables in a diner, as a kind of performance piece of her own: ‘The work was demeaning and hard
Like one of the American protagonists of Telex from Cuba, who forms a friendship with her family’s houseboy and is said to be not a ‘sympathiser to communism
The train of events set in motion by this moment has Reno running away from Sandro and the villa with Gianni, a Valera groundskeeper, who takes her to Rome, where she joins a group of political subversives associated with the Red Brigades. At a demonstration in Rome, she watches women’s groups marching ‘with their bullhorns, shouting: “You’ll pay for everything!” I took their rage and negotiated myself into its fabric. I fused my sadness over something private to the chorus of their public lament.’ And yet she doesn’t quite join that lament, even after staying in a flat in Rome with women who call on their sisters ‘to fight with a gun’ against class oppression and the patriarchy. When the time comes, it isn’t Reno but Gianni who commits a violent act. Her complicity is half-hearted, incidental, or that’s what she chooses to believe: ‘My guilt
The point is nicely made by Ronnie Fontaine, another artist at another dinner party. He tells a long, exotic, fantastic tale of his experiences as a young man after suffering unexplained amnesia. Not knowing who he was, he drifted into the role of cabin boy-cum-rent boy on the yacht of a rich, lascivious couple, a commodore and his wife, who were sailing the world. ‘I was, after all, so impressionable,’ Ronnie explains, ‘with no memories or experiences to draw from’: a male version of Reno, with her effaced passivity. When he emerges from his amnesia, Ronnie realises that he’s been used. The commodore ‘said everything he wanted me to do, or did to me, was for my good, but often it seemed like it was for his good
I could tell you
... that the commodore and his wife both died under mysterious circumstances, and lead you to believe that it was at my own innocent boy’s hands that they died, and I could even declare my reasons for murdering them in a way that would leave you satisfied, in fact more than satisfied, that I had done the right thing and that the commodore and his wife had met an appropriate end... I didn’t kill them. Like I said, I’m letting you know that I could start inventing.
It’s better to invent, to fantasise, to leave open the possibility for action, than to take part in a real action that would only satisfy the desires of others, and contribute to one’s own entrapment, as a person playing a role.
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