And she draws interesting, wildly smart parallels between the cultural-political chaos of New York and Italy in the ’70s, with Little Italy serving as a distorted mirror of defunct Old World values.

Kushner confidently manages huge swaths of politics and history, intersecting them with the personal lives of her characters, often through cultural or commercial motifs. Reno is a modern Henry James heroine - a rough-riding Daisy Miller, say - who wanders far from home and submits to what turns out to be a very unsentimental education at the hands of reputed sophisticates. “It was an irony but a fact that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West.” She is beautiful, of course, and lonely, and not a little lost, spending the better part of her first Sundays in the city watching the chauffeured limousines of Mafia bosses, “lined up like bars of obsidian-black soap,” clogging the street in front of her Little Italy tenement. It’s also about time slowed to the flip side of speed, to an utter, velvet stillness: “an operatic present, a pure present.”Īt the heart of “The Flamethrowers” is Reno, a young artist from Nevada who, after a childhood of downhill skiing and racing dirt bikes, moves to New York with the vague idea of making it in the art world. It’s the speed of the fastest motorcycles on the planet, the dizzying trajectories of artists in a capricious world, the precipitous rise and decline of fortunes, reputations, social status, sanity and, perhaps most acutely, love.

Speed is another operative element in the novel speed - “an acute case of the present tense” - and its necessary correlative, time. One artist, responding to the question of why he invents, defends his florid lies as “a form of discretion.” Above all, they hunger to be seen, to distinguish themselves from the ordinary. None of the characters in “The Flamethrowers” are quite what they seem, fabricating pasts as nonchalantly as they throw together their art. It’s an irresistible, high-octane mix - and a departure from the steamier pleasures of her critically acclaimed first novel, “Telex From Cuba.” The language is equally gorgeous, however, and Kushner’s insights into place, society and the complicated rules of belonging, and unbelonging, can be mordantly brilliant. In “The Flamethrowers,” her frequently dazzling second novel, Rachel Kushner thrusts us into the white-hot center of the 1970s conceptual art world, motorcycle racing, upper-class Italy and the rampant kidnappings and terrorism that plagued it.

The flamethrowers book review