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Frederick Seidel, the septuagenarian poet and long-time rider of very
fast motorcycles, does not care much for Rachel Kushner's "The
Flamethrowers", a book adored by most critics.
NY Review of Books July 11, 2013
‘This Book Has Heat’
by Frederick Seidel
The Flamethrowers
by Rachel Kushner
Scribner, 383 pp., $26.99
A young woman from Reno, an artist (and motorcyclist), comes to New York
and the Seventies downtown art scene, and is promptly dubbed “Reno” by
one of the art scene people. That’s the starter motor for Rachel
Kushner’s novel. Reno is intelligent. She is shy and bold. She is
attractive. She has a winning gap between her front teeth. She wants to
do her art. She has brought the American West east. Here she is, alone
in New York, a bit at a loss. She is looking for her story. She is the
story, or rather hers is the voice that tells about many of the events
in the book and inspires much of the dialogue of the other characters.
She connects what’s in the novel to connect.
The other principals are Sandro Valera (fleeing his distinguished
Milanese family whose factory in Milan makes Moto Valera motorcycles)
and his friend Ronnie Fontaine, with each of whom Reno has an affair,
and to both of whom, but especially to Valera, Reno joins herself, heart
and head. Both fellows work as nighttime security guards at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, or did in the recent past, and of course
there’s a scene in the empty after-hours museum examining a Greek statue
of a slave girl, with meanings attached. Both men are artists. As to
whether Reno is an artist. As to whether any of these artists are
artists. Ah well. I’m sorry to say that these lively combustible
characters, quite fun, talkative, talkative, up to all kinds of stuff,
whose names are mixed in with the names of real artists of the period
(such as Robert Smithson and, for heaven’s sake, Morton Feldman!), these
fictional artists and art world types are not really persuasive, even
when they supply pages of pleasure.
The book begins with a flashback to World War I, with an Italian soldier
at the front yanking the headlight off the motorcycle of a buddy who a
moment before has crashed and died, and using the headlight as a cudgel
to knock down a German soldier charging toward him. The Italian soldier
is T. P. Valera, Sandro’s father, as a young man. At intervals during
the course of the novel, the story of the father is told, how he made
his fortune with rubber (and therefore tires) produced by what you could
call slave labor in the jungles of the Amazon, leading to a company and
a factory in Italy, and prestige and power.
The father as a youth, well before the war, falls in with a spirited
gang of kids in Rome who hang out at a particular café and make
proclamations about life and art and politics, and blast around town on
their primitive early motorcycles, and whose attitudes and activities
and aggression are meant to bring to mind the Futurists and forecast the
fascism to come. It doesn’t convince. Not quite. Not really. Are they
also meant to foreshadow, however dimly, the virulent, violent Red
Brigades, seventy years in the future, and in the future of this novel?
One of the problems of the book is that while lots of people in it have
lots to say about many things, important things included, the things
they say never sound like what real people might say, like real thoughts
or real speech. The book keeps being entertaining (except for the really
bad bits) and keeps being unconvincing.
The Flamethrowers has been praised in many places for the vivacity and
invention of its language, for the bulging vitality of its characters,
for the landscapes and settings and action, urban and otherwise, Italy,
America, Nevada, New York, over a hundred years of action and story. Why
not! All true. Deserving praise. But to me the novel too often sounds
like the stylized voice-over narration of film noir, sardonic,
self-conscious, very American, the sound of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. Which can be very
entertaining when it’s Chandler or Hammett but when it’s not can seem
awfully artificial. Talk, talk, and talk. A bunch of arty tough guys,
male and female, talkative American Noël Cowards—everybody has something
smart to say.
I thought at first I was reviewing this book because of the motorcycles
in it. They are not very convincing motorcycles, nor are the accounts of
how it feels to go fast particularly convincing. I like motorcycles. The
race bikes I myself have ridden have mostly been Ducatis, made in
Bologna, Italian. The fictional motorcycle in the book is Reno’s Moto
Valera, Italian. I thought I was reviewing this book also because of the
Italy in it, some of the Italy superbly done, some of it not so much.
There is a lot in The Flamethrowers that is tiresome, histrionic,
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,
slowdowns of yawningly long bravura description, speedups that sound
like sitcom.
But there is also a lot that is really quite wonderful, the good side of
the bad side, a romantic splurge, a brightness of colors, an ambition to
tell a big story. The book is too long—it needed an editor it obviously
did not have—but when it’s on song, as we used to say in the world of
motorcycles, it’s joyful, it’s youthful, it zooms. But it’s still
first-person singular. It still talks too much. So much description. So
many soliloquies. So many one-liners in the midst of all the other talk.
Reno has an idea. She will ride across Nevada to the Bonneville salt
flats where she will attempt to set a speed record (for motorcycles in
its class) on her Moto Valera. That attempt will be her art, the
invisible straight line of her going very fast will be her art. But she
crashes when she makes her run. But she’s all right. Hardly hurt at all.
There are charming and amusing portraits of the people who go after land
speed records and nice stuff about the official Valera team and their
diva driver under his hairdo before he puts on his helmet. His name is
Didi Bombonato and he is seeking the world speed record in a two-wheeled
metal cigar with a rocket engine, called Spirit of Italy.
There’s a nice bit of comedy and Italian reality in how a work slowdown
back at the motorcycle factory in Milan all of a sudden makes it
impossible for the team of mechanics around Didi to proceed at more than
a snail’s pace. I suppose there are people in the world with names like
Didi Bombonato, particularly in the Mafia and the vanished world of
burlesque dancers. I suppose. Just as in the real world there are people
with names like Ronnie Fontaine. And John Dogg. And Giddle. And Talia
Shrapnel (Sandro’s cousin and lover, a descendant of Henry Shrapnel, the
inventor of the shrapnel shell, who changed her ugly original name to
Valera, her mother’s name).
Here’s the point about the names. There is a generous and exuberant
artificiality to this book, as I have mentioned, and, as with the names,
a comical exaggeration, but one that isn’t always funny—Terry Southern
without the laughs. There’s a tremendous comic energy in the characters
in the book, a downtown outlandishness, comic but usually not funny,
brilliant fiery invention, but somehow lacking in feeling. The book has
heat but lacks warmth.
What is this book interested in? Besides motorcycles. Which it’s
interested in only a bit, and, as much as anything else, as a plot
device, yeast to make the rest rise. It is interested in language, but
that interest it doesn’t quite have under control. Language runs away
with itself, runs on, hopped up. What’s the book interested in? Would
that be Art, or rather the making of art, or rather how some of the
people trying to create lived in New York in the Seventies? It’s a
novel, so it’s interested in the people. It adds politics to the people.
This was the period of radical politics in major cities of the Western
world, so you have the character Burdmoore and his wittily named Fah-Q
movement. The Symbionese Liberation Army gets mentioned, the East
Village Hell’s Angels are there, Patty Hearst flashes past. You get
speechifying. You get drinks and hijinks and girls. Banks get robbed, an
offending landlord gets killed. But mostly the scenes take place at
parties, in clubs, in a diner, the Trust E, in Rudy’s Bar. The scenes
are like movie storyboarding or like panels of a comic book, puffs of
bright illumination in many colors, as in the sequencing of a fireworks
display.
There will be more politics, radical politics, and serious, deadly, bad
unpleasantness when the book gets back to Italy from New York with Reno
and Sandro, and where the Red Brigades are (so to speak) waiting.
On the basis of Reno’s speed runs at Bonneville—a second run after her
crash, but this time in Bombonato’s borrowed Spirit of Italy, gave her
temporarily the world land speed record for a woman!—Reno gets invited
to ride for Team Valera back in Italy. A very reluctant Sandro decides
to join her and return to Italy to face his family, which means older
brother Roberto who runs the Valera company, the father having died, and
the dreadful mother. And here they all are, including Sandro’s cousin,
the formidable Talia Shrapnel Valera, at the grand family property on
Lake Como.
The fun of the novel is about to end—two hundred pages before the novel
actually ends—but not without a few scenes with these pampered
grotesques. Haughty awful mother and her fool of a lover, extremes of
class nonsense. Roberto, emblematic, coldly arrogant industrialist. And
the servants, who, like the mother, treat Reno with disdain. The
servants are standard-issue servant snobs, devoted to the family, and
make a nice contrast to the not-at-all devoted Valera factory workers
who are about to thrust themselves forward in the story. The work
slowdown at the Valera factory has turned into a workers’ insurrection.
Soon much of Italy will be involved. Reno is not going to be able to
make her Moto Valera run, is the very least of it.
A handyman working at the Como estate—Gianni—taciturn, charismatic,
Reno’s age, will turn out unsurprisingly to be a member of an extreme
radical group. Reno, fleeing Sandro, who has betrayed her with his
cousin Talia—sounds like program notes for an opera, right?—will leave
with Gianni and travel to Rome and, without wishing to, will become part
of the radical uprising there—will be a nonparticipant witness, a
noncombatant caught up in the violent demonstrations and destruction.
The novel is turning into the needs of its plot. The plot is stepping
forward as a character in its own right, as in opera. There are crowd
scenes out in the city, in the streets and piazzas, and domestic scenes
and drama in the secret apartment where the radicals nest. We know what
happened in Aldo Moro’s Italy, terrible things. None of what’s happening
to Reno seems real because it isn’t. It almost is, it wants to be, or
wants to seem to be, but isn’t. It wants to be more, it wants to invent
to the level of persuasive reality, and still be a novel. But it’s only
a novel, Kushner’s novel, and feels like it, reads like it. She
brilliantly tries. She writes like mad. There is the news that Robert
has been kidnapped. Later there will be the news that he has been
killed. Now we are looking up at the Italian Alps into which the
escaping Gianni disappears, and now we are waiting with Reno on the
other side, the French side, for him to reappear. He doesn’t.
Now we are back in New York, at the end of a four-hundred-page swirl and
whirl of language and people and bits of business, bomb blasts and
jukebox music—and Morton Feldman with his thick glasses—and “‘Larry Zox,
Larry Poons, Larry Bell, Larry Clark, Larry Rivers, and Larry Fink. And
they’re all talking to one another!’” So much New York, so much
Seventies, such bursting-apart-at-the-seams liveliness! What a splendor
of invention! These passionately alive and not believable characters!
Heat without heart. Such an abundance of life and liveliness and
language! It’s a glorious novel Rachel Kushner has written with heat but
without warmth. Maybe that’s a new kind of novel.
The end, the final pages. And we’re back in Rome. Learning why the
Allies bombed the Cinecittà film studios during the war. And, look,
we’re in the Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK, which makes Sandro think of
Brasília, built with T. P. Valera’s rubber-tapping money. And now Sandro
thinks about Talia, who talked like Sylvia Plath and looked a little
like her. And now we’re with Reno waiting below Mont Blanc for Gianni to
reappear, as the lights of Chamonix come on and snow falls and night falls.
What’s this book interested in? It’s interested in being made into a movie.
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