Politics By Other Means

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Harvill Secker, 400pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781846557910

reviewed by Marika Lysandrou

Through the eyes of a young woman from Nevada we see the colourful, vibrant scene of the 1970s SoHo art world. Through these same eyes we see masked men and angry women thronging in protest on the streets of Rome during the Years of Lead. The young woman, Reno, is the narrator of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, The Flamethrowers. She arrives on the New York art scene with aspiration. She is into motorcycles and ski racing – which she describes as ‘drawing in time’ – and soon becomes involved with the established older Italian artist, Sandro Valera. Kushner captivates her reader through a commitment to real and invented detail, an ability to fuse the personal and the political and a readiness to cast wide the nets of her imagination over different historical moments.

It soon becomes apparent that Reno is a somewhat uncomplicated canvass upon which other characters can project. Her relative thinness of character is less a weakness on the novel’s part, more a result of a series of techniques that emphasise Reno’s appearance as a passive receptor to experience. There are, for instance, large swathes of prose in which Reno reports from a passive perspective on personal events happening to her, such as when Sandro takes her to a restaurant on Coney Island: ‘[he] said he loved me. The way he kissed the snow from my eyelashes, wrapped me in his warmth, I believed him’. When Reno finds herself in conversation with an old novelist later in the novel, his speech is reported directly, while Reno reports her own reply indirectly – ‘I said I was simply curious about what sorts of things he wrote’. On the one hand this has the effect of dulling the vitality of Reno’s character, but on the other, her passivity and self-effacement are a method of survival in the uncertain art scene of SoHo, where certain rules apply, in the claustrophobic environment at the Valera household and on the turbulent streets of Rome.

Kushner’s Reno may be passive, but she is also open to the fluid processes around her. She occupies different roles throughout the novel – she is ski racer, motorcycle racer, land artist, girlfriend and friend, among other things. Fluidity and movement are the novel’s theme and Kushner brings forth a world that is characterised chiefly by its metamorphic quality, where characters perform an idea of themselves. Take Giddle, for instance, Reno’s chief friend and ally. Giddle sees her job as a waitress as one performance in an unending series. But when Reno watches an actual actress act as a waitress in a film, she reflects that ‘This woman … was what Giddle impersonated. It somehow did not occur to me that the waitress in the film was even more of an actress than Giddle was.’ Kushner brilliantly introduces a layer of ambiguity here, for even though the novel is first person, the narrator still says it ‘somehow did not occur to me’, a subtle paradox that raises the question of how much Reno actually knows.

In Jamesian fashion, Kushner is a master of withholding knowledge from Reno, and therefore from the reader. The question of how much Reno knows is a question which we constantly seek to understand. The power of the novel is perhaps slightly lessened by the fact that some secrets, hinted at throughout, are eventually laid bare. Ronnie, Sandro’s best friend and Reno’s one time lover, tells Reno that ‘It wasn’t just Talia [Sandro] was gifting himself with […] name a woman you have met through Sandro, or he has met through you, and you’ll find that–’ This confession seems to go a step too far, rubbing Reno’s nose in the reality behind her fiction of Sandro, just as it rubs the reader’s nose in the truth behind the hints we may or may not have chosen to take throughout the novel. Ronnie’s justification is that he is laying facts bare to show Reno ‘the uselessness of truth’, but this justification doesn’t wash as easily for Kushner herself.

In her own words, what excited Kushner most in writing her first novel, Telex from Cuba (Scribner, 2008) ‘were the possibilities it posed in terms of moving characters through a fictional landscape and through historical processes simultaneously […] They are politicized in that they are people living in a moment, affected by and constructed of that moment.’ This excitement is also captured in The Flamethrowers, for Kushner uses different techniques to incorporate the contemporary political scene into the novel and her characters’ lives. The political situation forms and flows through characters, but in the latter half of the novel, when Reno is in Italy, for instance, it also lies in veiled conversations. In Sandro’s mother’s villa, the old novelist brings to light the Valera family’s accommodation of German SS officers and their concomitant complicity in the acts of atrocity these officers committed. Kushner is a master of effortlessly fusing international and dining room politics, both of which play their part in determining the course of her characters’ lives.

Kushner is true to her word: Reno is politicised in that she is constructed ‘of that moment’. But, equally, Reno is not an active participant in that moment. Though she comes to Rome to accompany and assist Gianni, an Italian revolutionary, she finds herself passive in the midst of a protest, observing it through the viewfinder of a camera. This is a point of brilliance in Kushner’s novel, and one which makes it akin to the experience of a surrealist Fellini film: Kushner is able to show historical events, such as violent protest, from a distanced, uncomprehending and fantastical view. For although Reno is in the midst of the protest in Rome, with Gianni by her side, Kushner doubly removes us from the action. Firstly, Reno is positioned as outsider (with camera and viewfinder) and this affects the way she sees the protestor who becomes a kind of performer. With camera in hand, Reno sees that a man is wearing a ski-mask with ‘cartoonish eyeholes’, just as she also sees a young girl who is about to sing: ‘she wore theatre makeup […] curious geometric teardrops … her pretty face a pictograph of sadness’. Kushner casts the performer/protestor in artistic terms, as a part of a ‘counterreality’: the singer’s ‘sadness’ is at once a political statement and a part of a show. At the same time, Kushner’s narrator casts the events and objects of the protest in highly metaphorical terms, drawing attention to the way in which language can simultaneously convey and distance us from real life. Balloons floating above the protest have ‘stretched skin the sheer white of nurses’ stockings’ – this wonderfully taut metaphor captures a sense of beauty and tenderness amidst upheaval and brutality. The protestors, including Reno, are tear-gassed.

Kushner’s characters may be politicised, in that the historical moment does indeed move through them, but her novel complicates what being politicised means. Reno observes, for instance, a young pregnant blond girl who is being filmed naked by two Italian men. Although the girl is being taken advantage of, Reno does not impose her political will or view. Reno’s observation, her youth, and her role of waiting (as she does, for instance, at the end of the novel, at the foot of the mountains, for Gianni) seem to be Kushner’s testament to the shifting nature of sympathy and political affiliation. Even the cruel collaborator, Signora Valera, is at times portrayed sympathetically, in moments of isolation and subordination at the hands of her husband. The Flamethrowers is not didactic and apart from the way in which the activity of one US counter culture group, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, is itemised, political agendas are not touched upon, only alluded to.

The Flamethrowers is a beautifully written testament to the idea that even the most atrocious acts cannot be separated from the aestheticising effects of language. Even the flamethrowers of the novel’s title, like the protestors in Rome, are cast as role players, as ‘hulking creature[s]’ and ‘harbinger[s] of death’. Kushner’s novel places performance, and the reality or historical moment in which any performance takes place, at the nucleus of her novel. She also heightens the irony that can come from the clash between performance and reality. This occurs, for instance, when Sandro reflects on the irony inherent in Italian neorealist filmmaking: ‘It was actually funny … Rossellini was too busy casting regular Italians to play wretches, too busy casting them to portray the actual wretches’. This is one of the few moments of explicit political indictment from a central character in the novel, and it occurs towards the end, when Kushner ties up some loose ends that were perhaps best left untied.

Anxiety about art and the process of making art are something both Reno and Sandro share. Reno sees art as connected to speed, which underwrites her love of skiing; and she sees speed as ‘a causeway between life and death’. Sandro views art as a changeable ‘technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.’ Both characters view art in terms of temporary, makeshift lines constructed to carve out one’s place in the present. What is interesting is that while Kushner shows a degree of sympathy in her characters’ efforts to divide and carve and construct, she thwarts these efforts by deploying narrative shifts in time and place which contribute to the fluidity of the novel: history and art, the past and the present in which the characters find themselves, collide.

Kushner’s characters may not be the entirely living, breathing, knowable characters some readers crave, but The Flamethrowers makes a luminous gift to the reader out of this unknowability. The distance erected between the characters themselves, as well as the characters and us, is telling of the atmosphere of 70s SoHo and Rome – a time of shifting scenes and performances, which we, along with Reno, are encouraged to negotiate.
Marika Lysandrou works at the literary agency Sheil Land Associates.