Synopsis:
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine's #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker; Time; Flavorwire; Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast "Superb...Scintillatingly alive...A pure explosion of now."--The New Yorker Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity--artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts--by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
Review:
"Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel."--Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia
"I loved Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers."--Jonathan Franzen "The New York Times Book Review "
"Rachel Kushner's fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers."--Elissa Schappell "Vanity Fair "
"Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flamethrowers, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story... it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading... Kushner employs a[n]...eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical...Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno's reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos...[Kushner's] novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."--James Wood "The New Yorker "
"The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock...Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of ....Robert Stone and Joan Didion...[Kushner has] a sensibility that's on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty...persuasive and moving...provocative."--Dwight Garner "The New York Times "
"Life, gazed at with exemplary intensity over hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences precision-etched with detail--that's what The Flamethrowers feels like. That's what it is. And it could scarcely be better. The Flamethrowers is a political novel, a feminist novel, a sexy novel, and a kind of thriller...Virtually every page contains a paragraph that merits--and rewards--rereading."--Tom Bissell "Harper's "
"Rachel Kushner's new novel, The Flamethrowers, is a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, she strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated...[Kushner is] a superb recent-historical novelist...20 brilliant pages [of The Flamethrowers] could make any writer's career a set piece of New York night life that's a daze of comedy, poignancy and violence...What really dazzles...is her ability to steer this zigzag plot so expertly that she can let it spin out of control now and then...The Flamethrowers concludes with two astonishing scenes: one all black, one all white, as striking as any of the desert photographs Reno aspires to shoot, but infinitely richer and more evocative. Hang on: This is a trip you don't want to miss."--Ron Charles "The Washington Post "
"[A] big, rich wonder of a novel... [Kushner's] polychrome sentences...are shot through with all the longing and regret you find in those of Thomas Pynchon, whose influence is all over this novel... a glittering, grave, brutally unsentimental book that's spectacularly written enough to touch greatness."--Craig Seligman "Bloomberg News "
"Exhilarating...it's impossible not to be pulled in by the author's sense of the period's vitality...the novel's brilliance is in its understanding of art's relationship to risk, and in its portrait of Reno's--and New York's--age of innocence."--Megan O'Grady "Vogue "
"[A] brilliant lightning bolt of a novel...The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture--psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women--with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency."--Maud Newton "NPR "
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