The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

I peruse the numerous discounted e-books that Barnes and Noble offers almost on a daily basis looking for the rare gem of a book, normally priced at $9.99, reduced to $7.99, or even to $2.99 or less.  I obtained a copy of The Flamethrowers this way, bought it despite the ragged cover art, and the fact that the website advertised that the protagonist in the book meandered her way through relationships, a story which might interest other audiences, but not me.  The fact that the book earned a spot on the National Book Award's finalist list for 2013 persuaded me to pay the measly amount for the book.

Once bought, the cover became clearer under the light of ownership.  It features a young blond woman with an "x" taped over her mouth.  She looks at the camera, and ultimately, the purchaser of the book, a calm disdain in her eyes.  I immediately though of those modern works of art that I studied in college wherein the artist attempts to make you aware that in fact that, in viewing the work and passing judgment upon it, the artist incorporates you into the work, makes you a part of it, as well as makes you keenly aware of that fact.

In fact, the book, at least in part, follows through the point of view of the protagonist, a group of artists who adopt a modern approach to art, eschewing the more traditional forms, i.e., painting or sculpture, and adopting forms concentrating more upon message.  One such character, Gloria, a woman in loose, dysfunctional relationship with another artist, constructs a piece wherein she hides herself behind a curtain, her genitalia exposed.  A sign outside the curtain commands the observer to stick his or her hand inside the curtain and in effect grab onto the artist's genitals.

Ironically, just as the observer becomes participant to a sex act wherein the participant adopts the role of the giver giving pleasure to the artist, instead of the other way round.  Yet, Kushner turns the whole image on its head again, when the reader realizes that he or she becomes the observer reading the sex act meant to be performance art performed by the artwork's observer and artist.  Kushner litters the book with these examples of odd pieces of art, both comedic and solemn, a reminder of the manner that art works upon its consumer.

I read a number of reviews of the book, trying to decipher its message, attempting to gain a foothold into what message The Flamethrowers meant to convey.  A number of reviews related that a number of critics viewed that Kushner's writing scandalously exuded a kind of masculinity.  Dwight Gardner in his review states:

"Elsewhere, though, the novel has prompted accusations that its so-called 'macho' qualities (there is a great deal of speed, risk and bodily excitement) explain 'why it has been received so enthusiastically by the critics.'  In Salon she was dubbed the novelist 'who scares male critics... When Rachel Kushner--not a venerable male auteur--writes the Great American Novel, male reviewers are flummoxed.'"

However, I believe that such interpretations are unmerited.  Kushner plants herself in a feminist mode of writing, telling a tale much more driven at the oppressiveness of a male dominated world, whether the radical Italian or New York radical movements in the 1970's, the art community of New York in the 1970's, or even the meaning of relationships between men and women.  Ultimately, the flamethrowers of the title do not reference every character of the novel, as suggested by James Wood in his review in the New Yorker, but refers mainly to the men of the novel.

Kushner makes the protagonist of the novel a female trying to break into the art, with a bit of naivety.  The protagonist prefers the medium of film and photography, giving rise to the common image of the pretty female photographer, a dabbler in something to pass the time while looking pretty.  But while she desires to be taken seriously for her work, those around her limit her to being merely female.  She becomes a land speed record holder, a record qualified by the term "female."  Valero, a tire company, offers to send her to Italy to become a part of promotional advertisement, but such offer really involves her being a pretty face and not necessarily a racer.

Even Kushner makes the protagonist merely a female, not even herself.  Kushner names the protagonist Reno, not a real name, but one given to her offhandedly by one of the other characters, a male character with whom the protagonist sleeps:

"I told this friend of Nadine and Thurman's that I was from Nevada and he started called me Reno.  It was a nice word, he said, like the name of a Roman god or goddess.  Juno.  Or Nero.  Reno.  I told him it was on the neaon archway into town, four big red letters, R-E-N-O."

 Kushner objectifies the protagonist.  The protagonist moves to New York and finds employment posing for film used to color correct cameras before movies are shown:

"Every movie had what was known as a China girl on the film leader.  The first one wasn't Chinese.  None of them were.  No one was quite sure why they were called China girls, since they were a printing reference for Caucasion skin, there for the lab technicians, who needed a human face to make color corrections among the various shots, stocks, and lighting conditions.  If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer.  There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble.  Flesh is different.  Flesh needs to resemble flesh.  It has a norm, a referent: the China girl.  Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces.  And if faces looked wrong, we question eerything.  Some of the China girls smiled.  Most stared into the camera with a faint, taut bemusement just under the surface of their expressions.  Who knew I'd be a model?  But here I am, modeling flesh tones."

 The protagonist transforms from artist to the art itself, even if the "art" itself is insignificant.

Kushner provides example after example of insignificant art, works that feel ineffective, though in reality seem more genuine than the art that appears in the galleries identified in the novel.  These pieces, insignificant, are the products of women.  Perhaps the most interesting of these pieces is the performance artist/waitress of Giddle who transformed her own life into a work of art, albeit a tragic one: 

"'So I pressed her,' Giddle told me.  'And she admitted she was actually not a waitress, but a sociologist, and that she was living for one year on minimum-wage jobs to gather data on how difficult it was to get by in that life, to understand and expose a kind of American ugliness.'  So it's like a performance, Giddle had said to the woman.  You're performing the role of a waitress.  Giddle was a performer herself, and it was what most interested her.  The woman insisted, No, it's sociology--I don't care about performing.  I infiltrate to study this world.

"'But that is performance,' Giddle said to me.  'She didn't see that, but I did.  She was performing, as a real but not actual waitress.  She was rushing from table to table and clipping orders on a little metal wheel that the cooks spun around, and calling out sides of biscuits and gravy and carrying stacked dirty plates one-two-three up the inside of her arm, which I still have not learned to properly do.  I can't quite explain what happened next.  I was in a strange mood that day.  I was all alone.  It was February.  The sky was very white.  The trees were bare.  The diner was warm and humming with a kind of life that was new to me.  I watched the sociologist smooth her apron and slide a pencil in her hair and share a knowing smile with the cook, who called her by her server number, forty-three.  When she came to refill my coffee cip, I said, 'I'd like to work her.  Are there any openings?'"

Kushner suggests through her female characters that women serve as nothing more than objects, a lesson learned through the Borsalino which the protagonist "gave" to Ronnie Fontaine, the man with whom she slept with, the man who gave the name to the protagonist which is used throughout the novel.  Clearly, the sex signified by the transfer of the hat held meaning for the protagonist, a interpretation which Ronnie did not share because he thereafter gave the hat to Talia, a clear sign that Ronnie slept with the woman who would eventually would create a divide between the protagonist and Sandro Valero: 

"I went into Talia's room, next door, which she'd cleared out of, banging her huge leather suitcase dramatically down the stairs that morning, before Sandro intervened and came to her aid.  The bed was unmade, wet towels on the floor.  On a chair was my Borsalino.  Had she forgotten it?  No.  She didn't care about it.  She was free and east Talia, and the hat meant nothing.  If Ronnie Fontaine had given me something the one night I'd brought him home, if our secret interlude had resulted in a possession, I would have held on to that thing, whatever it was, forever.  But Talia wore the hat once, got her compliments, lathered the old novelist into a drunken tirade.  That was enough.  It probably just took up too much room in her suitcase."

Later on in the novel, Ronnie Fontaine explains to the protagonist just how mistaken the protagonist is about the messages in acts, whatever they be:

"'Look,' he said, and petted my hair.  His expression held something like pity.  'I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again.  About more than that, okay?  Okay?'"

And then Ronnie destroys the misconception that the protagonist holds about the purity of the other man that she slept with, Sandro Valero, whom she felt remained true to her until his cousin, Talia, "seduced" him:

"'You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained?  Because it wasn't just Talia that he was gifting himself with.  It wasn't just Giddle either, who, well see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally.  And it wasn't merely Gloria, who has been Sandro's leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants.  In fact, gee.  Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you'll find that--"

Interestingly, Ronnie reveals the truth that too men, all men, women serve only as "furniture."

Earlier, Kushner reveals the ridiculousness when a man claims to be the object.   It occurs when Ronnie Fontaine tells a story about he loses his memory when struck in the head and finds himself on a boat with a husband and wife couple take advantage of him.  The story sounds ridiculous from the outset, and, incredulous.  In its incredulity, the claim that a man could ever become the object instead of the objectifier loses all validity.  But as Ronnie Fontaine explains to the protagonist, there is a "uselessness" in truth.

Men destroy women in The Flamethrowers.  Kushner depicts all men in her novel as deprived.  She reveals the depravity of the one possibly honorable man in the last chapter.  Gianni, the man who had driven the protagonist to the Valero factory, to help her escape the oppressiveness of the Valero estate and to capture the philandering Sandro Valero having sex with his cousin, who also drove her away from the factory and permitted her to stay with him and his group of revolutionaries, merely uses the protagonist to escape Italy after being identified as a participant in the murder of Sandro Valero's brother, Roberto.  The protagonist drives Gianni to the border where he is to cross on skies the Alps and is supposed to meet on the other side.  However, as the novel closes, Kushner reveals that Gianni never comes:

"I'm alone at the base of the run, almost too cold to move.

"The answer is not coming.

"I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away.

"Leave, with no answer.  Move on to the next question."

At the end of the novel, the protagonist moves no farther than the point she occupied at the beginning of the novel.  She is not an artist.  She is not with Sandro Valero or Ronnie Fontaine or even Gianni, all of who abandoned her.  We really never know if she learned her lesson about how men objectify women.  What Kushner reveals to us, what the reader ought to grasp, is that men irredeemably objectify women and as long as they are objectify are impotent and unable to create works of art.