Scenes of an increasingly radicalised Italy – galvanised by the Red Brigades and, given that this is 1976–7, the newly jabbing theorists of Autonomia – tighten the screws, the Valera factory becoming a flashpoint for violent protests. In picaresque reports from NYC, meanwhile (openings, bitchy dinners, boozy nights in downtown bars, casual sexism, attempts to have sex on Gordon Matta-Clark’s hacked-up pier), we see a mostly politically disengaged artworld that has literally emerged out of industrial Modernism – the minimalist style in general and Sandro in particular, his career choice seemingly enabled by something like blood money. Whether Kushner is summarising the hazard-strewn life of a Brazilian rubber- tapper for the tyre industry, the grim conditions in the Italian factories or the gilded ennui of the Valera family, the message comes over loud and clear. set up his industrial empire – himself inspired by contact with the Futurists in Milan, and with the Italian fascists – and the brutality towards workers that underwrote it and continues to. In periodic flashbacks, Kushner establishes how Valera Sr. In New York she hooks up, after a couple of false starts, with Sandro, a forty- something, Donald Judd-like Italian Minimalist and scion of the Valera family, which manufactures the very motorbikes Reno rides.
The book’s heroine, known as ‘Reno’ for her Nevada hometown – the first of many bruising depersonalisations of women here – is an early-twenties fine art graduate and ingénue who, at the outset, like a modern-day Futurist, is motorcycling fast across America and calling it drawing in space. It’s clear that Rachel Kushner, the Los Angeles-based writer and critic whose outstanding second novel this is, is also talking (or, really, asking) about today: what’s at stake and what might be possible in art, life and their mythic overlap.
The Flamethrowers, which unites scenes from a somnolent, insular artworld with episodes of bomb-flinging struggle against inequality, is only nominally concerned with mid-1970s America and Italy.
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