The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

I found this book quite difficult to sustain. It’s about a young and rather gutsy woman from Nevada who rides motorbikes and does downhill ski racing, who decides to go to New York to pursue her conceptual art practice. She is described as a ‘landscape’ artist, and her interest is in taking photos of speed – tracks in the snow that sort of thing. She meets an older Italian artist, on the run from his family who own a rubber and tyre making empire. He makes polished metal boxes for the art world and is very successful. A lot of the next part of the novel deals with the world of conceptual art and artists in New York in the 1970s and with the run down neighbourhoods of Little Italy, where Reno lives, and SoHo where the artists are just moving in. Conversation, in my view pretentious and lengthy, absorbs the writer through all this, and I found it hard to wade through the meaningless rants of the artists. The book comes to life when Reno and Sandro go back to Italy and she stays with his dreadful family in Bellagio. We’re thrown into the political turmoil, kidnappings and murders that were taking place then. The characters are intensely drawn, the conversation riveting and the action fascinating. I was not pleased with the end of this book, where I didn’t feel that Reno had moved on or learned much. It was almost as if she had been a quiet observer, when in fact she hadn’t been that at all. She’d been intimately involved in the art scene, in a love affair, and in extreme political action, and for a girl who had taken the risks of high speed racing and a solo move to New York to try her hand in the art world, her lack of response, the fact that she just goes on as if nothing has happened, just doesn’t ring true.