This is a curious novel in so far as there is much to
admire, but, for this reader, less to like, within its nearly 400 pages. The
scale and ambition of the book are impressive and the research that has gone
into it is evident. But Kushner seems to have deliberately chosen to have run
with a narrator, Reno, whose shallowness has the effect of undercutting any
moral or emotional resonance the novel aspires to. The narrator’s voice feels
out of sync with the author’s apparent intellectual intentions. The result is
that The Flamethrowers all too often feels like a textbook, a slightly stilted
guide to the mores of the New York art scene through the ages. This is the
novel as encyclopaedia, which has the effect of nullifying any emotional
attachment we might hope to have with Reno, Ronnie, Valera & co. The
fictional artists with whom the narrator sleeps and socialises feel as though
they have been drawn by Lichtenstein: bold colours and clear lines, but no
depth.
The debt to DeLillo’s Underworld is evident, in particular
as the narrator embarks on her Nevada motorcycle-sculpture adventure. At times
the book has the feel of a cut-out-and-paste Great American novel, assembled
according to a take-home kit. Epic Western landscape – tick; deprecating
sub-Fitzgeraldian dissection of NY pseudo-sophisticates – tick; adventures in
the old continent, (in this instance, Italy) – tick. Coming of age story –
tick. Hints of a discarded experimental direction – tick. It has all the
ingredients, but they make for a somewhat self-conscious, stodgy cherry pie.
Kushner’s prose mirrors this inconsistency. There are
moments where it comes off the page. This reader enjoyed the slightly
incidental sections dealing with the Valera back story. At other moments it
feels turgid, (“The Colosseum, a great decaying skull whose grassed over arena
was all but lost in a strange haze of thereness, unreal because it existed,
now, without its former use.”), or downright pretentious: “In any case, death
was death: it had its own gravity”, leading to moments where you want to ask –
what exactly is that supposed to mean? One suspects that the vacuousness of the
narrator’s voice inevitably clashes with the broader perspective of the
authorial voice, leaving the book hoisted on its own petard.
The novel has received vast swathes of literary hype. But
its brilliance is worn on its sleeve. It’s a novel that sets out to dazzle and
has clearly achieved that end, but exactly what lurks behind the sparkle is
open to question. Strangely, the book is at its strongest when it allows the
listless Sandro Valera his moment, free of Reno, in the penultimate chapter.
The writing exhibits both cruelty and insight in its examination of the
artist’s vanity and success. For a brief moment we see how the whole art
charade functions, why a type like Valera can achieve what he does in spite of
his flaws. Koons, Warhol and Hirst are just around the corner. But it feels
like the writer can’t bring herself to exercise the same sense of distance when
dealing with her narrator Reno, whose
navel-gazing naivety surely deserves the same cold-eyed treatment as her
lover’s addled vanity.
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