By Max Liu
Rachel Kushner. Photo: Ann Summa for The New York Times
‘The Flamethrowers’ (2013), the acclaimed second novel by American writer Rachel Kushner, begins as its young narrator Reno takes an exhilarating motorcycle ride across Nevada and Utah. Most of the novel takes place in the New York art world of the 1970s, where Reno embarks on a relationship with a celebrated Minimalist, who’s the son of a wealthy industrialist with historical links to the Futurists, and the couple eventually travel to Italy at a moment of extraordinary social upheaval. Kushner, whose first novel, ‘Telex from Cuba’, was nominated for the National Book Award in 2008, answered my questions from Los Angeles where she lives with her family.
Max Liu: Did you start writing The Flamethrowers with a character, place, time, image, idea or something else in mind?
Rachel Kushner: I started with a few images, just notions, really, like visual flashes: New York’s SoHo in 1977. Rome in 1977. A girl on a motorcycle, and the Bonneville Salt Flats. More or less those things. But it wasn’t a baking experiment, ‘mix these ingredients’. It was more of a general migration into each of those worlds that the images evoked.
ML: Reno says: ‘I filmed and then looked at the footage to see what was there …’ Do you ever compose first drafts in a similar way?
RK: I never thought of that comparison. When you film, the ‘consciousness’ is, for a moment, inside the camera. The camera records. It remembers. There’s no mediating third thing for the writer, a machine that sees first. So it’s impossibly different on a basic, structural level. You are aware that you are writing, you feel yourself thinking, and thus no neutral ‘footage’ is being generated. But of course there are drafts. You see what you’ve done and go back and try to improve it. I don’t write in a blind inspired rush – maybe that’s what you’re really asking. I’m more slow and deliberate. But once in a while something good comes out quickly. That’s rare. But I’ll take it when it happens.
ML: Your characters are often performing, in their lives and work. When you write are you conscious of performing?
RK: There is a lot of dialogue in this book, and some of it is rather performative. Characters are trying to sustain a performance, for themselves as much as for the audience they’ve managed to gather, and I’m keenly aware of the way people perform themselves for their own benefit, to keep the narrative of the impression they make stable. (As opposed to the radical instability of innate ‘character’ to determine ‘affect’, i.e., you can’t rely on your essential traits to speak of you for you to others, in the way you want.) I am not myself conscious of performing, as the writer – if, alternately, that is what you mean. Or maybe I am? I want to be a good writer. I try to write, I think, in a way that will please the big ‘Other’ in me, whoever or whatever that is, a symbolic order of some kind. But it isn’t a performance with the sense there is someone watching as I write: it’s attenuated, and elapsed. It’s not a performance in real time, which is what dialogue is.
ML: Why did you write The Flamethrowers in the first person? Did you experiment with telling the story from other perspectives?
RK: I did try to write Reno in the third person, at a certain point early on, mostly just to confirm that first-person was right for the novel. I didn’t want there to be any emphasis on her as a character to be looked at and judged by the reader. She doesn’t even have a name (she’s dubbed ‘Reno’ by her friends, after the Nevada town where she’s from). I wanted her to have experiences, and for her and the reader to share those experiences as though her thoughts were the reader’s thoughts. She’s not a character who is defined so much by how she acts. She is a set of perceptions, and I felt that first-person would be more immediate and appropriate for that. The first person promises a thought-like neutrality, somehow. The third person is tough, actually. It carries a lot of baggage. I’m less interested in it at the moment.
ML: A friend says of Reno: ‘There’s something you never seem to get.’ Is Reno a reliable narrator?
RK: Yes. Most people don’t get certain things, have blind spots in their ability to read themselves and those around them, and when they pretend to have a read and a spin and an interpretation of everyone and thing and of themselves, it’s highly constructed. In any case, she reports this comment that’s made about her to us, doesn’t she? She’s fairly neutral. She’s not ‘unreliable’ which I take to mean, dissimulating. But since you bring it up, I find the whole classification of the unreliable narrator problematic. What human is ‘reliable’ in the sense that this term means – ‘objective’? No one, thanks. I find the idea of a character who can see into every corner of understanding fatiguing. I guess you could say Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (1991) is definitively ‘unreliable’ like when he says he has a meeting with his lawyer ‘about some bogus rape charges’, but then again he also might be telling the reader both A) that the charges probably are not bogus and B) that he has to present these things as if he could care less, which has the added effect of making us laugh. Humans are unreliable, even when they aren’t hiding bodies in a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen.
ML: I love it when Reno thinks: ‘She’s on her timeline … not yours or anyone else’s.’ This reminded me of the way that when we read, say, Proust for the first time, it feels like the first time that anybody has ever read Proust. Does that chime with your encounters with great works?
RK: I guess I agree. I mean, what else do we have to go on, in a direct engagement with art and life, than our own startled and personal reactions? If you’re going to write an analysis of Proust it might be wise to turn first to the literature and theoretical apparatus dedicated to it, but as a reading experience, it belongs to the reader. The whole ‘been-there-done-that’ attitude, you know, ‘Oh, you’re just discovering that now?’ is weak. I don’t want to be on either end of that.
ML: One artist in the book is dismissive of ‘people and their need to interpret’. Your gorgeous prose put me in mind of Susan Sontag’s ‘erotics of art’. What are the perils of over-interpretation?
RK: Oh, that’s flattering. In the context that my character refers to, the perils are taking gestures literally, and thus missing the point, not to mention the humour, in something someone might say or do. Which I can see, I guess, relating to your Sontag reference, ‘in place of hermeneutics.’ The character you refer to, in the book, is an artist for whom the artwork should be pregnant with nuance and humour and some fakery, too. It is a gesture, and gestures are best responded to with something like knowing instinct – an erotics, maybe – rather than a plodding march toward literal meaning.
ML: Patience is a recurrent theme. Is it something you’ve had to learn as a writer?
RK: I suspect a certain kind of patience comes naturally to writers, because it is essential. When I started my first novel, Telex from Cuba, I had the deluded optimism that the book existed in my head and all I needed to do was write it into being – give form to a thing that preceded that form. But I came to understand pretty quickly that the journey is the thing. The novel doesn’t exist until you make it, and that process takes a lot of time. It cannot be rushed.
ML: Reno’s boyfriend, Sandro, tells her to be patient as an artist but time is a luxury that not everybody can afford. There’s tension throughout The Flamethrowers between people who are permitted to ‘be’ and those who are forced to merely ‘do’. What are the political implications of this?
RK: That’s a big question. I’d rather just acknowledge that yes, there are political implications. Italy has a bizarrely aristocratic culture, which I guess I was thinking about, in terms of Sandro’s family, the Valeras, in my novel. One of the demands, or desires, of the Movement of ’77, as it was called, in Italy, was to ‘be’ together; in other words, to have autonomy from the work-clock. But what he says to the narrator is about ambition: he is suggesting that she doesn’t need to be in a rush to make art. Maybe I got the sense that this kind of remark implies that he has fetishized who she is and for him it’s fine if she doesn’t make art, because he is reducing her to what pleases him, and not really thinking about what is good for her, for her own future. For older people, the young can have a special form of energy, non-transferable.
ML: One of many parallels illuminated in The Flamethrowers is between American deindustrialisation and the moment in the 1970s when artists moved from making objects to exploring concepts. Can you expand on this please?
RK: Well, I could expand on it, but I’d be adopting the mode of an art historian, and though I have attempted that mode from time to time, here I am my novelist self. I would only point out that there are excellent texts on this, such as Lucy Lippard’s essays from that time, Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973) and more recently, with a longer view of that era, Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book Art Workers (2009).
ML: Do you lament the failure of protests of the ’70s that you write about in the novel, or do they show that it’s possible to resist power?
RK: I guess I take history at face value, as a was rather than a might-have-been. Although I’m interested in moments of promise, potentiality, more than in the way things fail to work out. I’m not that focused on failure. I think the protests in Italy in the 1970s have become the focus for a lot of people not because of how they failed, which was very specific to Italy and to the time, as much as people are interested in the ways in which they succeeded.
It’s not clear to me what power is. It’s not one thing, and yet people seem to ‘resist’ it all the time. As I write this, people are torching cars and buildings … in Sweden. As I was writing The Flamethrowers, there were continual eruptions in Greece, the Arab World, Spain, Portugal, Italy, London, all over the US. The marketplace, or ‘power’ is a global jellyfish. Perhaps the jellyfish will begin to sting itself, or it already is. But I have no ready analysis of this to offer up. For me, it’s an open question as to what will evolve.
ML: To what extent do cities feature as characters in The Flamethrowers?
RK: I like to think of the city as being rendered in a character-like way in that it can be complex and unpredictable, and obviously, have traits. Hopefully both Rome and New York figure in this way, as subjects I pursue in hopes they will reveal their dynamism to me. I don’t write the city so that it’s simply a plausible background behind the plot. To me the city should serve its own role, have specificity and a set of effects, which is why I think of it as something like a character.
ML: What role does danger play in The Flamethrowers and do you find it inspiring?
RK: I’m interested in danger and risk, in so far as I might have characters who are committed to violence and unafraid of it and its consequences, and others who are artists taking risks. And yet others who merely flirt with the language of danger, or who don’t know how to calculate and recognise danger. I’m not sure if it’s exactly that I find danger inspiring. I find it real.
ML: At an exhibition opening, a woman holds on to elegance ‘like it was a religion that could save her’. You connect elegance with desperation and beauty with cruelty. Once you perceive these kinds of connections in the world, how do you go about articulating them in a novel?
RK: I don’t quite work backward from the world to the novel. The novel is a way of enfolding the world and making it undergo a treatment, so that the logic of the novel can reveal a hidden logic in the world, but I wasn’t consciously making those kinds of connections you outline and then finding ways to articulate them. There really is an unconscious agent in the writing of a novel. The writer finds she has things to say when she’s arrived at certain junctions in the writing. It is the writing that illuminates what these things are. Among the connections you mention, there is plenty of inelegant desperation, of course, but perhaps elegance is desperation perfectly masked, which is why elegance matters, why it can have such a powerful effect.
ML: The 1970s Manhattan art scene sounds like a very masculine environment. Is that consistent with your own experience of that world later on? And do you consider The Flamethrowers to be a feminist novel?
RK: Not exactly consistent with my experience (just as nothing in the book is exactly consistent with my experience). I keyed the novel to the time but since it’s made up, I had to imagine what the men were like, whole cloth. That said, I’ve had some experience with people who were predominate art world figures in the 1970s, so I suppose I drew from that a little. I am happy for people who care about feminism to read my book and to relate to it, or respond to it. I can’t imagine writing anything that isn’t, in some way, feminist. You’re either a feminist or an anti-feminist. It’s a very clear choice, even as that term opens onto a world of ambiguity and nuance.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner is published by Harvill Secker.