She knows she’s naïve, out of her league. She’s “the gamine,” and Reno is aware of this. One of her friends even calls her out on it. Reno wants to be a badass, but she’s a stock character in her own narrative. In other words, Reno is in way, way over her head. The Red Brigades aren’t fooled for one moment that Reno’s personal umbrages are a piece with their radicalism, but they’re willing to co-opt her rage and pain for their purposes nonetheless. In 1977, Reno in their midst, the movement launches a full-scale assault aimed at overthrowing leftover fascist power structures-including the Valera corporation-still in place decades after WWII. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, you should take five minutes and do it now.)Ī series of personal tragedies sweeps Reno into a radical youth movement in Rome: the Red Brigades. He takes up with the Futurists, a group of largely aristocratic young men eager to throttle Italy out if its nostalgic malaise and send it lurching into the modern 20th century by embracing industrialism and war as cleansing mechanisms for obliterating the past-and much of the present. Reno is tentative and vulnerable Valera Sr. Valera, also a lover of motorcycles, but in all other ways Reno’s opposite. Reno’s story is punctuated by the coming-of-age tale of Sandro’s father, T.P. Additionally, Valera happens to be the second generation of an Italian industrialist family made vastly wealthy by its rubber, tire, and motorcycle business. She becomes the girlfriend of Sandro Valera, a successful older artist who also serves as her art-world Sherpa. Reno, so nicknamed because of her hometown, arrives in Manhattan in 1976 fresh out of art school, equipped with vague ideas of making films and photographs inspired by her love of motorcycles and speed. The reactions-and the reactions to the reactions-have been ardent (more on that in a bit). In other words, this is a novel that very self-consciously strides into Great American Novel territory. Amid these pyrotechnics are some of the most familiar tropes of the Western novel: the ingénue setting forth to find adventure and romance the American innocent in Europe egotistical, creative men and the women who love them.

The story reveals itself to us via multiple narrative viewpoints, lists, and a selection of illustrations. Wrapped up in its narrative are at least seven decades, four continents, revolutions, radical underground movements, various -isms of 20th-century art history (futurism, minimalism, etc.), and a deep plunge into the anarchic lower Manhattan of the 1970s. Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, The Flamethrowers, steps up and slaps you across the mouth with its ambition.

The flamethrowers book review