CLUTCHING AND SHIFTING
From the archive
Another from my Bookforum archive, a piece not much circulated at the time, for reasons obscure to me, though it was the cover essay of the Spring 2013 issue.
THE WILD BUNCH
Politics, art, and betrayal collide in Rachel Kushner’s new novel
RACHEL KUSHNER’S FIRST NOVEL, Telex from Cuba, a National Book Award finalist in 2008, chronicled life on the island in the 1950s, mostly as seen through the eyes of two American children: a boy, K. C. Stites, whose father runs a United Fruit sugar plantation, and a girl called Everly Lederer, whose father manages a nickel mine. Politics is glimpsed through the smoke from the back of a nightclub, where the Cuban showgirl Rachel K (as tricky as the author who named her) stirs intrigues among the deposed President Prio, the soon-to-be-deposed President Batista, the up-and-coming Castros, and a French arms dealer who used to be in the Gestapo. Sex and telexes keep the plot—or history, really—going in between the descriptions of life on the plantation and around the mine. As with the sections in Anna Karenina about Konstantin Levin’s farm, your taste for these bits will depend on how many spoonfuls of adultery you take in your cup of agricultural living—or, in Kushner’s case, of US neo-colonialism. I grew up the son of a truck driver who hauled bananas grown on the estates of the former United Fruit Company—we call its remnants Chiquita now, or Dole—north along the East Coast, so here at last was a vivid tableau of life on the other side of the shipping route. For those who lack interest in the workings of United Fruit, Kushner adds plenty of adultery, racism, and other bad behavior of gringos displaced in the pursuit of capitalism. If that’s not enough for you: Well, one night in a tent in the hills, Fidel Castro humps the arms dealer.
No real-life political leaders fuck fictional ex-Nazis in Kushner’s new novel, The Flamethrowers, but we are still in the clutch of history. The novel opens on the road in Italy during World War I; T. P. Valera, member of a motorcycle battalion called the Arditi, is raiding his dead partner’s bike for parts. A hostile German comes out of the woods, and Valera tackles him, killing him with a headlamp to the skull. Two pages later we’re in Nevada, 1976, en route to the Utah salt flats with a different sort of rider, a twenty-two-year-old artist called Reno (not her real name, but what her friends in New York City have nicknamed her because that’s where she’s from), intent on making art out of the tracks her motorcycle leaves in the ground.
What’s the connection? It turns out to be both thematic and personal. The Flamethrowers is about machines (motorcycles and guns, but also cameras) and the way they revolutionized the last century (its politics and violence, but also its art). And T. P. Valera is the father of Reno’s boyfriend, Sandro, as well as the founder of the company that manufactures the motorcycle she’s riding, a Moto Valera. In Telex from Cuba, Kushner took up a particular historical episode unwinding in a certain place and presented it from multiple angles. Here she’s more concerned with a set of ideas and how they move through time, and especially with where they end up. It’s a trickier task for the novelist: how to graft a cluster of themes onto a handful of characters in a few (in this case, far-flung) places, and how to set it off so it works as drama, not simply as a history lesson. Any writer who set herself this task would be in for a rough ride.
Kushner puts a lot of weight on T. P. Valera. He and his family embody history—especially the ways technology and art are entwined with capitalism. He’s first with the Arditi, then a member of a Futurist art scene; after the war he becomes a designer of motorcycles and ultimately an industrialist. He founds a firm that, as far as I could tell, has no real-life counterpart, but reads like a blend of Ducati, Ferrari, and Pirelli Tires. He has dealings with Mussolini, and helps the Italian government build national highways. He sets up rubber farms in Brazil and has a hand in the founding of Brasília, itself a kind of massive Futurist art project. He also fathers two sons: Roberto, who will run his company, and Sandro, who will move to New York to become an artist. He’s groomed them for these roles: “He trained Roberto in the details of profits and losses”; he exposed Sandro, at a young age, to labor strikes, “workers coming at them with clubs,” not the sort of thing that gives a boy dreams of becoming a CEO. The senior Valera has his reasons: “Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren’t suited to anything else. That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else.”
The story of the Valera family is told in discrete, occasional flashbacks—patches of what might have been an epic, if a novelist today could write an epic of capitalist triumph and keep a straight face. Most of The Flamethrowers is narrated by Reno and details her life in New York along with trips to the desert, where we first see her, and to Italy, for a reckoning with the Valera family. The passages about Sandro’s father, told in the third person, read as if they could be Reno’s imagining of him; they serve as an intellectual background to Kushner’s portrait of the artist as a young woman. “It was an irony but a fact,” Reno says, “that a person had to move to New York City first, to become an artist of the West.” Reno grew up working-class; her mother was a switchboard operator, and her father walked out when she was three. She was raised by her mother and her uncle Bobby, a dump-truck driver who “spent his final moments of life jerking his leg to depress the clutch while lying in a hospital, his body determined to operate his dump truck, clutching and shifting gears as he sped toward death on a hospital gurney.” (I spent the summer I was eighteen driving dump trucks, which, luckily for me, had automatic transmissions.) At night, Uncle Bobby “sat inexplicably”—perhaps also implausibly—“nude watching TV and made us operate the dial for him, so he wouldn’t have to get up.”
It was, in other words, a crummy childhood; Reno escapes first to art school at the University of Nevada, Reno, with a junior year abroad in Florence (not bad for a dump-truck driver’s niece, and convenient for the book’s passages in Italy), and then to New York. She gets a studio on Mulberry Street and a job in a film studio on the Bowery, where she also works as a China girl: the term for a model whose face is used as “a printing reference for Caucasian skin” in movie color corrections.