The FLAMETHROWERS: R. Kushner, merely smolders

Rachel Kushner is an exceptionally gifted, literary award winning novelist.  She received the Guggenheim Fellowship Award '13 & previously been nominated for the Nat'l Book Award.  I've read several of her novels and anticipated a complex sequence of enigmatic events.  There are two main characters, both artists, whose lives merge in NYC '75, at an iconic period of revolution in the contemporary art world.  Reno, a young female heroine, is a free spirited, motorcycle racing, filmmaker who falls for Sandro, a much older, established artist of Italian aristocracy.  Kushner has many burning observations on both the precarious powers of love & the alchemy of art.  "The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect.  It's not admirable to want love, it just is."  Despite moving to NYC on her own to establish herself as an artist, Reno is feckless in relationships & maleable to a fault.  She is easily led by galvanizing men while acknowledging her actions are without resolution and self-destructive.  Sandro, the older, but no wiser, controlling lover, is so self-absorbed he becomes a caricature of the egomaniacal artist.  The droll observations on the art scene at the time are scornfully prescient.  "Only a killjoy would claim neon wasn't beautiful."  Despite her literary talents and humorous insights, I'm going to be a killjoy.  The FLAMETHROWERS sputters out.