The Flamethrowers

"Yes, it’s set in 1970s New York: a period that I, like so many people, am quite drawn to. The idea of New York, and lower Manhattan in particular, as somewhere lawless and even revolutionary and creatively radical is so appealing and so alien to us now. Now of course, you get out of the subway at Prince street and on one corner there’s Dean and DeLuca—a very fancy food store—and on the other corner there’s Prada. But in the 1970s that was all artists’ lofts. The Judd Foundation is still there: Donald Judd’s home preserved. It’s thrilling to be there and remember that this was how it was, although I think it’s too easy—and creatively stymieing (and just uncool!)—to overly romanticise that time. Some of The Flamethrowers takes place in revolutionary Italy, but much of it is set in the art world of the 1970s. The book is mordant , that’s the only word, in terms of sexism and gender. Kushner has this great line about a character who’s an older guy, something like “he had that affliction common in all men over the age of sixty, which is the inability to stop talking” in a dinner party scene where he just bloviates and bloviates. “New York is so known, has such a corpus of consensus reality surrounding it, that there are limits to how far you can fictionalise it” I always find descriptions of art in novels incredibly exciting because, within the paradigm of modern art, if you’ve written a work of art into a novel, that makes you an artist; there’s this agreement that to be an artist is to have the idea—you don’t necessarily need to execute it. If you’re Andy Warhol, you can get other people to do your silk-screen prints, or if you’re Damien Hirst it’s other people who make your spot paintings. And so on. It was also exciting to encounter artists in the book and wonder how much of them was drawn from real artists. I mentioned Donald Judd earlier: one of the main characters in The Flamethrowers —the romantic interest of the protagonist—makes brushed, stainless steel boxes that are very Judd-like. It feels so delightfully audacious on Kushner’s part, to take someone as monumental, in both senses—reputationally, aesthetically—as Donald Judd and rewrite him. It’s the same kind of audacity as playing with New York and making it your own as a writer, taking something monumental and shaping it to your own characters. In The Flamethrowers there is a passive quality to the main character, Reno, at least when she’s in New York. (She competes in a motorcycle race on the Utah salt flats, which is by no means a thing you could describe as passive.) But there’s this sense of her as a young woman hanging out with these artists who are much older and who are fluent socially as well as artistically: the way that the creative world overlaps the social world and how she doesn’t speak this language. They’re all full of self-confidence, or at least seem to be. There’s a sense in the novel of the way that we make ourselves through other people, as well as through the city. We make ourselves up, and that’s definitely something that Kate is doing in Neon in Daylight —trying on different personae for herself, through different people she meets. I think New York, being a hyper-conscious place, is somewhere where that process is even more conspicuous. You’re meant to be—I’m going to use a word my brilliant teenage mentee uses a lot—”extra”. It’s encouraged to be bigger and “better” and brighter and more dynamic and all the rest. It’s dissimilar to embarrassable London in that way—in London, that sort of egregiousness is discouraged. Yes, there can be a really overstated quality to New York. Overstated, literally, in the sense that we keep talking about it in terms of its endless fictive iterations! But also in terms of the audacity of this city, and the way it compels people to be audacious themselves. There’s a boldness. People ask each other out on the street! The first time I visited New York some guy on the subway yelled “lookin’ sharp, modernist!” to my boyfriend and I don’t think either of us got over it for weeks. I was just refamiliarising myself with Elizabeth Hardwick. There’s this line in Sleepless Nights when the narrator Elizabeth, who both is and is not Elizabeth Hardwick—she was ahead of her time in terms of autofiction—says “it certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey, but after all, ‘I’ am a woman”. It conveys this sense that a drama of self is, or has been, denied to women. Years ago, I interviewed Rivka Galchen, whose fantastic first novel has a male narrator. I was so impressed by the way she spoke—it was almost guileless—when she said “all the books I had read growing up had male narrators, so it barely occurred to me to write a female narrator”. We make ourselves from fiction, partly. It was natural to her that she had a male narrator. I was amazed by that review of my book. To be mentioned alongside those female, central, slightly passive narrators of Joan Didion and Elizabeth Hardwick and Renata Adler, was obviously astonishingly flattering. It was just overwhelming to me to be put in that company. But to the question of why these characters recur. First, as I said, I think it’s an almost formal function that the narrator be slightly passive, because then we as the reader can see more. But I also think there could be a reductive interpretation of feminism here, which is that to be a good feminist woman is to have strong opinions and act on them. In one sense, fine, that sounds great, I’m all for that in life on and off the page. But women are also human beings and this state of uncertainty is inherently human. My experience of my twenties was, in one word, confusion. It was a state of not quite knowing what I wanted, but knowing that I wanted it very badly. I think that’s where the most interesting fiction comes from, from central characters who aren’t quite sure. It seems like a more fertile territory than someone on a very specific, narrow mission."