The Flamethrowers

Plot

In 1975 a young art school graduate from Reno moves to New York City hoping to become a successful artist. She meets an older, more established artist, Sandro Valera, the heir of Moto Valera, an Italian tire and motorcycle company. He and his friends nickname her Reno. In 1976, with the reluctant approval of Sandro, she takes one of the Moto Valera prototype motorcycles to the Bonneville Salt Flats where she intends to race and then photograph her tracks as part of an art project. Reno crashes the bike but is adopted by the Moto Valera crew who help her set a record to become the woman with the fastest racing record in the world.

The following year the Valera crew ask Reno to join them on a promotional tour in Italy. Sandro reluctantly decides to accompany Reno and the two spend two weeks with Sandro's family in their villa in Lake Como before the promotional tour is due to begin. However plans for the tour are put on hold when the star of the promotional tour, a professional racer, is kidnapped. Reno also finds Sandro kissing his cousin, Talia, and runs away to Rome with the Valera family mechanic, Gianni, who introduces her to a group of young radicals. Reno is swept up in part of the Movement of 1977 and participates in riots. She later helps Gianni illegally cross the border into France.

Back in New York Reno moves out of Sandro's apartment and concentrates on her art. She learns that Sandro's older brother has been kidnapped by revolutionaries and tries to contact him but realizes he is already seeing someone new. After his brother's murder Sandro finally returns to Italy where he will succeed his brother as the head of the Valera empire.

Reception

Critical reception for The Flamethrowers has been predominantly positive. The New Yorker's James Wood praised the book as "scintillatingly alive" and commented that it "[succeeded] because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive." The Guardian commented upon the book and its polarized reviews, remarking that while some reviewers such as Wood and novelist Jonathan Franzen have been vocal in their praise other reviewers such as Adam Kirsch commented that the book was "macho", which explained "why it has been received so enthusiastically by the critics". However Kirsch's overall review also contained praise and he wrote that Kushner had "a real gift for grasping the prose-poetry of ideologies". It was listed as one of the top ten books of 2013 by the New York Times.

The New York Review of Books wrote a predominantly negative review where they criticized elements of it as unconvincing and remarked that it was "tiresome, histrionic, hysterically overwritten" and was "desperate to show how brilliant it is". The review provoked a response from the Huffington Post's Nicholas Miriello, who published it through the Los Angeles Review of Books. Miriello remarked that Seidel's review was more interested in Seidel than the book itself and that it was "gallingly condescending" and "often inadequate". The New Republic in turn commented upon Miriello's response, suggesting that Seidel's opinions might have been more based upon differences in cultures between New York and the coast.

The Flamethrowers was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award.

Film adaptation

A 2014 article by The Guardian reported that Jane Campion was on the verge of closing a deal with producer Scott Rudin to shoot an adaptation of The Flamethrowers.