She meets an older, more established artist, Sandro Valera, the heir of Moto Valera, an Italian tire and motorcycle company.

In 1975, a young art school graduate from Reno moves to New York City hoping to become a successful artist. It was the subject of a literary spat between the coasts summarized in The New Republic, with the Los Angeles Review of Books attacking the New York Review of Books's review as sexist and unfair. While writing the book, Kushner drew on personal experiences during and after college, as well as her interests in 'motorcycles, art, revolution and radical politics.' The book was selected as one of the '10 Best Books of 2013' by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. The Flamethrowers follows a female artist in the 1970s. The book was released on Apthrough Scribner.

But it’s nearly impossible not to follow her.The Flamethrowers is a 2013 novel by American author Rachel Kushner. From descriptions of clouds to 12-page soliloquies on sailing around the world, it’s often difficult to see where the author is going. Her constructions don't just pop off the page, they blister and seer into your brain. Her use of color is cinematic, and she frames the minutiae of everything from obscure art movements to motorcycle parts as if she had intimate knowledge of each subject. The Flamethrowers packs an impressive punch, and Kushner’s writing is fantastically vivid. Her beau, the black sheep of his family, resists Reno’s inclusion, but she nonetheless ventures with them to Italy-and there learns more about Sandro and revolution than she cares to know. While beginning an art project on the Salt Flats, Reno crashes a motorcycle and is subsequently adopted by the Valera racing team. The narrative veers and swerves between locations and times, creating a jerky sense of anxiety.

Kushner’s focus shifts between Reno’s artistic journey and the Valera family’s rise, rendering locales ranging from the Salt Flats of Utah to the Amazonian rain forest with sterling detail. Reno’s bridge between the two worlds is her boyfriend, Sandro Valera, an Italian artist living in New York, whose businessman father built a tire and motorcycle empire on the backs of Brazilian slave laborers.

The central character, a young artist nicknamed Reno, is almost secondary to the larger-than-life figures she encounters in the late 1970s, including artists and countercultural revolutionaries, who fall into one of two violent categories: the Weather Underground sort and the even more dedicated-to-destruction Italian kind. Youth, art and revolution all demand a body count, or so Rachel Kushner suggests in her bracing, sometimes brutal second novel.

The flamethrowers book review