“Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

I (unlike much of the NYRB cognoscenti, apparently) really enjoyed Creation Lake last fall and resolved to explore more of Kushner's work — a resolution which led me to The Flamethrowers, her debut in spirit if not in fact, a book which threw her into a bit of a national spotlight as an Important Vital Female Writer.

Perhaps with a decade of hindsight, it is easy to understand why this book — and Kushner's style — was so hotly discussed. This book has the whiff of a high-budget prestige post-Mad Men series: big ideas, a smorgasboard of perspectives (literal and figurative), set pieces galore, a period piece that feels very much in conversation with What Is Going On Today, writing that is interesting and dense. It is hard not to come away from The Flamethrowers with a strong conviction that Kushner is very smart and very interesting and has a lot to say.

And yet. Perhaps it is indicative more of the literary movement of the past decade more than of this novel, but: using 1970's New York as a backdrop for discussions of broader societal issues feels old hat and, moreover, boring. Skewering countercultural art scions as largely bourgeoisie sons of bourgeoisie parents is old hat and, moreover, boring. Listening to Harper's essays about the relationship between art and performance and reality, thinly rewritten to be monologues from thinly-written ^[1] characters is old hat and, moreover, boring.

This is a shame because when Kushner leaves the relative comfort of the framing device of urban-flight New York and explores more interesting points of view (post-war Italy; the Bonneville flats) the book comes alive. She is witty and idiosyncratic and — if not mean, cutting in a way that makes her writing feel so vivacious in a way that Cusk and others in her vaguely-modernist cohort feel lacking in my esteem. There are images of real beauty in The Flamethrowers; it is also very clearly a work from a writer who has not learned to carve herself lean, and I think that's where Creation Lake proves itself the stronger work.

★★★