Jay's BURN ALL THE LIARS Post - Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers - La Simulacra

   If someone asked me how I would classify Rachel Kushner’s novel The Flamethrowers, I just wouldn’t know what to say.  It’s not the kind of book I can easily group with other books on my shelves here in Mexicali.  I mean Rachel K is all over the place with this one.  From the beginning of The Flamethrowers, I can tell the author wants to explore the place and atmosphere of the art world in 1970s New York City: like Avant Garde, Andy Warhol, Punk Rock.   Who wouldn’t?  LET’S GO!  Maybe I can place Rachel K next to my Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground books. (I have plenty!) But in this novel, Rachel K also spends considerable time traversing motorcycles, love, betrayal, feminism, and Italian terrorists.  The novel is disjointed.  The author shifts back and forth between points of view, first- and third-person narration, arrival and departure of characters; so much so, I often lose my place.  She writes like the post-modern artists her characters aspire to be.  Maybe when I finish this piece, I’ll give Rachel K her own shelf.

Rachel K’s main character, Reno, is a fledgling artist from, you guessed it, Reno, Nevada, who makes the trip to New York City to jumpstart her career.   There is an instant mystery to this young woman, for we don’t ever know her real name.    Because Reno has just graduated from her art school, she must be like twenty-two years old;  she is riding her Italian motorcycle to enter a land-speed race at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah where she plans to transform photos of her motorcycle tracks into art pieces.  (Spoiler alert:  She doesn’t foresee the possibility that her best art will rise up from her motorcycle wreck.)    From there, it’s on to New York.  From readhing Rachel K’s bio, I know she was an art student in real life, and she liked to ride motorcycles.  From her photo on the book jacket, she appears to be a beautiful young woman, so when I read this novel, I envision the real Rachel K smack in the middle of every chapter.  But, if I told you this book was autobiographical, I would probably be WRONG. I mean Rachel K may be drawing on a few personal memories and experiences for inspiration, but I if this book was purely autobiographical,  I don’t think I would like it as much.  The real tension in the book comes from having to determine what could beTRUE and what is just STRANGE. Rachel  abruptly changes point-of-view and writing style.  Reno bounces back and forth between lovers, political movements,  and countries.  Reading this book for me was a drama.  I never knew WHERE it was going or WHY.  This style keeps me on EDGE.   This makes the novel FUN!

I read somewhere favorite author Jennifer Egan once say this:  “My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different…   I actually tried to break that rule later: if you make a rule then you should also break it!”   In reading Rachel K’s novel, I came to terms with a new concept called “simulacra.”  It’s often defined as a false reality.  It could be an artist’s attempt to mimic REAL LIFE.  Like those painters who painstakingly paint a photograph.  Or, maybe like my students who engage in online role-play video games where they discard their own identities for fantasy characters.   Some of them, they tell me, play for sixteen hours at a time.  They leave their real selves behind.  But, isn’t that what all authors try to do.  Don’t they try to transport us to a parallel universe? Yes, but the most interesting aspect of Rachel K’s writing is that her characters are all active participants in simulacra.  They are all LIARS.  They make up their lives as they go along.  You never know who or what to trust.  Neither does Reno.

Let me give you an example:  Reno develops a friendly relationship with a New York City waitress named Giddle.   This seems important to me, for Reno is pretty much a lone wolf.  Seeing how she relates, or not,  with her friends reveals a lot about her true self.   Upon her arrival to New York, she spends much of her free time with Giddle, but clearly Giddle isn’t who she appears to be.  She is not a waitress, she says, but she is an artist.  We have all heard this type of story before, but with Giddle, it’s different.  Giddle says she is not working as an aritst, she’s playing the role of one.  That’s her art.  But, she’s been doing it for three years now.  Rachel wonders for who and why.  When is Giddle going to complete her piece?  Along time ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed, where the author goes undercover to work as a waitress to expose exploitation and discrimination of minimum-wage women.  Ehrenreich was a serious journalist who wrote down her true feelings and observations every night after work.  Giddle just drinks and fucks.  Though the course of their friendship, Reno realizes everything that Giddle says just may be a lie.  In fact, all the time Giddle shares her crazy stories, she may be sleeping with Reno’s lover.    If Giddle is sleeping with her lover, why would Reno maintain the friendship?   She must believe she is like playing a fantastical role in her own life, just like Giddle is playing a waitress.

By the way, Reno’s first lover in the book is a much greater liar than Giddle.  His name is Ronnie.  He’s pathological.  He’s the Lebron James of bullshit. He winds up stories you can't believe, but you can't turn away from either.  When Reno met him in a bar, he was wearing a Mardsen Harley T-shirt, but he knew little about motorcycles. His stories  about doing  time in prison seemed to pull her in, but later she found out all his jail-time stories came from his brother. He just shared them in first-person.  This is WEIRD in an interesting way for the reader.  Reno must be attracted to people who lie.  It becomes a pattern in the novel.  Reno knows they are lying and the characters who lie to her know she knows it, but this the "simulacra.”  Maybe the people Rachel meets are boring, but she recognizes meaning in their stories.  (Spoiler Alert:  Later in the novel, Rachel recognizes her own self in a fantastical Ronnie story about his world-wide travel on a small boat and possible sexual abuse.  This is WEIRD and TELLING.  Ronnie's trip may explain a little about his depraved behavior, but it says nothing for the fact that he hadn't yet met Reno.)  At this point, I ask myself, is Reno YOUNG and IMPRESSIONABLE?  Or, is she DESPERATELY LONELY

I’m not writing a book report here – the novel is just too BIG for me – but that won’t stop me from sharing my favorite part.  It has to do with CHINA GIRLS.  Not Girls from China. Not Chinese Girls.  Not the David Bowie Song.  When Reno made it New York City, she found she had the necessary atributes to become a film model.  “Who know I’d be a model?  But here I am modeling flesh tones…”  In the 1990s film makers hired young women, often lab technicians, to pose in a few shots that would be positioned at the beginning a reel – to measure their skin tones against a range of color samples.  They were called CHINA GIRLS.   I imagine there  is a complex process for duplicating color on film.  If the colors of clothes or landscapes are slightly altered, this may be of little consequence, but any artificial change in flesh tones could become a great distraction and ruin a film.  The China Girl could be used as a colour control reference.  She’s hidden at the beginning of the film.  She's basically invisible:  An UNSEEN model.  The only ones who see her ar the photographers and filmmakers.  In the final print of her modelling session, Reno would see her crooked teeth, but no one cared.  She was anonymous.

It's clear to me that Reno is not so much LONELY, but she is ENCHANTED by the BIG LIE. She buys into the false narratives of her so-called friends because it brings her closer to them.  The China Girls look like models but they don’t do anything. Giddle is going nowhere.  Each time Reno falls in love, she is betrayed.  She wants something so bad, but she doesn’t know what it is.  I believe Rachel K suscribes to Jennifer Egan's first rule for literature: Break All the Rules.   She is not trying to entertain. Instead of giving us something we want, she strives to make us uncomfortable.  What is ENCHANTMENT really?   “Enchantment,” Reno says, “means to want something and also to know somewere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that your aren’t going to get it.”