The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner – andtheIToldYouSos Book Review

Repulsive, decadent, and entitled people populate these pages and you know what? I do not care! I loved it! I loved it for all of the things that it tries to be, all of the things that it mercilessly tears apart, and all of the things that it will not and cannot be. This is a lightning rod for artists, revolutionaries, trust-fund princes, and girls next door.

While this book takes place mostly in the 70s, I felt like I had been a part of the idealist goings on within. I thought I was tough. I thought I was creative. I thought I had ideas unlike any others. I thought I could not die; even if I went physically, I was going to leave behind something that mattered. Turns out the revolutionaries are terrible, the artists are terrible, and everyone else is terrible as well.

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. She said the Motherfuckers’ actions were interesting, in the context of the dreadful hippies of that era. The Motherfuckers were about anger and drugs and sex, and what a relief that was, Gloria said, compared to the love-everyone tyranny of the hippies.

Yikes! This Motherfuckers in question here are a take-back-the-streets gang, the artist is an older woman who stands behind a wall and dares people to reach through a partition and into her privates. Art!

I loved this book in all of its needy and visceral glory.

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.

I know that I am rambling on about unlikable things, but you do not need likable people to populate an incendiary novel. Despite the sticky mess of the people within, I enjoyed the time I spent with this novel. I felt home. I felt impassioned. I felt disgusted. I felt full of privilege. There were moments where I saw my own life played out before me:

Didi was short, and short men so seldom liked me. I’m relatively tall, which seemed to count against me, and I was once even told by a short man that I was retriggering his youthful nightmares of being ridiculed by tall girls in school, and I sensed he wanted me to apologize for this, for his adolescent trauma, and I didn’t, and moreover, I gave up on short men partially if not totally, sometimes even preemptively disliking them, though seldom admitting this to myself.

No offense to the less than Olympian men of the world, but as a tall woman this reverberated within the shell of my skull. I cannot tell you how many men shorter than me have treated me poorly, and have made a point of bringing up my height while attempting to take me down. What gives?

We dig here into the myth of the american dream, which itself fulls a more mythological role of dreams in general. At the end of the day, you must remember one thing:

The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.