Boris Kachka (Hothouse) profiles Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers, for New York magazine:
It’s tempting to ask just how transgressive a novel, especially a best-selling novel, can be—and whether taking a stand against mainstream values makes you subversive or just modern. In other words: Is Kushner the flamethrower for real?
The answer is, basically, yes, in both senses of the phrase: She knows what she writes about, and she’s dead serious about her ideals. There’s plenty of room in The Flamethrowers for the dark side of that idealism—murdered businessmen, casually discarded girlfriends, movements warped by violence. In many ways it’s the subject of the book. But if something ardent and glamorizing blazes through, like the flashy World War I brigade of the title, that’s because Kushner herself is a believer, a genuine and unself-conscious exponent of what she might call the radical gesture—even if those gestures are more common now among academics and art stars than any genuine underclass. In a forthcoming interview with Tin House, she calls her shimmering mosaic of a second novel a “paean, maybe, to things that have long interested me. Nothing is in the book that I had to learn about. Instead, it is filled with things I already knew … drawn from my taste, my life, my sensibility.”
The paperback edition of The Flamethrowers is out in February 2014.