The first thing I did when I finished reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers was to check out what James Wood had to say about it in last week’s New Yorker. I was very surprised by what I read; it seemed at times that Wood, in his praise and enthusiasm, was describing some other book, even though all the characters’ names and doings checked out. It seemed that, while Wood had read the book carefully, he had not heard its heartbeat. I thought that I had.

The proof of our difference lies in the single paragraph that Wood devotes to Ronnie Fontaine.

But perhaps his stories are his best works. We soon understand that nothing Ronnie says can be trusted. Yet he has all of Kushner’s uncanny novelistic confidence.

Yes, yes. But what about the narrator’s obsession? Isn’t it obvious that Reno (as the nameless narrator is nicknamed — by this very character) is locked into orbit around Ronnie? The last chapter preceding the novel’s triple-headed finale closes with a searing passage of anti-romantic romance.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained?  Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. … Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that —”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

Ronnie — maybe I’ll get used to that name, but it doesn’t fit the description that accompanies his first appearance in the novel, by which, Reno tells us, “I was struck”; it’s the novel’s only flaw — is the Lady Brett of The Flamethrowers. No matter how close he comes to Reno, he remains unattainable, a very good-looking trickster. He sleeps with Reno the night they meet, and then she doesn’t see him again until he turns up as her new boyfriend’s oldest New York friend. (The boyfriend is Sandro.) Ronnie eschews serious attachments, and carries himself like a demigod who swims above séquences et conséquences. Reno needs a serious attachment so badly that she tries to see her relationship with Sandro as one, even though she doesn’t really love him — as Ronnie says, Reno doesn’t know herself — and can’t stop from violating the fundamental rule of his artist’s life in New York, which is that his connection to a powerful Milanese industrial family be overlooked, as a kind of embarrassing celebrity. Reno’s foolishness here, which plays out like a very extensive fermata in the moment (to cue in a famous opera that comes to mind) between Elsa’s asking Lohengrin what his name is and the ensuing calamity, propels the action of the book, even though Reno presents herself as an ingenue conceptual artist who can’t see beyond her next project. She is too naive and callow, and too ambitious to stake a claim to fame in the Soho art scene (the novel is set in the mid-Seventies), to acknowledge her own ignorance and inexperience. I came to think that Sandro’s ferocious old mother was right to treat Reno rudely. She is simply not serious enough for her son. She’s just another vacant American.

Reno is not serious enough to understand the novel she’s in. But I should have thought that James Wood, serious enough for twenty, would have gotten it.

***

Nick Paumgartner writes about James Salter in the current issue of The New Yorker. I read the piece with interest, although I should not read anything written by Salter himself. His last book, a collection of short stories about rich New Yorkers and other top people whom I should shudder to know, put me off him entirely. I was prepared to make an exception for A Sport and a Pastime, and to give it a second read. Like everyone (it seems), I was knocked out by it the first time. But now I’m pretty sure that the shock was meretricious, as though you could improve pornography by making it Slow. Here is Paumgartner on the novel:

It’s an odd little book. A first-person narrator tells the story of an affair between a Yale dropout named Dean and an eighteen-year-old girl named Anne-Marie. They travel around provincial France in a convertible and make love in hotel rooms. There are astonishing evocations of France and explicit descriptions of anal sex. The narrator, a tentative, rueful photographer and friend of Dean’s, states on many occasions that he is imagining this affair — that he is making it all up [something that would come easily and untentatively to Rachel Kushner’s Ronnie Fontaine], which makes the novel something of a puzzle. Salter has said that he devised the narrative conceit out of necessity. “You could not tell Dean’s story, I don’t believe, in the first person without losing the reader’s sympathy, some essential sympathy,” he told me. “And in the third person it merely becomes an account. It dries up a little and becomes a dossier, a report on something, no matter what the language does to enrich it.” The inference: to tell the story of his own affair, with intimacy and allure, he had to make it not only someone else’s but someone else’s as imagined by someone else. The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.

(Typing out that final phrase, cumulus-grand but deadly, I feel that the wind has been kicked out of me. I live to say things like that.)

I remember “the astonishing evocations of France,” and how badly they made me want to see Sundays and Cybèle again, although it was unavailable at the time and nobody seemed to had heard of it, notwithstanding its Best Foreign Film Oscar win in 1962. Now I have a DVD of the film (Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray in the original), so I don’t need Salter.

“Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton,” Paumgartner writes,

that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader — envy of the life that the writer is living.

So, so wrong. The function of a writer is to enrich the reader’s actual life, whatever it might be. Envy, quite certainly, oughtn’t to come into it at all.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 10th, 2013 at 11:55 am.