![]() ![]() ![]() Good as it is, the plot is merely the delivery system for setting after setting so precisely informed and tone-perfect you won’t believe that Rachel Kushner ’01SOA (born in 1968) wasn’t there personally to taste and smell and see them.Įverything is more vivid than this morning’s breakfast. Not so much because of the plot, which traces the misadventures of a recent art-school grad from Reno who gets led by her heart into the treacheries of New York’s downtown art scene, and then into the treacheries of Italy’s old-money scene, and then into the lice-filled treacheries of Rome’s street-hardened Red Brigades scene. ![]() It’s a leap, but between here and there, if we’re patient, we find an astounding book. Scores of pages later, we discover that the Italian soldier is the founder of a contemporary character’s family fortune. The Flamethrowers begins with a soldier in the Italian motorcycle squadron of World War I braining a German soldier, which initially seems unconnected to the rest of the book, set in the 1970s. You could miss one that’s as gloriously good as this. ![]() If you were ever tempted to give a book only fifty or eighty pages to make its case before you move on to another, here’s proof of why you mustn’t. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |