![]() ![]() When the ‘coming-of-age’ moment finally occurs, it feels predictable - a let-down in such a meaty, ambitious novel. Reno, for all her love of speed, passively drifts to her fate, and you long for her to take control, stand up for herself, and answer back. Kushner drops menacing hints of what is to come, creating a tension which compels the reader to turn the pages, but which also leads to frustration with the narrator. ![]() The novel, however, is written in the past tense, and while the prose is taut enough to prevent it from losing immediacy, the tense sharpens Reno’s naivete with the sense that her innocence will be lost. As Reno rides the motorbike across the salt flats, she goes so fast that she ‘was in an acute case of the present tense’. The sonic rip of a jet is ‘like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete’. It is a stunning opening and Kushner’s prose dazzles with invention. She also says she wanted to distract readers with side stories whenever the narrator was about to give important pieces of information. Because, as Kushner says, the narrator is long winded, the other storytellers within the narrative breakup the narration. Her artistic ambition is to capture the essence of speed and the novel opens with her doing land speed trials, in order to document her tyre marks on the salt flats. The Flamethrowers is a first person narrative, however. ‘The allure was partly about speed’, explains Kushner, and Reno loves speed, as a China girl, or riding motorbikes. ![]()
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