July 15, 2013

As advertised, we’ve got multiple voices going on. So far in Part One, there are three:  a young narrator from the sugarcane family (the Stites), an exotic dancer named Rachel K, and a tomboy daughter of the nickel mine family (the Lederers). The only writing in third person is the Rachel K part.  The Stites narrative is mature and eloquent, and the Lederer narrative is puerile.

Amidst the Americanos at work in their bubble communities in segregated areas of late 50s, early 1960s Cuba, the reek of  colonialism and privilege is strong in the air. The capitalist families have a pecking order of maids and chauffeurs. The children have typical bourgeois expectations of security and material things. Except for one of the Stites’ sons, who has gone to the other side. Out in the fields, the hard work of cutting cane is handled by Jamaicans, who along with boatloads of imported Haitians, do the dirty work.

Meanwhile, revolution is advancing in the hills of Cuba. Guerrilla fighters are burning the cane fields and raising hell with capitalism. The imported Americano families are reluctantly freaking out, and the country’s military generals are in denial. The very real Raúl and Fidel Castro are around, as are President Prio and the returning scoundrel Fulgencio Batista, plus cameo mentions of historical American figures like Henry Cabot Lodge.

Kushner, part Cuban-American, built this book on her maternal family’s history plus lots of research and her own vivid imagination as a novelist. She is painting the picture for us in bits and pieces, weaving in facts and keeping up dramatic narratives. So far, her imagery is not as luxuriant as it is in Flame Throwers. But in this novel, she’s a much more interesting storyteller. Parts of the narrative jump in time and between characters, but overall the story pushes forward in a fluid and logical direction. The impacts are less strident, subtler than in Flame Throwers.

Readers are getting a central image from the very start, based on color. The green fields of Cuba are quickly turning red.

July 24, 2013

The cast builds as the eponymous Havana character, dancer-courtesan Rachel K, finds a man of interest, a French political fink. Meanwhile, back on the other end of Cuba, around Nicaro and Preston, more American families and their children are coming into the corporate jungle. The air is rust-colored and foul with the dust of nickel ore. The Allains are countrified and Joad-like, sticking to themselves on a self-sufficient lot next to the factory. The noveaux riche-minded Carringtons and the structured, upper management type Lederers try to live like they are back in the U.S. but they aren’t.

Part One leaves us with the ugly image of a monkey raging inside its cage, in contrast to the one the Lederer girl fabricated as her pet in Cuba and bragged about to her stateside friends.

Part Two opens with a sensational Kushner chapter depicting a dinner party for the managers and the ambassador, held at a dilapidated lodge along a humid river. The American couples drink heavily, especially Mrs Carrington who is an accident waiting to happen. Suffering in the heat, trying to make a social scene out of a rustic get-together, the only ones to keep their cool are Mrs. Mackey and perhaps the ambassador himself, who couldn’t care less that the food is bad or the lodge is a dump. The corporate wives put on quite a show and dominate the extended scene the author has put together for us. (She will do a similar long dinner party scene in The Flame Throwers, see my review). Once again Kushner presents us with an indelible image:

“The Cuban women draped their furs down around their lower backs. Perspiration beaded on their upper lips, caking their makeup and giving their décolleté a particular, reflectant glow. They looked to Tip Carrington as delicious as bowls of ice cream beginning to melt. Something you better lap up quickly, before it puddles.”

Local violence as represented by a cockfight is simmering in the realities of culture warfare. The new character Willy, a local Haitian overachiever, seems the only one with his act together. In the club where she dances, Rachel K is waist-deep in the insurgency, and as Part Two closes, her friend La Maziere predicts a possible violent end to her life.

July 31-Aug 1, 2013

Seeing Hemingway in the novel’s cast of characters, downing daiquiris at La Floridita bar, wasn’t a surprise.  He of course was The celebrity resident in Cuba during the Batista/Castro transition (not long before his departure and eventual suicide in Idaho). The portrayal of the old guy produces mixed reactions. Is the dialog rooted in any sort of hearsay or is it completely made up? Are we to assume that Papa is brainless at this point, jabbering about la pachanga and asking men to dance? Is that an insult, that last one? Or a commentary on how Papa suspects Cubans and their visiting elite are getting soft? It happens twice, from two narrative viewpoints. I’m not convinced Kushner made a great value add to the story.  The depiction of E.H. can be viewed as colorful and comic, or emblematic of the country’s divided sense of values, or as a mini-slam of his writing (“lots of humping and I’s”) – a gratuitous swipe at his legend. Maybe it’s something even deeper in Kushner’s layered scheme, like many things in this book. Take your pick.

Risk-taking is a trait of the novelist, and we get another injection of celebrity-related history with the appearance of Desi Arnaz’ niece, who is a robust young teenage girl who puts the hormone hustle on the Stites boy. He is overpowered by her standing there, swimsuit at her ankles, and can’t close the deal. Gratuitous maybe, but another memorably written vignette in the large canvas of Part 3, which includes entertaining and scandal-ridden events, as well as politically earth-shaking ones. Who ever said the middle parts of a book have to be dull? Kushner is on her game on every single page.

Now Fidel’s rebels are coming out big time, trick or treat. The guerrillas send rats into the cane field with their tails tied with kerosene-soaked torches. Planes drop ping pong ball bombs loaded with phosphor. Other rebels appear in Nipe Bay with their slung carbines to greet the corporate Americans and take hostages. At the rebel camp in the mountains, we follow La Maziere who gets a cringe-worthy nighttime napsack visit by a most unexpected guest (which made me think of Roberto Jordan and Maria, wishing for that old Hemingway romantic innocence in portraying warfare camps). The older Stites boy, Del,  is now a leftist Comandante filled with tactical ideas, and is eager to show his own family who’s boss. An interesting aspect Kushner gives us (obviously she did a lot of research) is how revolutionaries handle such a personal situation, how they can cleverly divert attention from the obvious expectation and get their point across in another, unexpected way.

Cuba’s Rural Guard appears to be impotent against the revolution, sort of unexpectedly stunned like young KC Stites with the naked Arnaz girl.  Denial persists among the Americans, who continue to party and call the revolutionary activities a passing thing.  But as the terrorism escalates, and Batista is duped into bombing Nicaro, the Americans’ fears are growing. We know the inevitable attempt to flee is coming.

At this point in the book Kushner’s multiple narrative POVs are merging, overlapping, and effectively harmonizing. It’s a beautiful exhibit of writing skill that extends until the end.

 

Posts now re-sorted into chronological order:

April-29-2013

When you get terrific riffs of prose like this from Reno the girl biker narrator…

“At a Mexican restaurant across the road from the motel, I ordered fish, which came whole. I picked around, not sure of the appropriate method, and finally decided to cut off the head. It sat on my plate like a shorn airplane fuselage. In its cavern, instead of menthol-smelling pilots, the dark muck of its former fish mind…”

…and more stuff like…

“ALL VEHICLES WITH LIVESTOCK MUST BE WEIGHED. I passed the weigh station, breezed through third gear and into the midrange of fourth, hitting seventy miles an hour. I could see the jagged peaks of tall mountains, stale summer snow filtered by desert haze to the brownish tone of pantyhose. I was going eighty…”

…you have to realize you’re in the midst of something special.  It’s a novel to bring you out of the fiction reader’s doldrums.  So far, Rachel Kushner’s book is off the charts for being, well, damn good.

Okay. There will be updates to this as I slowly journey through the novel.  As background, I steered clear of  her “Telex from Cuba” when it came out, because of reviews saying it was narrated in several voices, a style some of us don’t prefer.  Now, it’s likely I’ll  go back and read it. Something as powerfully written as “The Flame Throwers” will do an author the ultimate favor: it will fire up readers to buy everything else they have on the market.

May-6-2013

This is a terrific book – I don’t mean otherwise, but the virtuoso performance of the early chapters makes me ask: is a pace like that sustainable? I’ll get to that.

But on a darker note, in relation to thousands of unknown writers far from Kushner’s league who struggle and try desperately to win an agent query (and are limited often to submittal only of chapter 1 or the first several pages ), do these writers have a tendency to try and top-load their first chapter?  Just to try and win attention? Do they leave any mojo for chapter 2 or 10 or 22? Is it no longer sufficient to have a hook and an engaging voice? Does it mean now we also need exquisite writing, top-drawer imagery, a skillfully condensed presentation of the book’s synopsis, and some brand new stunning take on the world, all packed in the very beginning?  Is the result a more literate package or something trending toward gimmickry? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Moving along, I have no concerns about Flame Throwers losing momentum.  The high quality is sustained, one-third through the book where my marker presently sits.  I’m reading a masterful account of a young person’s immersion into a big city’s way of doing things, how people interact as strangers hoping to become friends.  A world where mannerisms mean nothing, only art and substance in this crowd. Some time jogs back to the Red Guard are interspersed, making me glad I read other reviews and expect it. The reader interest factor is much more more ablaze (like the cover’s colors) when we’re right there with Reno as she makes her way in the city scene, from film leader China Girl to…who knows. There’s more of Giddle the pedantic Aunt-type waitress than I want, and if Giddle’s over-grilled,  it may be a thematic device indicating Giddle’s cynicism is something drummed into us and easily embraced yet eventually something to be avoided. Meanwhile, Reno is sandwiched with two male friends of varying radicalism, not that this concerns her too much.  Danger doesn’t exist.  Loneliness exists. She’s young and fearless and willing, whether getting a female-version hand job in the movie theater, or riding her Valera bike into speeds of even higher abandon. It’s all very compelling stuff.

May-16-2013

In an online interview Kushner refers to herself as a “fabulist.” That’s becoming more evident in the middle sections. We get to read the woman-struck-by-meteorite at the kitchen table digression, for one.

Earlier there is an inventive depiction of Valera’s erstwhile friend Lonzi in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The imagery is cinematic, rich with connotations:

“They sat in wicker chairs, he and the men in linen, the woven caning of their chairbacks blooming up behind them like gigantic doodled wings. Nearby, something called an umbrella bird crouched inside an enormous cage, a shiny black thing that kept fanning itself out, menacing and ugly…”

At the same time, Kushner can also put out a striking image of historical verisimilitude:

“Mussolini was hung from the girders of an Esso station in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. He was next to his lover and a small coterie, all hung upside down …like Parma hams.”

The dinner scene at the Kastles plays relentlessly ahead like a long abstract anthem. We’re brought into it, there at the varnished picnic table raised like some sort of holy pyramid object through the elevator shaft. It seems every little thing has its micro-story at this point. We can empathize with Stanley’s saturation with words as he weeps at the table. The scene relating an audio tape about a couple with an amputee sexual hangup goes on too long, but otherwise the reading locks us in.

One day I’ll return and read parts again. The feeling is much like the one I felt when reading Franzen’s “The Corrections” for the first time.  There are so many good passages of writing to explore and analyze. I had my own image of Amy Hungerford coming to the Kastles’ party and illuminating us with color commentary.

I look forward to completing the book (no, I  do and I don’t) and will report more next time.

May-22-2013

Found a couple of typo’s, kind of surprising in a book of this marketing scale. My mind drifts from the page and I wonder about the smaller font’s effect. I sort of slog and skip through the street radicals section. Along the way my sleepy narrowing eyes widen when I come across one of Kushner’s dandy simile’s. Some comparisons (such as the hair curlers image: “like a tarp over a log pile…the hollow spaces for hope”) remind me of Raymond Chandler’s: original, robust, and well-placed. Meanwhile only Ronnie seems to be dynamic on the page at this point in the novel. The guy purportedly enamored with her, Sancho or Cilantro or whatever his name is, needs to step up to the plate and show us something.  Is this a book with vacuous males? I still wonder about Reno’s deal, too. Who is she?

May-25-2013

Chapter 14 is lengthy and brilliant: all the rich details and imagery and interactions on the Valera family estate in Italy.  Eyes locked on the pages again, not drifting. The matriarch is perfectly portrayed. I dig the old novelist. You can sense something amiss with Talia. Roberto is more real than his brother.

May-29-2013

Cilantro or Sontoro or Sominex, or whatever his name is, got caught with his pants down, as expected.  This gives Reno more impetus to be a grrr-irl and get back to bike riding.

But then Reno is in Rome with a lawn jockey. Dimi has been kidnapped and things are getting dicy and insecure for all. I still wonder what Reno’s  deal is, i.e. what the hell does she really want?

May-31-2013

The end sections are well constructed, story-efficient and in more places than one lyrically sublime. I won’t talk about them beyond that. So this is the last post.

Earlier in chapter 16, maybe it’s the obligatory action climax section. The Red Guard apartment scenes and the dramatic street riot scenes have a reporting sound. There are a few scattered highlights. One is Kushner’s vivid description of the young singer (she’s represented by the girl photo’d on the cover) standing to project her “Callas-like” voice in the midst of chaos.

Things get a bit romance-novelish and breathless (and again towards book’s end) when Reno encounters Gianni again. Then we find out Gianni is banging one of the other girls. Reno can’t hold a guy, it seems, or maybe she’s mistakenly attracted to too many philadering types. Who knows about Italian men – or any damn man – anyway, the substrata message seems to say. Reno has certainly played both sides of the fence and put herself in the midst of the rich bourgeois and the threadbare proletariat, gallery power-brokers and criminal desperados. If nothing else, she has more source material for her art.

Story delivery is story delivery. The main attraction to me for this book is that it’s a terrific display of creative American writing. Style and intelligence behind the prose, a writer coming into their own. If the agents and the market weren’t driven so much by storyline and profit, Rachel Kushner could be our 21st century Proust.  Or maybe our James Joyce.  She’s that good.