The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner
[Harvill Secker]
A bike crash, an almost-revolution, a New York of loquacious hustlers. Don’t let these blurb-friendly set-pieces distract you: this is essentially a well-handled coming-of-age story. Many of Kushner’s sentences are beautiful, but many are too close together to have any impact. This lull is, I suspect, part of what makes The Flamethrowers so absorbing. Kushner hypnotises her reader with her characters’ monologues. We hear them as captivating voices stretched taut over nothing. The novel is sumptuously upholstered at the level of character, setting and style – as any good novel should be. It reads seamlessly – as any good novel should.
Kushner is best when dinging little rabbit punches of observation at the reader: ‘Because of her looks, there would be no detours through vanity on her way to ruin’. While these moments are too softened by scene-setting to deliver much sting, taken in isolation they can be mimetically useful. The given example is Reno talking about a woman in a film, rather than someone she actually meets. Not all of this abstraction can be put down to youthful shyness: after all, the book opens with her breaking the women’s world land speed record. Her sentimental education errs more on the side of the sentimental than the properly, abrasively educational. These failures are Kushner’s. Politically, reader and narrator emerge unscathed: this is not G. with an American accent. However close Reno zooms in, the prose is too calm, her ego too abstracted, for her to be anything more than a passive observer. Not because she’s shy, but because it’s easier for everyone that way. For all her surface daring, Reno never answers her own imperative that art ‘involve risk, some genuine risk’. Nor does the novel. Reno’s capitulation in the last scene is the novel’s own capitulation. It could be the reader’s, too, if one is seduced by the superficial radicalism of its style, structure and movement. This is a good novel – perhaps exceptionally good. That is its biggest problem.
– Tim Smyth
Histoire de Melody Nelson
Darran Anderson
[Bloomsbury 33 1/3]
In this latest entry to Bloombury’s well-regarded series of books on a single album, Irish writer Darren Anderson turns a forensic eye to Serge Gainsbourg’s definining album Histoire De Melody Nelson, an ‘existential musical’ about an older man’s relationship with a nymphet straight out of Nabokov. The album bombed on its release but developed a considerable cult in its afterlife. Ideal fodder, then, for Bloomsbury’s series.
Anderson is as comfortable writing about twentieth-century literature and art as he is about music. Indeed, at the very heart of this book lies an attempt to position the album within various literary and artistic movements. This strategy is sometimes convincing. In its subversion of Yé Yé pop tropes, Melody Nelson certainly shares something of the ‘inner tension’ and contradictions of the best Pop art. But Anderson’s attempt to connect it to literary high modernism, particularly to Joyce’s Ulysses, is perhaps a bit of a stretch. Still, Gainsbourg’s narrative remains quite avowedly informed by Lolita, and Anderson is good on the overlap between the two works. He describes the album as an ‘elegaic tragedy’, a turn of phrase could just as well describe Gainsbourg’s life, which ended in alcoholism and illness and dissolution. ‘Fuck posterity,’ he once said of his legacy. With a knowing twist, Anderson ends his own fine work on this lastingly influential album with these very words.
– Darragh McCausland
Understanding a Photograph
John Berger
[Penguin Classics]
John Berger possesses a remarkable prose style from which we have very little to learn. Where there should be a colon, there’s a comma; where there should be a comma, there’s nothing at all. It is as if these should-be terrible sentences are trying keep up a pace, but they’re not. They are wilfully slow, long-exposed, still developing even after the full-stop. There is no system here. For all his evident learning, Berger writes like he has never read a sentence that was not his own.
In his editorial introduction to this collection, Geoff Dyer isolates something of Berger’s critical, rather than prosodic, self-sufficiency, noting that ‘the habits of the autodidact’ were ‘too ingrained’ for him to succumb to semiotics or discourse. The habits of the autodidact – that self-made (male) intellectual – are a mite overrated at this point, but this is a strong collection nonetheless. All the hits are here, including ‘Image of Imperialism’, ‘Paul Strand’ and ‘The Suit and the Photograph’, Berger’s magisterial essay on class hegenomy and August Sander’s ‘Three Young Farmers on Their Way to a Dance’ (1914). Here, he notes that by adopting the suit (‘the first ruling-class costume to idealize purely sedentary power’), the poor were condemned to be ‘always and recognizably second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive’. He speculates, though, that after hanging up their jackets and taking off their ties, the three young farmers might still have danced with a certain style. Perhaps Berger has a system of prose after all.
– Kevin Breathnach
