And I waterd it in fears, / Night & morning with my tears: / And I sunned it with smiles, / And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night. / Till it bore an apple bright. / And my foe beheld it shine, / And he knew that it was mine.
—William Blake, “A Poison Tree”
The story of The Flamethrowers starts bluntly in an enactment, not at all distant, eerie, or oneiric. It does not evoke any blatant literary tradition that calls for nostalgia or melancholic contemplation. It thrusts the image into audiences and pushes them forward along with the collective wave.
Rachel Kushner, the author of the book, confidently points to the images that sparkle her writing. The image of the female protagonist comes from a 1970s Italy poster—Kushner encounters the image from an archival document—featuring “a woman with tape over her mouth...with a grave, almost murderous look, war paint on her cheeks, blonde braids framing her face, the braids a frolicsome countertone to her intensity.”1
This image is not realized through a plot where the woman becomes a rebel and unfortunately gets captured and imprisoned. Instead, the energy surging below the image fuses into a girl nicknamed Reno because of where she comes from, who acts on her instincts and adventures through the turmoils in the mid-70s Italy and New York City.