The Flamethrowers Author Rachel Kushner Willfully Stands Apart

The Cool in Her: The Flamethrowers Author Rachel Kushner Willfully Stands Apart

• By Boris Kachka - New York Magazine - December 11, 2013

Rachel Kushner, photographed by Graeme Mitchell

On the day of the National Book Awards, the novelist Rachel Kushner strolled through the Guggenheim’s retrospective on “post-conceptual” painter Christopher Wool, whose big exhibit had coincided tidily with an astronomical spike in the value of his work. In a few hours, Kushner would have her own shot at posterity, her second; The Flamethrowers, probably the most heatedly discussed book of the year, was a finalist, making Kushner the first writer ever nominated for her first two novels. But as we sauntered past Wool’s monumental silk-screened canvases of squiggles, splotches, and inscrutable directives, she didn’t seem particularly eager to talk about conventional notions of success, hers or Wool’s. “I don’t pay attention to auction prices,” she said. “Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don’t have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don’t need anything. I live in a different way.”

The Flamethrowers is set largely among the downtown artists of the seventies, and though Kushner is now based in L.A., New York’s art world—its rarefied air, jargon, and unresolved contradictions over money and legitimacy—is her home turf. Auburn-haired, 45, and vaguely resembling Patti Smith, Kushner thinks, talks, and even writes like a visual artist: performative statements of purpose in place of irony or self-deprecation; allusions and digressions that break up her narratives with patches of abstraction; accounts of raw experience—backwoods skiing, illegal motorcycle racing, preteen drug use—that betray a strikingly earnest romanticism about the radicals and misfits with whom she identifies.
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