In Rachel Kushner’s second novel “The Flamethrowers”, a woman comes off a motorbike at 90 kilometres per hour and is not killed. She does not break a single bone. She has also — as though by accident — set the record for the fastest woman on the planet.
Reno is the opposite of a tragic heroine; undamaged, not just by machinery, but by the machinery of fate. She is unburdened by the smallness of her life or the difficulties of her own psychology. Sex is not a problem, shame is an irrelevance. This last is in part due to her willingness to become the girl in the picture, to be relaxed in the face of her own fetishisation.
Reno sees no limitations, she is uninterested in her own pain and hugely, endlessly, interested in everything else.
To be a reader at the centre of this interest is to feel more alive with every sentence. Kushner’s prose in “The Flamethrowers” is all speed, energy and verve — you begin, almost, to want a little dullness. But there is no doubting that Kushner knows what she is doing with the slightly empty characterisation of Reno — a writer this brilliant and this self-aware does not leave an accidental blank.
Telex from Cuba, Kushner’s first novel, has now been released in the United Kingdom, and readers of “The Flamethrowers”, for whom Kushner became an instant necessity, can get a second fix. This book is political in its reach more so than in the texture of the prose.
It takes a relaxed, naturalistic look at the last days of the Americans in Oriente province in the 1950s, as the Castro brothers’ forces gather in the hills. Telex from Cuba is epic and enjoyable: the style is lush and precise; the parties and cookouts, the drinks and affairs are beautiful and poignant, full of the pleasures of wealth overshadowed by loss.
For American expatriates, Cuba is a ”loser’s paradise”; many of the adult characters are escaping difficulties and failures at home. They advertise for light-skinned servants (but not albinos — that would be too depressing) and play at being snobs, with golf courses, swimming pools and polo grounds, and all the preening coldness — much of it from women — that snobbery requires. There is also the brutality of the mine and of the sugar mill, the injustices suffered by the indentured workers and the atrocities committed on those workers by America’s ally, Batista.
“It was almost Christmas time,” one woman notices, “and there were human beings hanging in the trees beyond the security fence.”
Much of the story is told through the eyes of the children whose parents run the sugar fields of the United Fruit Company and the nickel mine in Oriente province. Dutiful, “square” KC Stites has, as a child, the petulance of privilege under threat.
“But they wouldn’t have wanted to come to our club,” he says of the various types excluded from their set. He sees everything, however, and weighs things constantly. His final judgment couldn’t be simpler: “We went down there and took.”
The children learn, with some difficulty, the distinctions between one class of people and another, not just between the black servant, the mulatto Batista and the white manager at the mine, but also between their own families, which are a mixture of middle class, almost high class and white trash. Their older siblings date Cubans and one even runs off to join the revolutionaries. The Americans’ hold on this crumbling world cannot survive the awareness of their own young.
The children are not believers, nor are they innocents, and the same passivity that niggles at the reader in “The Flamethrowers” is seen here, in the face of the injustice that plays so clearly in their favour. A young girl called Everly Lederer says of a fish paralysed by the tentacles of a portuguese man o’war that “it looked so relaxed. Sometimes you didn’t want to be able to move. You just wanted to be held.”
At the core of both books is a very modernist view of the self as something that is endlessly lost and recreated. This uncertainty is most acute among what used to be called “the oppressed”. Willy, a servant from Haiti, cannot meet his old master, because he is, literally, a different person since leaving him.
Rachel K, a zazou dancer in Havana, believes “that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely”.
There are other big ideas swinging through Telex from Cuba, about essence and artifice, about ignorance, innocence and participation, but these ideas, and the historical events that shape the narrative, rarely dominate in a novel that manages to be constantly interesting; busy with people’s lives and thoughts.
It is a tough book that is full of generosity for its flawed characters, and it is written like a love story. That love may be for Cuba itself, but there is a kind of nostalgia, too, for the narcissism of the Americans that Joan Didion might recognise. There is something unreachable and proud in the picture, say, of the fabulous Blythe Carrington, whose Cuban husband watches her, one night, from the garden. She only has to turn out the light, he thinks, to see him there outside the window. She stares right at him and he stares right back, and a long time passes before he realises that she is looking at her own reflection.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Anne Enright’s latest novel is The Forgotten Waltz (Vintage).
