![]() ![]() Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner), is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. ![]() Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic. Often, this is because they have a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories and these stories-the paradox is important-seem fictively real, cunningly alive. (Twenty grams, twenty-five grams?) Some novelists, neither obviously traditional nor obviously experimental, neither flagrantly autobiographical nor airily fantastical, blast through such phantom barricades. And don’t bother with the newest “debate,” about the properly desirable amount of “reality” that American fiction should currently possess. It was never very edifying anyway, each camp busily caricaturing the other. Put aside, for the moment, the long postwar argument between the rival claims of realistic and anti-realistic fiction-the seasoned triumphs of the traditional American novel on one side, and the necessary innovations of postmodern fiction on the other. Illustration by Tyler Jacobson / Portrait Reference Beth Herzhaft Kushner takes on the world of seventies radicals in a book that, like its voluble characters, is in love with the artifice of storytelling. ![]()
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