Hannah Rosefield
On Your Bike
The Flamethrowers arrived in the UK trailing praise and controversy. Jonathan Franzen, not an easy man to please, had anointed Rachel Kushner ‘thrilling and prodigious’. James Wood’s 3,200-word review in the New Yorker was more enthusiastic still. Things soured when Adam Kirsch suggested that the novel’s ecstatic reception was in part due to the sex of its author. Kirsch had plenty of nice things to say about The Flamethrowers but he implied that reviewers, dazzled by the novelty of a woman writing about the ‘largest political issues’, had failed to notice its flaws. This did not go down well. Laura Miller declared the novel a ‘litmus test’ for identifying male critics unable to handle a woman writing about serious (read: non-domestic) subjects. Kirsch was not the only one she thought failed the test.
Reno, the narrator of most of The Flamethrowers, knows what it’s like to muscle her way into male territory. When Kushner introduces her, she’s 22 years old and on her way to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, to participate in the land speed records for 1976. Reno isn’t planning to become
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of the novelist Elspeth Barker, a valued contributor to Literary Review over the years. (1/2)
Jean Rhys 'had been channelling unhappiness since the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1927. The four novels she published before the war chart journeys that go from bad to worse for heroines who end up alone in dreary hotel rooms.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-went-down-well-with-vicars