Knowingly Navigating the Unknown - "The Flamethrowers"

LOS ANGELES — On a recent morning the novelist Rachel Kushner stood in the parking garage of the Petersen Automotive Museum, where the Green Monster, a lean, turbo-jet-powered vehicle used to set land speed records, was displayed in a roped-off corner. In her new, rapturously reviewed novel, “The Flamethrowers,” set in the 1970s, the narrator finds herself driving just such a vehicle on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where those records are set.

How outlandish is it to put a ’70s female character in a speed machine designed to go 500 miles an hour? “I based that scene on something that actually happened in 1965,” Ms. Kushner said. She went on to describe how the racer Craig Breedlove talked his wife, Lee, into taking a vehicle out on the salt flats to make the terrain unavailable to one of his competitors, who was hoping to ride that day. “Lee Breedlove went 308.506 miles per hour,” she said. “That made her the fastest woman in the world.”

It’s the same speed and the same record achieved by Ms. Kushner’s narrator, Reno. But Reno’s fascination with speed is part of an even more treacherous project: moving to New York City to become an artist at a time when the downtown scene is both male-dominated and plugged into a revolutionary impulse, with protest shading into violence.

Painting is dead, Minimalism is on the decline, and artists are ransacking their own bodies and lives for ideas and gestures that might make an impact. At 23, Reno, trying to capture “the experience of speed” by photographing her motorcycle’s tracks on the salt flats, becomes the girlfriend of an older Italian Minimalist, the scion of a tire and motorcycle company called Moto Valera. With him, she can attend chic events like a dinner party where she realizes that despite her hostess’s “feminist claims and enlightened look,” women are expected to help in the kitchen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/books/rachel-kushner-author-of-the-flamethrowers.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130507