The Flamethrowers

The Flamethrowers Plot Summary

Introduction

# The Flamethrowers: Speed, Art, and Revolution in a Fractured World The salt flats stretched endlessly white under the Nevada sun, a crystalline desert where speed became religion and machines became gods. Reno—named for the city of her birth—gripped the handlebars of her Moto Valera as wind gusts threatened to tear her from the machine. At 140 miles per hour, the ancient lake bed became a blur of reflected light, each grain of salt catching fire in the desert heat. She had come here to make art from velocity, to document the intersection of human ambition and mechanical perfection, but the wind hit her sideways like an invisible fist, sending her tumbling across the white expanse in a spectacular crash that should have ended everything. Instead, it was just the beginning. The Italian racing team that witnessed her accident saw something in this American girl who walked away from twisted metal and shattered dreams. They offered her the chance to drive their rocket-powered Spirit of Italy, making her the fastest woman in the world at over 300 miles per hour. But speed, she would learn, was just the gateway drug to a more dangerous addiction: the intoxicating world of the Valera family, Italian industrialists whose empire was built on tires, motorcycles, and secrets stretching back to fascist Italy. What began as an art project about velocity would become a journey into the heart of revolution, betrayal, and the violent collision between old money and new rage.

Chapter 1: Salt and Speed: A Record-Breaking Crash into Fame

The Bonneville Salt Flats shimmered like a mirage made solid, an endless expanse of crystallized dreams where men came to worship at the altar of pure velocity. Reno adjusted her helmet, feeling the weight of the borrowed Moto Valera beneath her, its engine purring with barely contained violence. She had grown up riding motorcycles with her cousins in the Nevada desert, learning to trust speed as a form of faith, but this was different. This was about making art from motion, drawing lines across the ancient lake bed with tire tracks instead of brushes. The wind was supposed to be calm at dawn, but nature had other plans. At 140 miles per hour, a gust caught her sideways, and suddenly she was airborne, tumbling across the salt in a symphony of grinding metal and shattering fiberglass. The beautiful teal fairing of the motorcycle exploded into fragments, scattered across the white desert like the remnants of a shattered dream. She rolled and skidded, her leather racing suit the only thing standing between her skin and the abrasive salt, until finally she came to rest, staring up at the vast Nevada sky. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the distant rumble of approaching vehicles. Race officials surrounded her, their faces grim with the expectation of tragedy, but she sat up, moved her fingers and toes, and realized with amazement that she was essentially unharmed. The Italian Valera racing team, who had been testing their own vehicles nearby, witnessed the crash and something about this American girl who walked away from what should have been death intrigued them. Days later, when Didi Bombonato arrived to attempt a new land speed record in the rocket-powered Spirit of Italy, the team made her an offer that would change everything. Didi was a professional racer with movie-star looks and the casual arrogance that came from regularly traveling faster than commercial aircraft. After he set his new record at 721 miles per hour, they wanted her to drive the Spirit of Italy herself, to set a women's record and keep the salt flats occupied so American teams couldn't challenge Didi's time before the season ended. At 308.506 miles per hour, she became the fastest woman in the world, her name entered in record books alongside legends. But as she climbed out of the rocket-powered cockpit, breathing the aftershave-scented air that Didi had left behind, she realized that speed was just the beginning. The Valera team invited her to Italy for a publicity tour, to race at Monza and travel across Europe as their unlikely American ambassador. She accepted without hesitation, not knowing that she was about to enter a world where the stakes were measured not in miles per hour, but in blood.

Chapter 2: Manhattan Circles: Art, Desire, and Hidden Connections

Back in New York, autumn painted the city in shades of possibility and danger. Reno worked at a film processing lab as a "China girl," her face appearing for a few frames between movie reels as a technical standard for color correction. She would smile into cameras, hold color charts, and disappear into the mechanical process of cinema, seen by thousands but known by none. It was honest work that paid the bills while she pursued her real passion: documenting the intersection of speed, landscape, and human ambition through her camera lens. Her boyfriend Sandro Valera was a successful minimalist sculptor, older and more established in the art world, with the quiet confidence that came from both talent and family money. He created spare aluminum and Plexiglas constructions that spoke in the austere language of high modernism, his work represented by increasingly prestigious galleries. Sandro had encouraged her artistic ambitions from the beginning, seeing in her Nevada background and motorcycle obsession a kind of authentic American experience that his own privileged Italian upbringing lacked. Their social circle revolved around downtown bars where artists, writers, and various characters gathered to drink and engage in conversations that felt world-changing at two in the morning. Ronnie Fontaine was Sandro's best friend, a photographer with a mysterious past and a talent for making rich people feel slightly insecure, which somehow made them eager to buy his work. He had grown up in institutions, worked on boats and in factories, and reinvented himself as a downtown art star with perfect instincts for the zeitgeist. There was a secret between Reno and Ronnie that neither acknowledged: a single night they had spent together before she met Sandro, an encounter that remained unspoken but charged the air whenever they were in the same room. That night had begun with Nina Simone's voice drifting from a bar, continued with stolen liquor and dancing in a hotel room at the Chelsea, and ended with his hand moving with deliberate certainty beneath his coat in a Chinese movie theater. By morning, he was gone, taking with him a brown hat she'd found, leaving only the memory of a night that felt like falling through space. The art world they inhabited was small and incestuous, full of overlapping relationships and unspoken histories. Gallery owners decided which artists would ascend and which would remain forever unknown, while everyone knew everyone, had slept with everyone, or was planning to. When Sandro finally agreed to help arrange her trip to Italy with the Valera racing team, Reno felt like all the pieces of her life were clicking into place. She would travel to the legendary Monza racetrack, document European motorsports, and create something that bridged her Nevada origins with her New York artistic ambitions. She had no way of knowing that the Valera name carried weight far beyond the racing world, or that returning to Italy would force Sandro to confront aspects of his family history he had spent decades trying to escape.

Chapter 3: Villa Valera: Entering an Empire Built on Blood and Tires

The Villa Valera perched on a promontory above Lake Como like a monument to old European money, its classical gardens and marble statuary speaking a language of privilege that Reno had never learned to read. Sandro's mother, Alba Valera, greeted her with the kind of smile that managed to be both polite and dismissive, immediately establishing that while Reno might be a guest, she would never be family. The villa itself was a maze of thirty rooms with walls six feet thick, built to keep intruders out and secrets in. Alba Valera was in her seventies but still beautiful in the way that expensive maintenance and good bones could preserve, though her cruelty had left its mark in the calculating coldness of her eyes. She spoke to Reno in a peculiar hybrid of English and German, claiming to forget that her guest understood Italian, though her memory seemed to fail only when she wanted to make cutting remarks. The old American novelist Chesil Jones, clearly Alba's lover despite the pretense of separate quarters, provided a running commentary of inappropriate stories and drunken lectures that made every meal an endurance test. Roberto Valera, Sandro's older brother, ran the family tire company with Germanic efficiency and barely concealed contempt for anyone he deemed beneath his notice. He lived in a glass and steel house down the road from the villa, rising at 4:30 AM to manage an industrial empire that employed thousands and generated billions in revenue. But workers were rejecting their own union representatives and striking anyway, creating a climate of tension that hung over the villa like smoke from the perpetually malfunctioning fireplace. The family's wealth was built on more than tires and motorcycles. T.P. Valera, Sandro's father, had been a Fascist Party member who survived the war and reinvented himself as a postwar industrial success. The family had profited from every major transformation of Italian society: fascism, war, reconstruction, and the economic miracle that put ordinary Italians behind the wheels of their own cars. Their rubber plantations in Brazil had used slave labor, their factories had produced weapons for Mussolini's wars, and their motorcycles had carried German troops across conquered territories. As Reno endured dinner after dinner of stale bread, cheap wine, and Alba's calculated insults, she began to understand that she was witnessing the end of something. The villa's grandeur felt brittle, maintained by servants who might secretly hate their employers and protected by armed guards who had recently been stationed at the gates. Outside the thick walls, Italy was changing in ways that would not be controlled by classical statuary and polite conversation. The only question was whether she would escape before the walls came down, or whether she was already too deep inside the family's cold empire to find her way out.

Chapter 4: The Factory Betrayal: When Love Collides with Legacy

The morning of the Valera company meeting dawned gray and ominous, with rain clouds pressing low over Lake Como like a lid on a boiling pot. Sandro kissed Reno goodbye in the villa's gravel driveway as Alba's Mercedes idled nearby, its diesel engine coughing like an old man with lung disease. The family was departing for Milan, where striking workers had barricaded the factory gates and the future of the Valera empire hung in the balance. Reno had chosen to stay behind rather than endure another day trapped in a car with Alba's cruelty and Roberto's condescension. She told herself she needed time alone to process what she had witnessed at the villa, but the truth was simpler: she was exhausted by the constant vigilance required to navigate a world where every gesture carried hidden meaning. As the Mercedes disappeared down the cypress-lined drive, she felt both relief and abandonment. The groundskeeper, Gianni, was working on his small Fiat when she decided to take a walk. He was handsome in a working-class way, about her age, and she had caught him watching her with an expression she couldn't quite read. He glanced up from the engine compartment and mentioned casually that the family had forgotten important papers for their meeting. He was driving to the factory to deliver them, and when she asked if she could come along to film the striking workers, he shrugged with the indifference of someone who had nothing to lose. The Valera factory was a city of concrete and smoke, with massive smokestacks belching yellow flames into the gray sky and workers in white coveralls moving like ants among towering stacks of black tires. The striking workers at the gates handed out flyers and spoke to Gianni by name—he had worked here before taking the groundskeeper job, she learned, part of the vast army of southern Italians who had migrated north to feed the industrial machine that made families like the Valeras rich. Then she saw them: two figures at the far end of an alley between warehouses, pressed against a wall in an embrace that needed no translation. Through the camera's viewfinder, Reno watched Sandro kiss Talia, his cousin who had arrived at the villa with her careless confidence and her talent for claiming whatever she wanted. She watched her boyfriend kiss another woman with the kind of desperate passion that made a mockery of every tender moment they had shared. When she lowered the camera and walked toward them, Sandro's face showed not guilt or remorse but the weary irritation of someone whose plans had been inconveniently disrupted. The worst part was how he held her hands to prevent her from striking Talia, protecting his cousin from his girlfriend's rage as if Reno were the problem that needed to be contained.

Chapter 5: Roman Streets Aflame: Revolution as the Ultimate Velocity

Rome in March 1977 was a city on the edge of revolution, its ancient stones echoing with the footsteps of young radicals who had decided that the old world needed to burn before a new one could be born. Reno found herself in a cramped apartment on the Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, surrounded by members of the Movement who had taken her in without question when Gianni arrived with his mysterious American refugee. They were not the romantic revolutionaries of her imagination but hard-eyed young people who wore their poverty like armor and spoke of violence with casual familiarity. The apartment was a headquarters of sorts, with graffiti covering the walls and a radio broadcasting coded messages about police movements and planned actions. Bene, a small blonde woman with reptilian eyes and freckles covering her body like constellations, seemed to be Gianni's contact in this underground world. She hosted a radio show called "Everyday Violence" that broadcast instructions for everything from making Molotov cocktails to setting fair prices for stolen goods. Lidia, with her big white teeth and infectious energy, explained that people were coming from all over Italy for a massive demonstration. The neighborhood itself was a monument to failed promises, bombed during World War II and rebuilt with utilitarian ugliness that spoke of bureaucratic indifference to human dignity. Television antennas jutted from every balcony like desperate attempts to connect with a world beyond the gray apartment blocks, while garbage hung from windows in plastic bags that swayed in the wind like urban prayer flags. The graffiti was stark messages of rage: "They throw us in jail and call it freedom" and "When shit becomes a commodity the poor will be born without asses." On the day of the march, the Piazza Esedra filled with a sea of bodies that stretched beyond the horizon of sight, banners rippling in the electric air like battle standards. There were contingents from every factory in northern Italy, including Valera workers who carried tire irons to support their white banner with red letters. Students with scarves covering their faces marched alongside kids from the Roman slums who had painted their cheeks like mimes and carried signs demanding "More work, less pay!" and "Down with the people, up with the bosses!"—their sarcasm a weapon sharper than any blade. When the march began moving through narrow streets lined with expensive boutiques, the breaking started almost immediately. Windows shattered, Molotov cocktails arced through the air, young women in stolen fur coats ran through the rain like debutantes at a very different kind of ball. Reno filmed it all through her camera, watching white balloons rise from the chaos like souls escaping purgatory while a sixteen-year-old girl with theatrical makeup sang with the voice of Callas amid the smoke and sirens. When the shooting started and the riot police charged with their shields and batons, she found herself running alongside Gianni through streets that had become a war zone, understanding finally that she had found a new kind of velocity—not the clean speed of the salt flats but the messy, dangerous acceleration of history itself.

Chapter 6: Blackout in New York: Finding Light in Urban Chaos

The lights went out across New York City just as summer heat pressed down on the streets like a suffocating blanket. Reno had returned from Italy carrying secrets and wounds that would never fully heal, finding refuge in the familiar chaos of Manhattan's art world. But when the power grid failed and darkness swallowed the city, something primal awakened in the streets that reminded her of the revolutionary fervor she had witnessed in Rome. In the sudden darkness that engulfed Manhattan, the normal rules of commerce and property dissolved, replaced by older laws of survival and opportunity. Looters emerged like nocturnal creatures, liberating goods from stores whose security systems had died with the electricity. Children with sledgehammers broke concrete for weapons, women dragged shopping carts full of merchandise through streets lit only by fires burning in overturned dumpsters. The city had become a temporary autonomous zone where anything was possible and nothing was guaranteed. She rode her motorcycle through the darkened streets, past crowds celebrating the collapse of order with the same joy she had seen on Roman faces when shop windows exploded in showers of glass. The blackout had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization to reveal something rawer underneath, a glimpse of what happened when the systems that controlled daily life suddenly stopped working and people were forced to choose between order and freedom. Ronnie Fontaine appeared in the chaos like a beautiful disruption, his broken tooth and dangerous smile cutting through the darkness. He had always collected images of random violence and cosmic accidents, understanding that meaning emerged from collision rather than intention. Now he moved through the blackout with his camera, documenting the temporary revolution that had erupted in the absence of electric light. When he looked at Reno, she saw recognition in his eyes—they had both traveled beyond the safe boundaries of artistic ambition into territories where art and politics merged into something more dangerous. The gallery openings continued after the power returned, but Reno saw them now with different eyes. The same faces appeared at every event, the same conversations about market value and critical reception, the same careful positioning for advantage in a game whose rules were written by money and maintained by exclusion. She had thought this world represented freedom, but it was just another form of imprisonment, more subtle but no less confining than the revolutionary cell she had escaped in Rome. As dawn broke over the city and electricity flickered back to life, Reno understood that she had witnessed something more than a power failure. She had seen a preview of revolution, American style—chaotic, opportunistic, and ultimately temporary. Standing on her fire escape as normal life resumed below, she realized that her journey from the salt flats to the Roman streets to this moment had been about learning to see in the dark, to navigate by internal compass when all external guides failed.

Chapter 7: The Weight of Motion: What Remains After the Dust Settles

The story ends not with resolution but with recognition—the understanding that velocity and stillness are not opposites but partners in the dance of becoming. Reno had chased speed across salt flats and through revolutionary streets, only to discover that the most profound movements happen in moments of apparent stillness, when the soul decides which direction to turn and commits to the consequences of that choice. The salt flats remained unchanged, that crystalline desert where dreamers still came to worship at the altar of pure velocity, but she had learned that the most important speed was not measured in miles per hour. The men who had shaped her journey—Sandro with his aristocratic detachment and hidden betrayals, Gianni with his revolutionary purpose and quiet strength, Ronnie with his performative authenticity and dangerous charm—had each offered her a different version of herself. But the woman who emerged from these encounters belonged fully to none of their worlds, carrying instead the hard-won knowledge that identity is not discovered but forged in the crucible of experience, betrayal, and choice. The Valera family's empire, built on fascist connections and postwar prosperity, could not survive the simple fact that their workers had decided to stop accepting exploitation as natural law. In the end, the true subject of her documentary was not the pursuit of land speed records or the mechanics of revolution, but the more elusive question of how a person learns to inhabit their own life with integrity. The fractured world she had navigated—from Italian villas to Roman streets to New York's underground—had taught her that authenticity is not a destination but a practice, requiring constant vigilance against the forces that would reduce human complexity to simple categories. At 308.506 miles per hour, she had become the fastest woman in the world, but the real record she broke was learning to move through time without knowing where the movement would lead, embracing the possibility of collision as a form of creation, understanding finally that sometimes the most radical act is simply refusing to go back to who you used to be.

Summary

Reno's journey from the Nevada salt flats to the burning streets of Rome revealed that speed was never really about motorcycles or land speed records but about the velocity of change itself—the way lives could be transformed in an instant, the way empires built over generations could crumble in a season, the way a young woman could discover that her true subject was not the intersection of art and machinery but the collision between old worlds and new possibilities. The Valera family's fortune, built on fascist connections and industrial exploitation, could not survive the simple fact that their workers had decided to stop accepting poverty as the price of other people's prosperity. The salt flats where her story began remained unchanged, that crystalline desert where dreamers still came to worship at the altar of pure velocity. But she had learned that the most important speed was not measured in miles per hour but in the rate at which understanding could dawn, betrayal could shatter illusions, and a person could discover they were capable of surviving the destruction of everything they thought they wanted. In the smoke and chaos of revolutionary Italy and the temporary darkness of New York's blackout, she had found a different kind of record to break—not the fastest woman in the world, but perhaps the first to understand that sometimes the most radical act is simply refusing to go back to who you used to be, carrying forward the weight of motion and the courage to keep moving toward an unknown horizon.

About Author

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Rachel Kushner

Kushner navigates the complexities of political and social landscapes through her incisive novels, which examine themes such as revolution, incarceration, and identity. By intertwining bold narratives with historical and political observations, her works challenge readers to consider intricate power dynamics and controversial topics. Her debut, "Telex from Cuba," delves into the Cuban Revolution, while "The Flamethrowers" explores the New York art scene of the 1970s. Meanwhile, "The Mars Room" paints a vivid picture of life within a women's prison, earning accolades such as the Prix Médicis étranger and a Booker Prize shortlist position.\n\nKushner's multifaceted literary approach is rooted in her unique educational background in political economy and creative writing, which she pursued at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, respectively. This foundation allows her to craft stories that not only entertain but also provoke thought and dialogue, as evidenced in her essay collection, "The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020." Readers benefit from her ability to weave complex narratives that blend different genres and explore challenging subjects, making her books both captivating and intellectually stimulating. This bio highlights how Kushner's distinctive voice continues to resonate globally, with her works translated into over 26 languages, further cementing her status as a significant contemporary author.

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