This bright, burning flame of a novel takes place in the art world of 1970s New York. Our guide to this scene of glittering parties and eccentric characters — such as the White Lady, who wears white and goes to a grocery store to buy ‘milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars of mayonnaise’ — is Reno, a young aspiring artist.
Alone and new to the city, Reno asks herself, ‘How do you find people in New York City?’ She relies on chance: ‘Chance shaped things in a way that words, desires, rationales could not. Chance came blowing in, like a gust of wind.’ She chances her way around New York, falling in with a crowd at a bar, tagging along to parties, going home with a man whose name she doesn’t want to know. She is a quiet observer, watching the characters of the art world, listening to them tell their stories and invent their fictions.
Rachel Kushner cleverly makes it apparent that Reno is in turn observed. She is pretty — ‘tall, lean’, with ‘dirty-blond’ hair — and attractive to Sandro, her older boyfriend, a successful artist who comes from a wealthy Italian industrialist family. Moreover, Reno gets a job as a ‘China girl’, posing next to a colour bar at the beginning of films to enable the lab technician to calibrate flesh tones. Intriguingly, it means that she is recorded on film, the image of her flesh is scrutinised by the technician, but when the film is played she becomes invisible: ‘My face strobed past too quickly, leaving only an afterimage’.
‘The allure was partly about speed’, explains Kushner, and Reno loves speed, as a China girl, or riding motorbikes.
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