Arriving in New York to pursue a creative career in the raucous 1970s art scene, Reno joins a group of dreamers and raconteurs before falling in love with the estranged son of an Italian motorcycle scion and succumbing to a radical social ...

Flamethrowers set the stage for a lot of what NUBClub has been: spirited disagreement. Essentially, the debate revolved around how you felt about the main character. Essentially, Kushner's novel looks at groups of people who are boldly and recklessly tear at the world around them, whether they be Italian leftist or New York artists. She's relentless in showing both their brilliance and destructiveness, and the novel expresses a velocity and power that keeps its momentum going. But the book does this through a kind of machoness that is embodied in all of the characters, notably the main lover Sandro. And that means that Reno, the protagonist, is at the receiving end of a lot of this masculine energy. This is where NUBClub disagreed. The people who liked the book thought Reno was an interesting character, a quiet artist drawn to the passionate and destructive, embodied in her love of motorcycles and racing. Detractors did not see that complexity and instead saw Reno as a cipher, a kind of punching bag the men of the novel could use to show how brilliant and mean they were. If you didn't find Reno an interesting character, the book just seemed really self-indulgent and pointless. So essentially, how we felt about Kushner's novel was a question of how we saw the main character. If you find Reno interesting, then the book takes you on a powerful tour of the intersection of art and destruction; if not, you just suffer through watching her get pushed around by arrogant men.