There were Mike Parr and Stelarc’s self-mutilations and, beyond the gallery, women like Jill Orr, burying her naked self in dirt, or Bonita Ely, mapping the degraded Murray River. There was nudity and provocation at Performance Space with Sydney Front or the punk shock Post Arrivalists. I saw plenty of tricksters and performers on exhilarating, endless nights in the city. I was not part of the New York scene in the 1970s, but a decade later in Sydney some similar ideas were being mobilised. And Kushner’s evocation of the heady experience of being on the threshold of your fantasy life hooked me too. And yet these events ‘sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.’ Reno is promptly hooked into an art scene she has longed to be part of. It is ‘just one night of drinking and chance’, she says. Her relationship with Valera will form a significant part of this coming of age story. After all, it is the night Reno sleeps with Ronnie and it is through him that she will meet Sandro Valera, heir to an Italian motorcycle fortune. In another fiction, this episode of drunkenly following strangers from bar to bar might be cast as fateful. That evening, narrated in a virtuosic passage early in the novel, establishes Reno as a species of ingénue possessed of a seemingly incompatible blend of vulnerability, passivity and chutzpah. They had slept together, back when she was fresh to New York and fell in in one night with some friends of his at a bar.

She is Reno because Ronnie named her this, after the Nevada town she had made a film about. On the wall is a list of titles for Ronnie’s autobiography: Partial View, Obstructed: A Memoir, I Lived (He Died) … Our narrator is not all that she seems, either – ‘Reno’ is not her real name. And Reno finds other signs of self-invention here. Even at home in his New York studio, he is still mythmaking – recasting his earlier fictions as a polite respect for privacy. Ronnie, like many characters in Kushner’s novel, never stops being an artist. She has come home with the artist Ronnie Fontaine after a dinner party, during which he told an epic tale. ‘Why do you invent … and tell lies?’ So asks Reno, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.

The flamethrowers book