“…clever people know that you don’t learn by inserting yourself. If you are inspired by the world, and open to it, it is sometimes essential to utilize your own innocence, your own lack of an ability to interpret or judge others, in order to read them properly.”

– Rachel Kushner, describing Reno, in “The Flamethrowers”

My narrator, who speaks in the first person, is not intent on thinking about her past. To relate to her, a reader doesn’t need to know much about her childhood beyond a few key details (she was a tomboy who rode motorcycles, is from a small Western town, is working class but educated). Early in the novel, the narrator recounts how she was hired to be a China girl. She got a job in a film lab on the Bowery, and the technicians needed photographs of a woman’s face in order to process film so that the flesh tones were consistent and looked appropriately like skin (white skin, that is—flesh calibrations in the movie industry have always been aimed at Caucasian skin). Around the time I started working on this novel, I had become interested in the China girl you see on old film leaders (up through the nineteen-eighties). She holds up a Kodak color bar, or a photograph of her is placed next to a Kodak color bar. I knew these women were mostly secretaries in the film labs, which seemed to me to be central to their allure. The idea that they are just random women asked to pose, and not professional models, makes them mysterious. They are “real” people who come to function as archetypes; they are anonymous-real. There is no way to find out who they are and no reason to, either. The idea of a girl posing on film seems to encapsulate something about how women are treated, and how they think of themselves: women are often judging themselves, and being judged, according to standards of beauty and femininity. Archetypes of what women look like are basically inescapable: women either conform to them, refuse to conform to them, or set them. They don’t ever escape completely from the realm of standards.

Reno begins the book moving east, racing a bike, trying to complete a project. Then she shifts and begins to slow down and watch, like a passive observer, or like a camera, witnessing conflicts where she only intermittently takes sides. How did you think about Reno’s agency as you wrote this?

It’s true that she’s much more strong and active in the long opening scene, when she goes to the salt flats alone. She knows the landscape and she knows motorcycles, so it’s a world where she’s comfortable. In the art scene in downtown New York, she’s an outsider, not yet an initiate. And, in my humble opinion, she’s also clever: clever people know that you don’t learn by inserting yourself. If you are inspired by the world, and open to it, it is sometimes essential to utilize your own innocence, your own lack of an ability to interpret or judge others, in order to read them properly.

In regard to agency, I was determined not to have the narrator ride off into the horizon in a blaze of triumph at the end. The plotline where the main character overcomes a weakness and acts with new empowerment is a form of narrative compression I usually find cheap and don’t much relate to. In any case, to have all the agency can be tragic. I love the end of the 1969 movie “Downhill Racer,” where Robert Redford gets the gold medal and yet winning seems like this empty question mark. I wanted my narrator to arrive at some kind of open moment, a blank, in whiteness—figuratively and actually—in snow, at the bottom of Mont Blanc, a setting that for me has a poetic resonance (Wordsworth, Shelley), and a personal resonance, too (an entire childhood spend skiing alone, dealing with cold, blizzards, high winds). I have learned a lot waiting for people who don’t show. It’s about what you do in that situation: I mean, what you do next.