How outlandish is it to put a ’70s female character in a speed machine designed to go 500 miles an hour? “I based that scene on something that actually happened in 1965,” Ms. Kushner said. She went on to describe how the racer Craig Breedlove talked his wife, Lee, into taking a vehicle out on the salt flats to make the terrain unavailable to one of his competitors, who was hoping to ride that day. “Lee Breedlove went 308.506 miles per hour,” she said. “That made her the fastest woman in the world.”  It’s the same speed and the same record achieved by Ms. Kushner’s narrator, Reno. But Reno’s fascination with speed is part of an even more treacherous project: moving to New York City to become an artist at a time when the downtown scene is both male-dominated and plugged into a revolutionary impulse, with protest shading into violence.  Painting is dead, Minimalism is on the decline, and artists are ransacking their own bodies and lives for ideas and gestures that might make an impact. At 23, Reno, trying to capture “the experience of speed” by photographing her motorcycle’s tracks on the salt flats, becomes the girlfriend of an older Italian Minimalist, the scion of a tire and motorcycle company called Moto Valera. With him, she can attend chic events like a dinner party where she realizes that despite her hostess’s “feminist claims and enlightened look,” women are expected to help in the kitchen.  “Reno is a persuasive and moving narrator because Ms. Kushner allows her the vulnerability and fuzzy-mindedness of youth while rarely allowing her to think or say a commonplace thing,” Dwight Garner wrote in The Times, adding that the novelist’s prose “puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.”  Ms. Kushner, 44, has the relaxed intensity of a ballet dancer — an Eastside Los Angeles thrift-shop-clad Suzanne Farrell, if Ms. Farrell could handle the clutch on a Moto Guzzi. Over lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, across the street from the Petersen, she reflected on the situation of women in the art world of the 1970s.  While “The Flamethrowers” is peopled by an invented cast of artists, dealers and hangers-on, “I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainier and the incredible Lynda Benglis,” she said. “There were many women who were really driven and became successful, who were part of essential paradigm shifts, despite the fact that the art world was still dominated by men.”  Ms. Kushner was born in Eugene, Ore., to bohemian parents who were completing doctorates in biology and spent long hours in their labs. For a time the family, which included an older brother, lived in a Merry-Pranksters-like bus. “Our parents had Ph.D.’s, but we were dirty ragamuffin children,” she recalled. “I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.”  Her father, whose Jewish New York family was in the Communist Party, collected beatnik poetry and rode a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle. Her mother, who Ms. Kushner said once slept in Central Park for a summer, is from a family of St. Louis Unitarians who lived for a time in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Ms. Kushner’s grandfather worked for a nickel-mining company there, the inspiration for her first novel, “Telex From Cuba,” nominated for a National Book Award in 2008.  At 16, Ms. Kushner enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in political economy, raced on the ski team and managed to get good grades while feeling unprepared, she said, academically and socially. To help with the bills, she worked as a waitress in a blues bar where she was frequently the only white person.  “I’m drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don’t understand, where there are things you can’t access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school,” she said. After college, she worked for a concert promoter and took up motorcycle riding, living in a converted warehouse arrayed with vintage bikes. She depended on her roommates to help her maintain her own Moto Guzzi. “I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics,” she said.  These experiences helped her sketch the predicament Reno faces as she tries, and often fails, to decipher the social codes of 1970s SoHo, as well as the haute-bourgeois Northern Italy of her boyfriend’s family and the underground protest scene in Rome. “If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false,” Ms. Kushner said.  In 1997 she headed for New York City and Columbia University’s master of fine arts program, where at 29 she was older than most of her classmates. Jonathan Franzen was among her teachers. “I had the sense that she came from a place where nobody had told young women what they could and couldn’t be,” he said. “She was strikingly curious and well informed about the mechanics of the real world, and was neither afraid of intellectual content, nor in any way pretentious about it.”  Ms. Kushner shares a two-story American Craftsman house in the Angelino Heights section of Los Angeles with her husband, Jason Smith, who teaches philosophy in the graduate art program at Art Center College of Design, and their 5-year-old son, Remy. It is austerely decorated with vintage furniture and an eclectic mix of art, including a painting of a self-possessed woman in an evening dress by the Social Realist artist Isaac Soyer that once hung in her grandparents’ Long Island home.  Behind the back alley sits her ’64 Ford Galaxie 500, currently not running. As for motorcycles, she said, the only riding she does now is an occasional turn on her father’s Vincent. Mostly she gets around by car, in a Honda Accord.  She has chosen to be risky in another way. “All these things I was interested in — motorcycles, art, revolution and radical politics — don’t seem connected, yet I thought they could become so, in the space of a novel,” she said. Just as Reno could easily have wiped out on the Bonneville Flats, she added, “there had to be the real possibility that the novel could be a disaster.”
Like the heroine of her well-received new novel, âThe Flamethrowers,â Rachel Kushner is drawn to worlds she does not completely understand.