In fact he was good." When she finds herself "alone again, like when I first arrived in New York", her insights are meagre: "It was a different alone," she thinks. Returning to the old wan mode of observation, Reno thinks, "Dogg wasn't bad. At an art show party on a roof, her friend Dogg's band Hookers and Children are playing. Sadly, the story heads back to Reno's cerebral and weary New York. I was the only American girl here, I reminded myself as he chased it around the room in his underwear. Up in their bedroom, as Sandro shoos a moth out of the window, she thinks, "He didn't care about moths. Even the inscrutable Reno enjoys a moment of primal conquest. Here, Kushner is all novelist, portraying the rich with a cruel rapture that bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst's. The most successfully realised section takes place in Italy, at the family home of Reno's aristocratic boyfriend, Sandro, son of Valera. Throughout, Kushner's gifts as a poet war with the more practical intentions of the novelist – like perfectly rendered pearls in a life-size portrait, her specificity draws the eye too close and muddles the focus on the whole.
There are other stories to break it up, but the tough, third-person documentary-style chapters about Valera, founder of the Moto Valera company, do little to kiss it into life. It's an estranging first-person narrative with minimal plot and scant emotional range.
"'That is funny,' he whispered back, but did not offer it." As if things weren't colourless enough, the weather gets bad too: "rain and then sirens". Of her closest friend, Giddle, Reno decides "there might be reason to doubt everything she said", and when Ronnie the artist makes a pass at her, Reno says she doesn't remember his name. There are prostitutes and drunks, there are "Sorry, no credit" signs in the bars and beneath them people tell casual, brutal anecdotes about abandoned babies or talk art with the dead-eyed lassitude of types in a Fellini film. Under Reno's gaze, New York in the late 1970s is a listless place.
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