I think it's appropriate that Patti Smith begins her narrative by sharing a dream of hers.  There is a dreamlike quality to her whole text, whether she is sharing dreams or details of her waking life.  It wasn't always obvious which was which.  There is a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness quality to the entire endeavor.  To enjoy it, one must be (1) pre-disposed to like Patti Smith, (2) in the right mood, and (3) into that kind of thing.  I mostly was on-board, though it took me a mental adjustment to get into this.  Especially since I was out on a 24-mile training run when Out of Orange ended and my mp3 player switched me over to M Train.  Mind shift!

Three things I have in common with Patti Smith are our deep and abiding love for:

1. (1) Coffee
   (2) TV police procedurals
   (3) Haruki Murakami

[Booklikes:  your "numbered list" button does not work, and I had to type in my numbers like a savage!]

One of the things that made me laugh out loud was when Smith discovered someone sitting at "her" table at her favorite cafe and imagined ways the woman's body would be found if this were happening at the beginning of a couple of her favorite police procedurals.  One of my go-to jokes is to "warn" characters, "Hey, don't you know you're at the beginning of a [Bones/Criminal Minds/Law & Order/etc.] episode?!?  Something bad is about to happen!"

So check this one out if you are a Patti Smith and in the right mood for rambly, trippy, stream-of-consciousness musings.

The Flamethrowers is a shape-shifter, a slinking fire-lizard, spectacular and formless. It's lines are curving, colorful and deceptive, you can't tell where it is going and I wouldn't care to anyway. I assume it was my own fault that this book was so far to the limits of my radar but Rachel Kushner should be on the lips of many discussions in the lit world.

Kushner's opening scenes in The Flamethrowers are electric. I picked up the book cold, it was a good deal used and I felt guilty about leaving the store without buying anything for the second time in a week. I tried a couple pages and there was no turning back. War, motorcycles, deserts the 70s art scene, it's the stuff that fueled Hunter S. Thompson, Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Then, just when you're buckled in, Kushner downshifts, turns down a different road.

The story moves to New York and we get our share of art types, caricatures, people who speak in code and have no names, but then we're learning about them, then they do have names and worries and bills, relationships, friends. It was jarring at first, like if Sal Paradise moved in with Dean Moriarty and they actually had to face domestic problems and wax poetic on life to people who have heard their bullshit before instead of fucking of to shoot guns with whatever alter ego he came up with for William Burroughs, but it came to seem necessary, overdue even, to break up this myth of the art monster, stylish, witty, cool, plugged in, distant from the rest of us. We who say the wrong thing, who fail, fuck up, get rejected and it doesn't mean anything most of the time. Still, she never loses that identity at the core of it, the flamethrowers, she just makes them human.

There is a lot of space in 383 pages to play with form and characters and the story changes shift several times. In the paperback I found--one that looks like it has been properly kicked about which suits this story much better than a pristine new copy--she added an essay at the end about how it became timely by accident. How she was writing about riots and movements already when Occupy was coming into it's own, but the echoes in Black Lives Matter seem even stronger.

I really liked it, I'd say the silly thing of it has a bit of everything, because it feels that way, and it challenges everyone. Maybe you shouldn't be so sensitive and be a bit more daring and artistic, or maybe you need to be checked and realize other people exist and deserve some consideration. Maybe it's just a great, dynamic story and you should read it and come to your own conclusions.

Post Script:

I mentioned I picked this up cold, and I want to reiterate that I knew nothing of the book, New York is mentioned on the back but not the era, so it's a particularly bizare coincidence that I read this right after Patti Smith's Just Kids which was also set in the 70s art scene, but about 5 years early for the most part. Why didn't I give five stars? I don't know. If you're making your decisions because of a stars ranking you can probably skip my page anyway.

There are not a lot of winks in Just Kids, no nods or quips, it is not self-deprecating or apologetic at all. Patti Smith writes one of the most outlandish coming-of-age stories I could imagine, from teaching college to the streets of New York to the Hotel Chelsea in about two years, then rising in the worlds of art, poetry and music. She has cool artistic friends who actually go on to change the world. Janis Joplin, Bob Neuwirth, Sam Shepard, these are the people she encounters at parties, concerts, or while sketching in the lobby of the Chelsea--real encounters, not the "Hey it's you!" "Yeah, I know" variety--but she plays it all straight, with heartfelt appreciation for the part each played in her life.

There is name-dropping, but how could there not be? She doesn't have to mention her brief conversation with Jimi Hendrix, but that is as much part of the scenery as anything else, as much as St. Marks or the Gotham Book Mart, every city has a cast of characters but hers have names we recognize. The story of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the two of them finding a place in the world and finding a voice and doing all this at such an exciting moment cannot be told without acknowledging that the people whose work they and everyone else bought and adored and discussed were just downstairs at El Quixote.

Smith captures beautifully that moment in life when friendships mean so much because the world has suddenly gotten so big and they don't know what to make of it. They are sure they can make an impression on it even as they struggle to make rent. I like also that she hasn't tried to place herself in that world but tried to show us how she saw the world then. They're around her, the Manson killings, Woodstock, but she's not reporting she's telling her story. 

I didn't have to tell you how good this book was. A National Book Award winner and strong recommendations from your cooler friends were probably enough, but if you--like me--for some reason have not picked it up, this is your chance.

M train, Patti Smith; Author and Narrator

Be prepared for an intense read. I listened to this audio in its entirety, but I must admit, I wanted to quit many times. The author narrates her own book, and her style is a monotone that drones on and on, without any modulation. It feels sad from beginning to end as she takes the reader on her journey following no timeline and no pattern, but randomly jumping from topic to topic, year to year, memory to memory. She examines her dreams, revisits excursions to many places and countries in order to photograph, write poetry, lecture, make music, and write. It reads a bit like a travelogue sometimes, albeit one that contains famous names. There is, midst the gloom of her memories, a sardonic moment and a touch of humor now and again.

In spite of the solemnity of the memoir and lamenting nature of the narration, the straightforward, conversational nature of the reading made me stay on long after I thought I would. I simply felt that the author was speaking directly to me, confiding in me, unleashing her tormented soul, relieving her emotional angst upon my shoulders, so how could I abandon her? I felt like I had been invited to read her diary. Obviously, somehow, in spite of her lack of emotion in the reading, she filled her story with it in the telling, and I connected completely with her, in the end.

It felt almost like a lamentation about the losses she experienced in her life, many of which seemed untimely and unfair. She had a house in New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy hit, a house that by all rights should have been destroyed but stood alone among her neighbors intact, still however, in need of its original list of necessary repairs. The coffee shop she invested in and loved died a premature death. Two loves of her life, her husband and her brother, left her in the prime of their lives. When she visited the home of Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the trip was marred by her severe migraine. The organization she gave speeches for in Iceland that concerned itself with Arctic expeditions, closed its doors.

All of the mundane happenings of life somehow took on a larger than life meaning for her. She agonized over the ways that travel changed, down to resenting the seat belt requirements on airlines or kiosks used for boarding passes. She traveled to Vera Cruz hoping to get a superb cup of coffee, a drink she adored. She collected odd little pieces of memorabilia that meant so much to her, and yet she often lost the things that meant most to her. She had a compulsion to make lists to keep organized and functioning, but somehow, she was forgetful too and was always leaving something important behind and wondering if it was a message or sign of some kind. She missed her mother and her father. She reminisced about the time she played chess with Bobby Fischer.

So you see, while it was intensely interesting because of the subjects she introduced, it was rambling and somber as well. Most of the time, she seemed to be looking backward, morosely, at the lost loves of her life, without the opposite effort of looking forward, somewhat with joy. She is, and was obviously, a free spirit who missed her husband her other family members. She dwelled upon the illnesses that afflicted them, and even memorialized her own serious childhood illness. At the end, there was the barest hint that she would continue to investigate and participate in new projects, in spite of the heavy cloak of grief that seemed to travel along with her.

So, what is the M train? Is it a train with no fixed destination, traveling down the road of life showing us all the random events we will all someday face, sooner or later? Is it the embodiment of the capriciousness of life? Somehow, in spite of the monotone, in spite of the sorrow and solemnity inhabiting the pages of her memoir, it grabbed my heartstrings and made me think about my own life and lost loves.

When I was young, I learned a song in school. It was a round with one simple line: Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other gold.

The memoir Just Kids focuses on the author Patti Smith's relationship with Robert Maplethorpe, who was to become one of America's most important avant-garde photographers. Early chapters describe how the two find each other, penniless in New York, and then in an on-again-off-again romance, co-create and support each other's artistic growth. There are hints that this book has been edited down from something larger, making for a bit of uneven pacing. But Smith wisely skips the details of her music career and puts the spotlight on her feelings and concerns for Robert and the strength of their oft-tested bond. As their careers blossom and their paths diverge, you can feel the sadness and tension grow in the story. On some level, this great rock&roll queen wanted nothing more than to have her best friend with her for always, like a little girl at Coney Island. When it's all said and done, this is the secret of Just Kids' narrative power- that it taps into that aspect of all our own (comparatively ordinary) lives and reminds us how hard it is to keep our friends close and safe through the swirling currents of individual experience.
I often will listen to an audiobook on a high speed, but there was something about this story and Patti Smith's voice that demanded a real time experience. Smith is a poet, and one can feel that in the weight of her spoken words. I highly recommend the audio version.