Known as Reno, the town she’s from, the narrator of Rachel Kushner’s electrifying second novel, The Flamethrowers (Scribner, $26.99), is an aspiring artist infatuated with speed and risk. She’s also in love with an older Italian artist, but it’s only risk-taking that she can “trust.” Unfolding in 1976, Reno’s bildungsroman takes her from Nevada to New York to Italy, with each phase of her adventurous life upping the ante. Racing a motorcycle across the Bonneville Salt Flats—experiencing “an acute case of the present tense”—she wipes out in a spectacular crash, but sustains only road rash and a sprained ankle. Back in New York, she meets self-described artists who argue about true revolution versus mere performance. Then, in Italy, Reno falls in with the Red Brigades and gets a searing lesson in what radical really means.