Last year I read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, which takes place in the arts scene in New York in the early ‘70s. Just Kids feels like the novel that Kushner was trying to write, or at least the world she was trying to fit her characters into. The contrast between these two works was really highlighted by how vibrant and desire-filled Smith’s book is- the things that bothered me about The Flamethrowers were the limp, motive-less main character and the pretension of the art world […]