Shoots and leaves: a dramatic episode in The Flamethrowers

Read only a little more in Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and...something happened. Will it matter? Will it affect the characters and their lives? That is, will it be part of a plot? Or just another incident? Narrator and boyfriend Valero walking home to his Soho loft early in the a.m. after the very long, very hip NYC downtown arts scene dinner party and drinks at club afterward - when a guy steps from the shadows and tries to rob them at knifepoint. V., ever the cool hero, reaches as if for his wallet and pulls out (from his pocket? can this be?) a gun - some old replica pistol that his Italian industrialist family used to manufacture - and he shoots the guy. Well, that stops the robbery - not clear how badly injured the thug might be. V. takes off and narrator runs into their loft and calls 911 (did they have 911 in 1976? This might be an anachronism) to report the shooting. They ask her for a report - and she realizes, shit, her boyfriend might have actually killed a guy. She hangs up, an ambulance arrives - later she goes outside and sees no one - and then she spends the rest of the night watching a predawn movie - not sure what movie it is, but some readers will be able to ID it for sure. So that's a pretty good little action scene, might stand alone as a good story, with some editing - but will it matter over the course of the novel? I have some trepidation and am afraid V. will return home in the late morning and narrator will just carry on with the course of her life - which seems to be heading toward a stint racing motorcycles in Italy. Kushner does her research really well - she make her narrator v. convincing as a moto-head, and she has an incredible fount of status details about the NYC art and political scene of the 60s and 70s - I can see why this book has gotten a lot of attention (writers - set your novels in NYC if want to find an agent/editor) and why it's holding my interest in spite of its flaws - but so far it's a long flat ride, detail after detail, and I'm hoping this dramatic episode will help Kushner give her novel a shape and provide some stakes for the characters.