When Hari Kunzru’s fourth novel, Gods Without Men, was published in 2011, it represented both a high point and an endpoint in the author’s career. The book is a kaleidoscopic work that teems with life, bursts with inventiveness, and brims with chaotic energy. The multistoried narrative plays out in and around the Mojave Desert in different time zones and alternate realities. The multifarious cast includes a couple searching for their lost son, a Cockney rock star, a Franciscan missionary, a Mormon miner, a war-damaged ethnographer, a shape-shifting charlatan called Coyote, a group of Arab Americans role-playing Iraqi insurgents, and members of a mystical, trippy-hippy UFO cult named the Ashtar Galactic Command. Kunzru impressed readers, but he also painted himself into a corner. This elaborate Russian doll of a novel could only be a one-off: Another one in the same mold would amount to cheap pastiche, diluted originality.
And so, instead, Kunzru changed direction and wrote two structurally and stylistically different novels. White Tears (2017) scrutinized race, exploitation, and madness by way of two music-loving friends, a record-hunting road trip, a bluesman bogeyman, and a song that unleashed “three minutes of darkness.” Red Pill (2020) followed an unnamed writer-narrator as he floundered in Berlin in pursuit of truth and meaning amid alt-right mindsets and ultraviolence.
Now, the London-born, Brooklyn-based author returns with a third color-coded novel that simultaneously examines individual woes and societal concerns. Like its two predecessors, Blue Ruin eschews the abundance and fecundity of Gods Without Men for a stripped-back, semi-streamlined tale. After dealing with musicians and writers, Kunzru’s cultural figures this time around are artists. His focus, however, is not their talent for creating but their capacity for self-destruction.
The book opens with a surprise encounter and a possible reversal of fortune. It is the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jay, an Englishman in New York, has fallen on hard times. Over the years, he has traveled far and scraped a living by doing a variety of manual labor jobs. Recently, after being kicked out of his lodgings in Queens for catching the virus and endangering the other residents, he left the city with his few possessions and fewer prospects, “like a cat slinking off to a private place to die.” Undocumented, unhealthy, and living in his car, he just about makes ends meet by delivering groceries upstate. One day, his delivery run takes him to the door of a luxury home in the middle of a grand estate. Its current occupant is his ex-girlfriend, Alice, who unceremoniously left him 20 years ago. Instead of turning her back on him again, she gives him a temporary place to stay.
Stunned by this blast from his past and afflicted by fever and faintness, Jay tries to process his surroundings and Alice’s situation. He learns that she is married to Rob, his former best friend from art school, who has since become a successful painter. They have borrowed this house and are sharing it with another couple, Rob’s gallerist, Marshal, and his girlfriend, Nicole. To avoid infection and uphold the rule of no outsiders on the premises, Alice hides Jay from the others in a barn on the other side of the vast property. Holed up there, Jay recuperates and reflects on the man he once was and the life he once led.
Kunzru flashes back to Jay’s reckless student days in London. On a wild night out, he meets and falls for Alice, a rich girl “lost in the East End, trying to get scars.” A relationship blossoms but starts to wither when Jay becomes more and more dependent on drugs. Meanwhile, he and Rob fall in and out of pubs and parties, their friendship intimate but also tempestuous, “balanced on a knife edge of competition.” Rising star Rob applies himself in his studio, “sweating out his debauches in paint,” and secures a reputation. Jay, on the other hand, sabotages his career before it has gotten off the ground by burning his paintings — and a few bridges. As he crashes and burns, Alice doesn’t wait to witness the wreckage and runs off with Rob.
Back in the present, Jay’s low profile on the property doesn’t last long. He explains to his hosts that the two decades he has spent drifting, doing odd jobs, and living hand to mouth have constituted a performance-art project, an attempt “to live without an artistic identity, but at the same time, to live entirely within the frame of art.” But Rob is not so much interested in the meaning of Jay’s art as the purpose of his visit: “Are you here for her or me?” he demands to know, offering to pay Jay to disappear. Tempers flare, resentments resurface, and soon, the stage is set for a long overdue showdown between these old rivals.
Kunzru’s seventh novel is a bracing and thrilling deep dive into the art world at its most corrosive. There is much to admire in the author’s portrait of the artist as a young man. Twenty-something Jay knows his field is dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful and believes that to stay authentic, the artist has to be “a spy, a spiritual fugitive,” and evade and resist. Answerable to no one, he produces provocative works that earn him the nickname “art’s illegal migrant.” In contrast, Rob is beholden to Marshal and has to churn out art that is owed. Kunzru brings both men together and explores freedom, integrity, and wealth inequality.
Blue Ruin is also a novel about transformations, a theme that has preoccupied Kunzru since his 2003 debut, The Impressionist, in which an Indian man wanders through life, sloughing off one identity and slipping on another. “It’s a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives,” Jay says. “There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood.” As Kunzru traces his characters’ great changes, we are left guessing how they will move forward. Is Alice, who once wanted to be a curator and is now “the mistress of some kind of fairy-tale kingdom,” at once “cynical, spare, flensed of dreams,” content to keep cleaning up her husband’s messes? Will Rob, a maniacal egotist showing signs of becoming more unhinged, take others down with him? And does Jay Gates, like a certain Jay Gatsby, think he can repeat the past and reclaim his lost love?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Not every reader will relish the accounts of Jay’s off-the-wall artistic endeavors or his occasional lofty or gnomic pronouncements (“Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death”). Fortunately, these blemishes don’t impair Kunzru’s narrative. He keeps us gripped with his cuckoo-in-the-nest setup and the mounting tension it engenders. The London backstory’s artistic and hedonistic exploits have color and vitality. The present-day setting beguiles, particularly an off-limits forest with an installation of mirrors — Rob’s domain, Alice’s wonderland — where Jay dares to tread. His trespassing paves the way for a suspenseful conclusion.
Early into the novel, Jay reminds us of the dislocation and emptiness of lockdown. This “time of no time” is “formless and without direction.” The opposite is true of Blue Ruin. Brilliantly crafted, it is Kunzru’s finest book in years.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
