An unexpected meeting
Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Blue Ruin, begins with a catchy hook– “Even with the mask on, I recognized her at once.” An intimate description of the woman follows this attention-grabbing first sentence. We quickly learn that the narrator, Jay, and the masked woman, Alice, have not seen each other since she had ghosted him twenty years prior, leaving him stranded in her aunt’s “airless London flat.”
This unexpected meeting with the love of his life takes place when Jay arrives in a beat-up old car to deliver groceries at a remote location in upstate New York. Despite the effects of years of hard manual labor and recent ill health on Jay’s withered body, Alice recognizes him. He looks exhausted and nearly faints on the doorstep. An awkward conversation follows where they try to catch up with each other’s lives. Alice tells him she is married to Rob, and they have a young daughter. Jay tells her very little about his own life except that he’d contracted COVID in its very first wave and still hadn’t recovered completely.
A helping hand
Seeing him stagger on his feet, she hands him a bottle of water and then offers to drive him to a hospital. When he refuses, she tells him that he is in no condition to complete the rest of his delivery round and instead needs to rest and recover. She declares that she’s going to hide him in a secluded barn away from the house where she and Rob are living temporarily during the lockdown. She insists that the owners of the house must not know he’s camped out in the barn.
Even at this early stage of the novel, I wasn’t sure if I bought the idea of the two of them meeting in such peculiar circumstances and the plausibility of the situation seemed further suspect when she tells him that the affluent owners of the property had installed a high-security system and cameras all over the expansive wooded property.
A contrived scenario
Kunzru’s fast-paced first-person narrative takes us through the stilted initial interaction between Jay and Alice. The readers may be able to empathize with the palpable sense of fear and misinformation that characterized the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the whole scenario described in their early encounter seems unconvincing and contrived.
Further in, the novel doesn’t add any more depth or nuance to the characters or their relationships. Alice and Rob share their house with Rob’s agent, Marshal, and his trophy girlfriend Nicole. These two characters verge on being comical and bizarre. When Marshal discovers Jay taking a walk in the woods, he chases him with a gun. The dialog which follows this episode reads like the script of a poorly made sitcom. Later Rob takes off with one of Marshal’s guns and Jay has to walk him down memory lane to try to convince him to give up the weapon.
A classic love triangle
Decades earlier, Jay and Rob had attended art school in London and developed a friendship and respect for one another’s work, although, Jay later says, “My relationship with Rob was always tempestuous, balanced on a knife edge of competition. There were times when we couldn’t be around each other, but we always gravitated back again, falling drunkenly into each other’s arms in some bar or gallery, long-lost brothers, comrades, drug buddies.”
As a young woman, Alice is interested in being a curator and together they share a bohemian lifestyle in the heart of London’s fringe artistic community. We learn early on that Alice’s casual disregard for money indicates she comes from wealth. Jay is uncomfortable about how freely she spends money, while he is forced to live the life of a stereotypical starving artist.
The disparity between their stations becomes more obvious when he realizes that Alice did not introduce him to her mother in Paris because her status-conscious Vietnamese French relatives would not approve of her Black boyfriend. This is the first time the readers are clued into Jay’s race.
A parting of ways
Close to their graduation from art school, Jay and Rob part ways. Jay expresses clear disdain for Rob and thinks of himself as a superior artist because he has not sold his soul in order to make it big. Rob is portrayed as being bourgeois, pretentious, and ambitious.
Meanwhile, despite his early promise, Jay hits a phase of creative block. By now Jay and Alice’s lives revolve around scoring cocaine or any other drugs they could get their hands on. In this unhealthy cycle of addiction, Jay finds himself wallowing in self-loathing and emotionally isolating himself from Alice and this lays the foundation for why she ends up choosing Rob over Jay.
The art scene
The early interaction between the three characters centers around art and their discussions on how to represent their true selves through it. In a mental haze induced by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, they talk about the scale, color, and medium of the art pieces.
Kunzru is clearly a gifted writer but often his work gets bogged down by minutiae because it devolves into more of a telling mode (as opposed to a showing mode). For instance, while expressing his love for art, Jay says, “For me, making art was inescapably cerebral. I approached it as a problem, a puzzle that I needed to solve. I was ashamed of that. It felt like a dirty little secret, a creative weakness that I had to hide.”
Again, while describing his connection with art, he states, “I loved painting, but began to feel that there was also something rotten about it, something shallow and corrupt. I hated its aura of luxury, consumption, the knowledge that whatever you did, however confrontational you tried to be, you were – if you were lucky – just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with. No one around me seemed too bothered. There was some halfhearted academic grumbling about commodification, but most artists were eager to make sales.”
A novel that does not deliver
Given Kunzru’s stellar background and reputation as an exceptional writer, I began Blue Ruin with high expectations, but, the deeper I got into it, the more disappointing it became.
The child of a Kashmiri pundit father and a British mother, Hari Kunzru, was born in London, attended the Bancroft’s School, and went on to graduate from Oxford University. He’s a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine and has published seven novels. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin.
How is it that someone with his background could only take his observations and criticism of the art world to such a perfunctory level? In Jay’s voice he wrote, “When I went to shows, I found that I couldn’t look at painting anymore. I tried to enjoy it, to take pleasure in color and form but all I saw were tricks and mannerisms. The drips and spatters and faux-accidental marks seemed calculated and cynical, a way to con some collector into believing he’d bought a flame in a bottle, a trace of the artist’s life force. I didn’t want to make statement objects for the rich.”
It is possible that at the conceptual level, this novel was probably an ambitious project. What Kunzru probably wanted was to put on display the fickleness of the art world and how the interaction between the artists, the curators, the agents, and the collectors is often shallow, transactional, and driven by hype. In the end, the novel fails to deliver this message effectively.
Hari Kunzru | Penguin Random House
Publisher : Knopf (May 14, 2024)
Language : English
Hardcover : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593801377
ISBN-13 : 978-0593801376
