The novelist’s love triangle has its sights set on the elite insularity of the New York art world but its plot is programmatic
I’ve always admired Hari Kunzru’s novels for their dense, satirical plunge into subcultures. His characters are nervy, laconic, forever looking for a chance to escape their domestic lives, brimming not so much with feelings as ideas. Mike Frame, the protagonist of My Revolutions (2007), may be living the “rich person’s fantasy” of a country life with his spouse and stepdaughter at the turn of the millennium, but once upon a time he went by a different name and was involved too deep with a militant ultra-left activist group in the late 1960s and early 70s. White Tears explored the American popular music scene, with two twentysomething New York-based hipster record producers who grow obsessed with old blues singers because their songs were “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people”. In Red Pill, a middling British writer has a nervous breakdown while on an artists’ retreat in Berlin and becomes curious about the nihilistic visions of neo-Nazis and edgelords.
Blue Ruin is a pandemic novel and opens with Jay, an erstwhile British conceptual artist now living out of his car in New York, who encounters his ex-girlfriend, Alice, while delivering groceries for an app upstate. He is mindful of looking old and exuding the “stink of ill health and gas station food”, having been kicked out of a cramped bunk-bed housing situation in Queens after he tested positive for the coronavirus. Meanwhile, she is standing all masked up at the door of a sylvan cottage, her skin looking “glossy” and “radiant”. He runs out of breath while dropping her bags, and she doesn’t just recognise him, but insists that he stay in an unkempt barn in the same property. Years ago she’d cheated on him with Rob, Jay’s closest friend in art school, now a commercially successful painter. Imagine Jay’s surprise on learning that Alice ended up marrying Rob and they are quarantining with another couple – Rob’s gallerist, Marshal, and his girlfriend, Nicole – in the house upstate.
