BookBrowse Reviews Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

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When he re-encounters his one-time rival and ex-lover early in the COVID pandemic, a former up-and-coming London artist, now down on his luck, must revist his past.

Like Red Pill and White Tears, the first two novels in Hari Kunzru's loosely connected Three-Colors trilogy, Blue Ruin stands alone as both a powerful novel of ideas and a compelling story. Although the three books are entirely different in theme, character, and setting, each focuses on specific cultural moments of the recent past. Blue Ruin alternates between the London art scene during the final years of the 20th century—in its exhilarating heyday of change, youth, and lucrative optimism—and upstate New York twenty years later, during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, which so sharply exposed the different trajectories of those with wealth and privilege and those without resources.

The novel's central character, Jay, arrives at art school already considering himself an outsider. Jay is referred to only by his first name through most of the novel, obscuring his full name, Jay Gates, which carries distinctive echoes of Jay Gatsby and his self-creation and yearning. His Jamaican father long gone, Jay has spent most of his British middle-class childhood living with his maternal grandmother after being ejected from the family home due to his white stepfather's racist antipathy and his white mother's cowed compliance. Determined, self-critical, and idealistic, Jay becomes close friends with a talented fellow artist named Rob. Once graduated, Jay's rigorous artistic explorations and performances attract interest from the art world, and, with the support of an influential gallerist, he begins to develop a name for himself. In these early years, Jay also falls hard for Alice, the scion of a wealthy French Vietnamese family, and the two form a fraught relationship that is intense and complicated and ends abruptly on an ugly note.

Twenty years later, now down on his luck—an undocumented migrant, reeling from the lingering effects of a particularly nasty bout with COVID and living in his smelly car while eking out a living driving for a ride-hail company and delivering groceries—Jay is startled to again encounter Alice and Rob, now riding out the pandemic at a luxurious, wooded upstate New York estate owned by an absent art collector. The scene is set, and complications of the past will play out in the powerful discombobulation of the anxious present. Kunzru employs the pandemic pod to draw a tight circle around his characters, adding in only Jay's gallerist, Marshall, and Marshall's unhappy young girlfriend, Nicole. These five characters will negotiate a complex series of interrelationships based on desire, class, race, trauma, history, and ambition. A sixth character, the absent art-collecting landlord, will, like Godot, be a pivotal figure of the novel, but perhaps more notable for his absence than his presence. 

As always, Kunzru has a keen eye when considering the effects of race and privilege in his characters' lives; in this novel, he is also focused on questions about the creation and the business of art. How is value defined and determined in the art world? Is there indeed such a thing as art without commodification? Is it possible to untangle the intricately conflated strands of creation and consumption? In what ways can life become art, and how might that even look? Three people who anticipated extremely promising artistic careers twenty years earlier now face creative crises: Jay's single-minded pursuit of a rigorous authenticity has ultimately led him into increasingly dangerous environments, while the commercially successful artist, Rob, has become unable to respond to the pressures of the market. The once generative and independent Alice has now transformed into little more than a frustrated and resentful manager and fixer. Relationships are at their breaking point and the claustrophobic closeness and creeping paranoia of the pandemic infect all.

Kunzru is masterful at sprinkling surprising revelations into the plot, which will keep readers continually reshaping their impressions as more intriguing details are unveiled. Ultimately, Jay will not share the fate of his near-namesake, Jay Gatsby. This novel may raise more questions than it answers, but Kunzru is wise to utilize the urgencies of the pandemic—the very definition of an unknowable future—to spur his characters into grappling with their complicated pasts and imagining lives beyond lockdown.

This review first ran in the July 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.