Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru — when artists and capitalism collide
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In White Tears (2017), the story of two young white men who fake a long-lost blues number from the 1920s, Hari Kunzru tackled the harrowing subjects of American race relations, cultural appropriation and the myth of white innocence. He followed this with Red Pill (2020), in which a Brooklyn writer on a fellowship in Germany is sucked down an alt-right rabbit hole while the Trump presidency looms.
Now, Blue Ruin examines disparities of wealth and privilege in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although each of these novels can be read in isolation, they form a loosely connected trilogy that presents a panoramic portrait of the social, moral and aesthetic crises besieging contemporary America.
Jay and Rob meet as art students in the UK in the mid-1990s. Not long after they’ve graduated, at a lock-in at a Shoreditch pub where everyone’s “riled up on cheap triples and terrible London cocaine”, they encounter Alice — “an incontinent angry mess”, blind drunk and about to get beaten up. The young men intervene, after which Jay sees her home. Nothing happens that night, but about a month later, he runs into Alice again; now sober, “poised and icily beautiful”. Soon they’re a couple. Sort of.
Yet Alice keeps Jay at a distance, especially from her family who are moneyed, Parisian and glamorous — her mother’s side are “wealthy Vietnamese émigrés” and her father hails from the French haute bourgeoisie. Jay, meanwhile, is preoccupied with work. His degree show puts him on the cusp of an enviable career, but as the millennium approaches, he becomes increasingly concerned with leftist political ideology — “the Zapatistas, corporate branding, globalisation, the predatory behaviour of the International Monetary Fund”. Soon he’s questioning both the value of his own work and that of the art world more broadly: “I didn’t want to make statement objects for the rich. I didn’t want to be shackled to anyone’s wall.”
He and Alice are also hopped up on anything they can get hold of: an “alphabet soup of chemicals” that Jay tries to claim is “sharpen[ing their] perception”. When Alice finally leaves him for Rob, it’s not exactly a surprise. Nor is it much of a spoiler, since Kunzru sets up this messy love triangle in the novel’s first few pages.
Fast-forward to upstate New York in 2020, where Jay — now middle-aged, undocumented and living out of his car after being thrown out of the house-share back in the city when he caught Covid — is struggling to make ends meet delivering groceries to the cosseted residents of the region’s “robber baron’s castle[s]” and “hedge fund follies”.
Already fighting for breath — he’s not fully recovered — he finds Alice at one of these houses, now a “stranger” in expensive “branded yoga clothing”. The shock is physical. They haven’t seen each other for 20 years, not since she ghosted him. Seeing he’s still unwell, Alice insists Jay stay on the property to recuperate. She and Rob (who are still together, a punch to the gut) are sharing the house with Rob’s bullish gallerist Marshal and his girlfriend. Another punch to the gut is that Rob is still making art, and making money from it too.
The set-up of the second half of the book — obnoxiously wealthy New Yorkers who’ve fled the city to ride out the pandemic cocooned in a “penumbra of money” — echoes Gary Shteyngart’s recent novel Our Country Friends. But before we get there, Kunzru takes us back through his characters’ old lives in London, the memories of which unspool in Jay’s fevered mind. If these sepia-tinged pages feel somewhat removed, it seems entirely deliberate. Later, as we glean a fuller understanding of Jay’s art practice — his shift towards performance, and an increased blurring of the boundaries between life and work — we come to a much more nuanced appreciation of the distance Kunzru creates. All the same, his portrait of east London in the 1990s has real texture, grit and grunge rubbing up against the crude new money of the exploding art scene.
Each of the novels in the trilogy has some kind of fictional art work at its heart. There’s the blues song in White Tears, then an ultraviolent cop show that the protagonist of Red Pill becomes obsessed with. Here it’s Fugue, the final act of Jay’s three-part performance piece THE DRIFTWORK. Although hard to document — it comprises of “actions” that weren’t “intended for anyone else to see” — and even harder to describe without giving too much of the game away, it forms evidence of one of Blue Ruin’s greatest strengths: Kunzru’s creation of a body of work that possesses the heft and believability of something real.
In both this, and the adroit way in which he makes Jay’s endeavours part of the fabric of the text — the revelation of which, incidentally, I found genuinely thrilling — makes for a novel that’s both a sharp dissection of the oily inner workings of the art world, and a compelling portrait of one man’s desperate attempt to escape complicity in the capitalist machine.
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru Scribner £20, 272 pages
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