Hari Kunzru’s ‘Blue Ruin’ Looks Back in Anger

During the turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its cycles of isolating lockdowns, many artists and writers had to draw creative inspiration from their own memories. Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin (2024) – the third in a tricolore after White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2019) – might be seen as one such example. Blue Ruin: the story of three young, art-school graduates living in London during the late-1990s (a time when Kunzru himself was working in the UK capital as a journalist), and the tale of their pandemic-era reconnection in a secluded housing compound in the woods in upstate New York. These two strands are brought together through the first-person narration of Jay, a once-promising performance artist who courted attention from galleries and institutions alike.

In addition to Jay – a Black kid raised by a single white mum, who used art as a way to escape from his difficult childhood – Blue Ruin’s other protagonists are Alice, an aspiring curator from a family of Vietnamese-French millionaires, and Rob, a curmudgeonly but preternaturally talented painter from the north west of England. Jay and Rob meet during a student crit, while Alice and Jay form a connection at an avant-garde film screening and embark on a tumultuous relationship. The start of their complex entanglement as a trio is their involvement in an amateur gallery project called Fancy Goods, from which point on the three characters have a profound impact on each other’s lives.

The book opens during the pandemic. Jay – still suffering from a recent bout of COVID-19, but unable to take time off to recover due to the precarious nature of his employment – is a masked-up delivery driver taking food to a grandiose property in upstate New York. On making his drop-off, he recognizes Alice (incorrectly assuming she’s the owner of the house) – who decades earlier ran away from him with Rob. Unwell and shaken by the encounter, Jay collapses. Alice takes him to an unoccupied property on the estate to recover. This leads to intense stand-offs between Jay and Alice and the compound’s other occupants, who see him as a threat – including Marshall, a gallerist who obsessively patrols the grounds with his rifle.

When Jay is required to explain who he is, however, Marshall recognizes him as a long-lost creative talent – an artist many assumed must have died. As Jay recounts his story, Kunzru paints a picture of Britain during the early years of the New Labour government, when – before the attacks of 9/11 and the consequent declaration of a ‘war on terror’ in 2003 – a sense of optimism prevailed, fuelled by economic resurgence and political naivety. For Jay, it’s also a time of personal chaos, of drug-taking and sexual yearning: he cycles down Kingsland Road in east London high on MDMA; he feels awkward eating in expensive restaurants while trying to impress the much-wealthier Alice. It’s a world to which, for all his relative success as an artist, Jay – a conceptual purist, who believes in art for its own sake – never quite belongs.

Even as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight. Rather, Kunzru focuses on how the lives of the three friends diverge. While Jay’s drug use causes his performances to become increasingly aggressive spectacles of self-erasure and disappearance – in one, he illegally enters France then sails back to Britain, burning his passport – Alice and Rob are trapped in mutual unhappiness, recipients of the art-world’s dubious privileges of money and unstable success.

As the novel unfolds, Kunzru turns his focus to Jay’s lost friendship with Rob – a man whose extremely successful career has made him careless with both money and people. Ultimately, we find ourselves asking whether he is any happier than Jay. The art world serves as a brilliant setting for this novel because it showcases how easily and dramatically fortunes can rise and fall. Kunzru resists equivocating over which character’s fate is preferable: rather, he looks at worldly unhappiness as a shared condition. By illustrating the various ways in which the world can change a group of people’s lives over a 30-year period, Blue Ruin insists it is the inescapable present that determines how we perceive the past.

Undergirded by moments of classist and racist tension, Blue Ruin deploys scenes of heightened interpersonal terror – much as did the author’s previous novel, Red Pill – to expose how the wealthy, even those who believe themselves to be liberal-minded, revert to neofascistic desires for personal security when fearful of the outsider and any associated threat of contamination. In contrast to the nostalgic tendencies found in some post-pandemic writing, Blue Ruin’s success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career – and himself – to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum.

Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin is published by Scribner in the UK and Knopf in the US

_{Main image: Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin, 2024, book cover (detail). Courtesy: Scribner UK}