IN HARI KUNZRU’S NOVEL My Revolutions (2007), which starts in Britain in 1998, the narrator, a fifty-year-old named Michael Frame, receives a visit from an old friend, Miles, the only person who knows that he is a former violent radical living under an assumed identity. To the delight of Michael’s younger wife and late-adolescent stepdaughter, Miles reels off stories of the good old days, a vanilla version of what occurred. After he slips up on a detail, mentioning a university education written out of the cover story, Michael quickly intervenes and finds himself drawn into the yarn-spinning, “a confection of swinging London and San Francisco flower-power, as phoney as one of those television nostalgia shows where they soundtrack archive footage with old Top 40 hits.” These candy-colored reminiscences are ideally matched to the preconceptions of their audience. Michael’s wife invokes “the sixties milieu” as something ossified, remote, like the Battle of Waterloo or the Spanish Armada, while his stepdaughter’s primary reference for that period was “probably Austin Powers.”
My Revolutions uses Michael’s own detailed reminiscences of that time, which form the bulk of the novel, to reveal the reality beneath the tales served up to Michael’s family as well as the sort of write-ups that turned one of Michael’s comrades into a “cardboard cut-out” of a hippie, shrouding his true character behind a “haze of Byronic bullshit.” Kunzru’s new novel, Blue Ruin, also has a middle-aged male narrator who is prompted to recall a twentysomething London existence defined by hopes dashed and love lost. Yet here it’s the retrospective episodes that bring to mind the uneasy role-play in Michael’s living room—an Austin Powers retelling of the hipster ’90s, all late nights and loft spaces. And though it’s hard to be sure, as in any first-person narrative, that the account is to be taken at face value, as sacrosanct or wholly dependable, we are given no firm reason for doubt, no clear point of contrast or more nuanced alternative, no skeptical commentary elsewhere within the fictional world pointing to evidence of holes or cracks, cardboard or bullshit.
As its title suggests, Blue Ruin is a follow-up to Kunzru’s previous books White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2020), completing a loose trilogy devoted––in part––to contemporary America, a conceit derived from Kieślowski’s Three Colors sequence (1993–94), where the flag in question was the Tricolore. (A graduate student in an earlier Kunzru novel dazzles her future husband with talk of Henry James, Marrakech, the Kosovo War, and “the films of Kryzstof Kieślowski.”) The novel’s present-day setting is pandemic-time New York State, where an Englishman, Jay Gates, is living hand to mouth as a courier. Delivering groceries to a cottage on a vast wooded compound, he encounters his former girlfriend, Alice, living in seclusion with her husband, Jay’s old best friend, Rob, now a celebrated artist, and another couple, the gallerist Marshall and his girlfriend. Jay collapses and, while recovering in a barn, starts thinking back to a time when he and Rob, just out of art school and on the verge of success, fell in with the aspiring curator Alice—dazzling, fearless, wealthy, French—and started putting together shows and installations as a collective named after the disused factory that served as their base, Fancy Goods. (There was a similar central hangout in My Revolutions, Free Pictures.)
From the start, the novel appears at ease with the creakiest devices of period evocation. “Back then,” we are told, “East London was cheap. A combination of Victorian industry and the Luftwaffe had created a streetscape full of weird gaps and hidden places, alleys and railway arches, yards and courts and terraces.” The memories often descend into, or half disguise, a list: “a room at the back of a kebab shop where you could drink room-temperature beer out of cans at four in the morning . . . pubs with lunchtime strippers . . . a bar in someone’s front room . . . a bar where you could buy drugs through a metal hatch by the cigarette machine . . . a Jamaican bar with a glitterball turning over a little dancefloor.” A reference to involvement with “all the intersecting causes of the nineties left” prompts more itemizing: “the Zapatistas, corporate branding, globalization, the predatory behavior of the International Monetary Fund.” Everything is left in its congealed state, with stereotypes neither questioned nor restored to a validating original context. Alice gives Jay an art theory book, and he tells us that he underlined “phrases about the reification of social relations, and spaces of intersubjective connection.” It resembles the description at the start of The Corrections, when Chip Lambert sells off his library and recalls the books’ long-ago promise of “a radical critique of late-capitalist society,” except in this case the ideas are crucial, not a fleeting source of parody. Yet we aren’t told what these concepts amounted to, where they came from, how they influenced Jay’s own practice. At one point, Jay recalls that he and Rob “were in love with painting’s mess and machismo, and we were young enough not to know what a cliché it all was.” He never expresses the same concern about his own reminiscences, nor his presentation of Rob.
Kunzru tries to offset the nostalgia-doc atmosphere by withholding titles. Sometimes the device is explained, as when Jay says he cannot remember the name of the British TV comedy about a “discontented suburban businessman” in which a title sequence depicted the central figure running along a beach removing his suit and tie before plunging naked into the sea (The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin). We can’t be sure whether he knows that the “TV show about teenagers with superpowers” he passes out in front of following an argument with Alice is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.There’s even a bit about a song that made the Top 40 (in fact, top 2), though the reluctance to name it produces a somewhat tortuous syntactical effect: “Rob once joked unkindly that the song was about her, the indie pop hit about the art-school girl who wants to do whatever common people do” (Pulp’s “Common People”).
It’s hard to get a handle on the novel’s attitude to reference. Instead of dropping a litter of names, whether real or invented or composite, Kunzru, or Jay, refers to a “famously conservative art critic,” “one of the famous Young British Artists,” “London’s most famous collector.” “A famous Chinese artist was to send some kind of pyrotechnic dragon down the Thames.” At an awards ceremony where he is nominated, Jay sits through an elaborate dinner and makes “halting conversation with a famous film director.” During an inventory of the kitchen in the cottage, Jay notices “a messy figurative painting that even in my dissociated state I recognized as the work of a famous nineteen-eighties Neo-expressionist, an artist whose work I’d only ever seen in museums.” The college where Jay and Rob meet is identified only as an institution “famous” for “disdaining traditional ideas about medium and craft.” But there’s also a heavy reliance on the explanatory power of familiar cultural reference points. In consecutive sentences Alice is likened to a Franz Kline and the darkness described as “Dickensian.” We also read: “like a character in a New Wave film,” “Brideshead persona,” “a Blakean heaven,” “like a scene from some Swinging London comedy,” “a sort of Valkyrie,” “a science fiction quality,” “like a cocktail in Star Trek.” It seems that Kunzru, or Jay, is implying that description is now unavoidably secondhand, that celebrity culture and our postmodern habits of mind have defeated realist representation. But then on other occasions, we get the comp and the full-fat rendering too. The words “like a set for a French house video” are followed by: “underfloor checkerboard lighting, space age retro furniture and a massive chandelier hung dramatically from the ceiling.” Opportunities for shorthand are rejected. When Jay and Alice arrive at “a tiny country station” in rural France, there are “flowers in hanging baskets and a dog sleeping on the platform.” Then Jay sits down at a metal table and orders two bottles of Orangina.
The one thing overtly dismissed as “bullshit” within the novel, the claim that the “delivery guy” happens to be an “old friend from London”—a scenario that Marshall compares to the “script of a porno”—turns out to be true. Or strongly appears to. There are hints that a COVID-addled Jay has imagined the entire thing. He calls Alice “the mistress of some fairy-tale kingdom” and recounts a long dream, which itself contains a dream. It’s notable that he shares a nickname (or adoptive name) and a pair of initials with one of the best-known fantasists in literature. Like James Gatz, aka Jay Gatsby, Jason “Jay” Gates believes he can rekindle a long-lost romance with a rich girl now living in upstate New York with an unfaithful and unworthy husband. (Both characters spend time working on the yacht of a rich American—Jay as “deckhand,” Gatsby as “steward, mate, skipper, secretary.”) But Gatsby, though daft and even delusional, wasn’t quite hallucinating. Marshall’s aggressive questioning of the coincidence hardly strengthens the sense of dream logic.
AS THE STORY OF A LOVE TRIANGLE and tripartite character study––along with pandemic-era drama and historical portrait, the novel’s other generic identities—Blue Ruin presents a strikingly similar scenario to Luca Guadagnino’s recent film Challengers, but with the art scene replacing the tennis circuit, and a pointed pandemic setting instead of a necessarily pre-pandemic one. In novel and film alike, a man reduced to sleeping in his car has an unexpected encounter in New York State with an old girlfriend married to, and managing, the former best friend and colleague with whom he met her, a dominant figure in his field whose best days, to the wife’s gall, appear to be behind him. Both stories begin in the present, with the coincidental reunion, before unfolding an intermittent flashback structure that eventually brings us back to the present.
Like Challengers, Blue Ruin suffers from a basic lack of clarity—over the initial couple’s breakup and the woman’s preference for the best friend, and over the question of why the one who lost out is reduced to his current lowly status. Kunzru makes more of an effort than Justin Kuritzkes and Luca Guadagnino, the writer and director of Challengers, to outline the relational dynamics. Alice tells Jay that it was “really hard being around your self-hatred. You were so unsatisfied with everything, and so proud and humiliated and angry about being humiliated.” In Jay’s own telling, the main source of humiliation during the time he knew Alice was her growing closeness with Rob. Alice’s use of that word to describe her own experiences also comes in relation to sexual betrayal; Rob’s name, we learn, has appeared on a spreadsheet devoted to “problematic art men, something like that.”
How are we to assess Jay’s personality?He explains that he was the only child of an English mother and a Jamaican father he never knew. As a kid, he emulated his white peers, dressing as a goth, listening to synthesizer bands, talking “like a taxi driver.” Spending time with Black groups during his foundation year at art school, he knew he emitted “out-group signals.” But race doesn’t appear to form a crucial part of his self-image. The first allusion of any kind comes on page forty-eight, with a reference to “hostile white barbers”—the word “Black” is used just once—and Jay’s feeling of alienation is generally cast in existential or psychological terms. When he describes himself as a “rank outsider,” his references are to unspecified “faults” obvious to other people. We learn that after his mother and stepfather had twins, he went to live with his Nan, and the implication is that he was destined for exclusion, doomed to play third wheel. Yet when recalling what attracted him to Alice, he doesn’t reinforce the idea that he was seeking out rejection. He says only that he would “chase after very beautiful girls . . . because they were the ones other people seemed to want.” Then, after charming them, he struggled to sustain his interest. But that isn’t what transpires in his relationship with Alice, the instance he is describing.
Jay’s account of his decline is no more coherent. He claims that when he learned that Alice and Rob had moved to New York, it convinced him “to do something drastic . . . to copy her by leaving behind the person she had left, to break myself and begin again.” But he had already retreated from the art world on ethical grounds. He hated “collectors” and was appalled by the commercial calculation of Rob and Alice, the hypocrisy of peddling a sale show as “seeking a relational exterior to capitalist modes of exchange.” Jay didn’t want “to make statement objects for the rich.” His degree show, a performance involving a painting occluded from view that he then destroys, is “a refusal, a way to separate myself from all the other artists who were jostling at the money trough for a chance to dip their snouts.” So: Are his actions noble and self-assertive, a defense of integrity, or merely a reflex, a product of a lifelong inability, which he calls “a sort of failing on my part,” to become a part of anything?
It’s possible that Kunzru is deliberately undermining a consistent interpretation of Jay as man, moral agent, partner, artist, and narrator. Imagery of drifting and driftwood recurs in various connections. Kunzru’s first novel, The Impressionist (2002), was about a Zelig-like shape-shifter in Asia, Europe, and Africa in the 1920s. In My Revolutions, Michael Frame, whose real name is Chris Carver, notes: “Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change.” At the end of Red Pill, a man who has suffered a breakdown returns to his Brooklyn apartment and finds that everything is both the same and different. Promoting My Revolutions, Kunzru said that he had a “nasty feeling” that he would find himself repeatedly asking the same question about whether the self is grounded or contingent, innate or context-specific—whether, in fact, we break ourselves and begin again with almost every action. Kunzru’s friend and younger contemporary Zadie Smith recently argued that the idea of shifting personas is “very deep in ’90s cultural logic. . . . The point was variety. It’s a weird aesthetic tic.” But Kunzru’s presentation of variety is too varied. As with the pattern of details relating to dreaming or imagining, it is difficult to track the argument—to be sure there is an argument—about change serving as the only constant.
BLUE RUIN IS A PERSISTENTLY FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE, at once predictable and inscrutable, certainly the least intricate and engaging of Kunzru’s seven novels. The title itself points to an essential lack of focus, urgency, and definition. White Tears and Red Pill risked seeming on-the-nose, naffly topical, but they reflected Kunzru’s ambition, his desire to offer the last—or longest—word on a prevalent conceptual and epistemic theme. Blue Ruin isjust a phrase, not far from a cliché, seemingly pulled out of the air because he needed a two-word tag including that color.
It seems strange that Kunzru has chosen to set his ’90s novel among a version of the Young British Artists, familiar terrain to an English readership and hardly revelatory to an international one, when his own experience of that time was so distinctive, and ripe for explication. In 1993, two years after completing his degree, he went to do postgraduate studies in philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick, a college on a Brutalist campus in the West Midlands, and fell in with a gang of aggressively future-minded theorists, led by Nick Land and Sadie Plant and later known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). He had always been drawn to oppositional impulses. Growing up in Essex, the son of a Kashmiri Hindu father and an English mother, he discovered Bowie and science fiction and the “almost unreadably abstruse meanderings” of the British music press. As an English student at a left-leaning Oxford college, he was being taught what a student with more traditional tutors called “Red English” (implying Marxist): protested apartheid, the poll tax, and fees for higher education; got into rave culture; and sought out a graduate student with whom he could study postcolonial literature. Land and Plant were an ideal fit. A list of their favored topics—culled from the many accounts of the CCRU’s activities—includes biohacking, dance music, e-cash, feminism, matrices, open-source software, and virtuality. An emphasis on the multiple was welcome to the child of mixed ethnicity. But to Kunzru, all the resulting ideas were linked by an emphasis on freedom from constraint—reveling in the autonomous zone of the dance floor as a sort of corporeal counterpart to surfing the net.
When Kunzru left Warwick, his sole marketable skill was that he could explain “why you would connect a phone line to a computer.” Plant introduced him to the editors of the British arm of a successful newAmerican tech magazine. A bio note that appeared shortly afterward says he “does something quite important, though nobody is sure what. Mostly, he plays loud techno music in the offices of Wired UK.” YouTube has some amusingly mad footage, from 1996, of Kunzru standing in the London nightclub Heaven and attempting to conduct an interview by video link with the novelist and inventor Arthur C. Clarke, who was at home in Sri Lanka. He remained at Wired UK until its closure in early 1997, at which point he started writing travel pieces for newspapers and music reviews for the lifestyle monthly Wallpaper, did some DJing, presented a TV show, and started working on The Impressionist, a comic picaresque about an Anglo-Indian that received a wild advance and was published in 2002.
In many of his preoccupations, Kunzru is highly characteristic, even the exemplar, of a certain kind of nerdily cerebral, outward-looking Englishman born between 1968 and 1970 who now dominates British cultural output at home and abroad. The best-known instances are Thom Yorke and Christopher Nolan. Other prose writers include Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, and—fleetingly—Alex Garland, and The Guardian journalist and political historian Andy Beckett. They have all shown a marked interest in travel, science fiction, the contemporary—future-minded—themes that preoccupied the CCRU, and the pop culture of their childhoods. Kunzru wrote a story with a title from Simple Minds, “New Gold Dream,” while Beckett named his book about the early ’80s Promised You a Miracle. Mitchell, who wrote a novel about a prog-rock band, Utopia Avenue, has said that Kunzru “got me into Brian Eno.” In recent months, the prominence of this micro-generation has been hard to miss. Yorke released a second album with his new band, The Smile. Nolan won his first Oscar, for Oppenheimer. Garland––who stopped publishing fiction twenty years ago and is now, like Nolan, essentially an American studio director––has made his biggest film, Civil War. Mitchell is on a tour to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cloud Atlas. Beckett has just brought out The Searchers, about the left wing of the modern Labour Party, following books about Britain’s relationship with Chile and histories of the ’70s and early ’80s. And Kunzru has completed an ambitious conceptual trilogy.
There are certainly broad distinctions between these novelists. Mitchell has said of Kunzru that he’s “a deeply intelligent, highly read, politically engaged man, and I know I’m not like that.” Kunzru and McCarthy are more engaged with, and involved in, contemporary art; Garland and Mitchell are more populist and work on movies, initially collaborating with teams behind key works of the ’90s(Trainspotting and The Matrix, respectively) and adapting theirbest-known novels (The Beach and Cloud Atlas). One thing they share is an indifference or disdain toward the writer most commonly heroized by writers younger and older, Martin Amis. He is mentioned nowhere in McCarthy’s essays or Garland’s interviews. Mitchell sent him up in Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. Beckett, in a recent interview, described him as seeming “quite an ’80s kind of figure.” Kunzru has noted that his work is “full of class anxiety.” The allegiance among English novelists was to a writer already celebrated when they came of age, J. G. Ballard. When the philosopher Simon Critchley noted that Kunzru, Mitchell, and McCarthy are “great writers and really clever people” but haven’t really shaken the form of the novel, the claim points to their fidelity to the concept-first approach adopted by Ballard, who, with the exception of the seventeen-part collage The Atrocity Exhibition, was content to work on a moderate scale, using a thriller-ish plot as a courier of social and scientific theorizing, and a male narrator or close third person.
There was also the example of another unlikely—even less likely—resident of the English Home Counties, Stanley Kubrick. 2001 is a clear influence on Gods Without Men (Clarke’s source novel provides the epigraph), Nolan’s and Garland’s films, and Yorke’s music. The film’s command of scientific fact is praised in McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Making of Incarnation. A crucial factor was that Ballard and Kubrick offered stories of war in Southeast Asia during the mid-to-late ’80s, a boom time for the modern mythology of that region. Kunzru has written about Thailand and touched on the Second World War and the Vietnam conflict. Garland’s debut The Beach begins with an uncredited quotation from Full Metal Jacket—he also recalls a school-days trip to see Platoon—and owes a narrative debt to Empire of the Sun.
The closest that Blue Ruin comes to reflecting the richness of Kunzru’s formative influences is a few passages about Jay floating around Asia, that fleeting reference to intersubjective connection, and a description of an art project in which Jay erases his digital footprint. During a recent appearance on New Moves, a podcast dedicated to politics and technology, Kunzru noted the greater relevance of “other things that I have done.” The belief that the self is “a multiplicity”––fortified by cyberculture and Nick Land’s work—served as the theme of The Impressionist. Its immediate successor, Transmission (2004), about a computer virus, drew directly on his Wired days. His engagement with electronic music underpinned the sly, original, and ingeniously developed White Tears, which mutates from a satire of cultural appropriation to a ghost story about racial violence. (It has substantial overlap with Percival Everett’s recent—less mordant––The Trees.) The preoccupation with subcultures, superstition, and utopian possibilities found expression in Kunzru’s richest novel to date, the stunning Gods Without Men, which explores the tendency to seek pattern in both chaos and emptiness. In nine narratives taking place between 1778 and 2009, all converging on the Mojave desert, the novel depicts UFO sightings, finance capitalism, substance abuse, the tabloid press, religious faith. The central story concerns a relationship between a Hindu man and a Jewish woman whose differences are underscored first when they have a son and then, after he is kidnapped, by a potentially extraterrestrial force. (This couple, Jaz and Lisa, are clear antecedents of Jay and Alice in Blue Ruin.)
When Gods Without Men appeared, it risked seeming old hat. The structure associated with the systems novel, perhaps above all with Gravity’s Rainbow—though Kunzru’s touchstone may have been another canonical instance, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home—was by that point fully domesticated, having provided the basis for perhaps the two most visible literary novels of the early twenty-first century, both to some degree family sagas, White Teeth and The Corrections. There were also inevitable comparisons to Cloud Atlas, no doubt abetted by David Mitchell’s praise for Kunzru’s book, though the closer precedent was Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, which also compiles a story in nine strands. (They share an interest in Le Guin and also Kieślowski, whose films offer a dreamier art-house counterpart of the systems perspective.) Yet looking back, Gods Without Men alsoanticipatedthe portrayal of mystically endowed spaces in McCarthy’s Satin Island, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (which Alex Garland adapted), Everett’s Telephone, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo.
IF GODS WITHOUT MEN IS THE WORK that best illustrates Kunzru’s strength as thinker and storyteller, the novel that offers the clearest contrast to the procedures of Blue Ruin is its immediate predecessor, Red Pill. Of his time at Warwick, Kunzru has said, “I was supposed to be reading German Romanticism and thinking about the noumenon”—the thing in itself. Then, after he discovered the work of Land and Plant, all that “went out the window.” This is more or less what occurs to Kunzru’s nameless narrator, a half-Indian, half-English liberal humanist who arrives in Berlin for a residency at the Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research, founded––like Warwick, in fact––by local industrial interests. He intends to research German poetry and the lyric self. He reads about Kleist’s struggle to find the truth beneath the surface of things, “the famous Ding an sich, the thing in itself.” It wasn’t quite true that for the twenty-four-year-old Kunzru the noumenon went out the window. What happened was that his studies at Warwick introduced him to a different way of approaching or appropriating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought—with different conclusions about the true nature of what lies beyond sensory stimuli, not a transcendental aesthetic but a hellscape. In the retelling offered by Red Pill, the narrator becomes obsessed with a violent network-TV cop show, Blue Lives, sort of The Shield meets True Detective, in which he identifies allusions to the Counter-Enlightenment conspiracist and protofascist Comte de Maistre––one of Isaiah Berlin’s “six enemies of human liberty––and a “subtext” of dog-eat-dog millenarianism, a reading corroborated when he falls in with the showrunner. (He has the same surname, Bridgeman, as Miles in My Revolutions.)
Red Pill explores what Kunzru considers the central lesson of the cyber age––that divergent images of society and the self might have a shared lineage and symbolic coordinates. At the time, he felt convinced that the ideas he was deriving from Deleuzian cyberculture and rave culture—about deterritorialization and “lines of flight,” horizontal networking and cross-border universalism—were destined to “lead leftwards.” This was the basis, at least in part, of the thinking developed by another Warwick postgraduate, a founding member of the CCRU and self-described “student of electronic culture,” Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism (2009) and the blogs and essays posthumously collected as k-punk (2018). It turned out that the liberationist potential recognized or foreseen by Kunzru and Fisher and Sadie Plant was not the only possibility, leftward the only direction. For a start, there was an industry, growing every second, devoted to selling hardware and software. While Kunzru was working at Wired UK, he was also part of the collective running Mute magazine, which was far more skeptical about the internet’s power to escape co-optation and exploitation. But even before that, Kunzru had evidence that this would be the case. He has recalled trying to talk to Nick Land about the potential of these converging phenomena and found that he was “clearly not . . . invested in the same way.” Land’s later work was concerned with the futility of social progress, the obsoleteness of democracy, and the superiority of the white race. (His writing was collected as Fanged Noumena.) Red Pill allegorizes Kunzru’s own naivete, moving his disillusionment from the mid-’90s to the mid-2010s, compressing years into the term of a writer’s residency.
In Blue Ruin, the enmeshed contraries of Kunzru’s previous work have been replaced by stark polarities. Even if Jay’s account of the art scene was accurate, and a declinist narrative inescapable, the scenario is not sufficiently complex to engage Kunzru’s rare analytic gifts, his ability to temper his taste for polemic with a feeling for paradox. Jay’s memories—and the scene he is recalling—do not yield the unexpected affiliations at which Kunzru has excelled. He clearly sees, or experienced, the art scene as a simpler tale than tech culture or the appropriation of Romantic thought. “In the early ’90s,” Kunzru wrote in 2012, Damien Hirst “seemed like a breath of fresh air, a rave-era blast against the terrible, starchy politeness that characterised the British art scene.” But he ended up as “house artist to the 1%,” and running a sort of sweatshop. The urge to create––a pure, free act––was sullied by rapacity and excess. Jay describes a party in Hackney Wick “before gentrification crept out that far,” where “a feral ecosystem was thriving just beyond the grasp of the developers who were beginning to line the canals with glass boxes and plastic-clad towers.” The “lock-in”––an after-hours session––where he and Rob meet Alice occurs “before” the scene-y Shoreditch pub was “converted into flats.” Jay recalls taking the 55 into central London and looking out for “spiky” and “humble” sculptures placed on the roofs of bus shelters along the route. The experience was complete without knowing “the name of the maker.” Only “later” was anonymity viewed as “a kind of death.”
The old days aren’t perfect. The Hackney factory was divided into “firetrap studios,” and the pub lock-in would have been “hard on the neighbors.” (And presumably it was someone’s job to clean or maintain the bus shelters.) But in revealing what followed, there is no sense of a genealogy, catalyst, or even basic causal process. “I loved painting,” Jay recalls, “but I began to feel that there was also something rotten about it, something shallow and corrupt.” That isn’t quite right. The “it” isn’t painting itself but the scene and, more precisely, the market. Something rotten is done to painting. Jay never hints at an inherent flaw, that, say, the machismo of painting could germinate a territorial instinct in the collector, that love of art cannot help but curdle into desire for ownership, that the exercise of imposing their vision on reality and other people might be compatible with the aggressive or acquisitive. Kunzru’s previous novels depicted all manner of controlling activities,by lobbyists, hackers, planters, market mystics, prime-time propagandists. If there was a kick-yourself moment, a moment where what-might-have-been was lost or botched, it came at least as long ago as the Enlightenment. The late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century didn’t invent the human capacity for corruption and depravity, self-adulation, self-destruction—only revealed it in a thousand brand-new ways.
Leo Robson is a freelance writer. His first novel, The Boys, will be published in the UK next spring.