Painters are more prone than writers, Edmund Wilson said, to “acquire the manners and the patter of the rich.” Sometimes those manners are no manners at all. In the cartoonish version of the contemporary art world that Hari Kunzru depicts in “Blue Ruin,” his new novel, we meet two competing artists. We can tell who the bad one is because he sniggers. And giggles. And spits. He has thinning hair and a paunch. He calls women “birds.”
A different scoundrel in “Blue Ruin” hisses. Kunzru’s bad people are obvious racists, goons who ask how their own daughters are in bed, gun nuts, security freaks or the makers of complicated health smoothies. Through this morass of bad taste and broken values strides the novel’s protagonist, a performance artist named Jay, who lives humbly, sleeps in his car, resembles a piece of driftwood, works manual jobs, moves around the world directing his imagination toward “a future free of domination and exploitation,” and is somehow, at the same time, probably the greatest artist in the world.
The two most tortured and pretentious memoirs I’ve ever read, from artists at any rate, are Marina Abramovic’s “Walk Through Walls” (2016) and Werner Herzog’s “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” (2023). In print, away from what they do best, Abramovic and Herzog can’t help inflating every emotion. Their books are unintentional comic masterpieces. “Blue Ruin” reminded me of both. The sentences read like these:
I have walked for miles along roaring highways, strafed by lights. I have been chased by feral strangers, who tried to throw me off a bridge.
This novel’s love story has the same overwrought tone, fit for a voice reading by Orson Welles.
We were star-crossed lovers, fleeing across Europe, looking soulfully out of the window at the flying countryside as we pondered the unsolvable problems of our lives.
Put a few thousand sentences like these between hard covers, add wooden dialogue (“you can’t love someone unless you love yourself, Jay”), and you have “Blue Ruin.”
I was surprised to find so little to admire in this novel. Kunzru’s reviews and essays, in places like Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, have style and bite. He’s a byline to search out.
“Blue Ruin” is the third and final volume in a loose trilogy of novels that began with “White Tears” in 2017. Then came “Red Pill” three years later. These books are his own Three Colors trilogy, in the manner of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films from the early 1990s: “Blue,” “White” and “Red.” The colors are those of the flag of France, and on a certain level Kieslowski was taking the pulse of France’s culture and civilization.
Kunzru is after similar game in his trilogy. “White Tears” is about irresponsible white record collectors chasing Black music in the American South; it’s a book about wealth and inequality, about the sources of creativity, and about racism, the country’s original sin. “Red Pill” puts us inside the mind of a writer at a literary retreat in Berlin. He finds himself and others under intense surveillance. (Who wants to spy on literary novelists?) The novel broadens, through the writer’s acquaintance with a TV producer, into a ripped-from-the-headlines examination of mind control and far-right online discourse. It ends with Donald J. Trump’s election.
Each of these novels leans on implausibilities and heavy-handed politics. There is almost no humor or lightness of spirit. Exacting description of everyday things is rare. If I had to pick a sentence that best captures the tone of all three, it would be this one, from “Red Pill”: “I was entering a period when everything around me seemed to be encrusted in signs.”
“Blue Ruin” is a Covid novel, and it opens with a vivid tableau. A group of wealthy art-world people are hiding out in a luxurious compound in upstate New York, and they begin to wonder: Is the man who delivered our groceries here to kill us?
The delivery man — the essential worker — is Jay, the performance artist, who all but vanished two decades ago. In a steep coincidence, the people in the compound include his former best friend, a painter named Rob — he’s the one who spits and giggles — and Jay’s former girlfriend, Alice, who ran away with Rob. Rob went on to have a big art career, but he’s an obvious sellout, a moral idiot, and he is now struggling and sniggering.
Jay, who seems to have a form of long Covid, collapses during his delivery. Alice hides him in a well-appointed barn on the property, without telling anyone else. Jay settles in. He’s warned not to go outside, because the property’s owner is (of course) a surveillance freak and eager to blast any intruders, probably with a drone. Jay, being Jay, goes outside anyway.
This story peels away to show Jay, Rob and Alice decades earlier, in London, where the two men were in art school together. The theory talk is airy and ardent. Alice, who is interested in curation, writes a press release about “seeking a relational exterior to capitalist modes of exchange,” and in books Jay underlines “phrases about the reification of social relations, and spaces of intersubjective connection.”
After the breakup, Jay seemed to vanish, but he was working all along. Some of his art sounds notional. (“I would go to a particular place at a particular time of day. I would do something or refrain from doing it.”) His disappearance is his masterpiece, a 20-year project titled “Fugue.” He drifts across borders, like an immigrant. He lives in fetid apartments. Everything he owns fits into a backpack and two cardboard boxes. He smells bad.
Are tribulations tribulations if you can be rid of them at the snap of your fingers? Can inventing and enduring them become a form of moral tourism? “People in her world had insurance,” Jay sneers about Alice in her compound. We all agree that compounds, especially when owned by other people, are bad. They’re where billionaire villains sharpen their mustachios. But is Jay better than Alice because he chooses to live without health insurance?
Did Jay not go online for 20 years? He seems to have no idea what happened to Rob and Alice, who are now important art world figures. Similarly, he has no idea he’s become an art world legend of his own.
“Am I in a porno movie right now?” one character asks, when he’s told that the delivery guy happens to be Alice’s old flame. (I dropped an unprintable modifier from that quote.) It’s the best and most honest line in the book.
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