Hari Kunzru’s artistic anxiety

Kunzru’s latest novel attempts to tackle privilege and politics in the art world, but struggles with stereotypes and unfocussed storytelling.

In Blue Ruin, Kunzru turns his gaze to the world of art and artists. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

Writers are worried. They are aware of their position as members of a cultural coterie involved in a relatively elite system of production, which often comes with privileged access to space and financial and intellectual resources. Consider writing grants, for example, which enable writers to write funded and uninterrupted in remote locations. Then there is the massive scale of influence that comes with letting your work be promoted by global publishing giants. Maybe some liberal/progressive writers are uncomfortable with the privilege their works bring. Out of this guilt, maybe they want to contribute in some way to ongoing political battles. Blue Ruin gave me the impression that it stems from such an anxiety of the creative mind.

Hari Kunzru’s latest novel is the continuation of a project of sociocultural critique that he began with White Tears (2017), a novel examining white appropriation of Black music in America, and Red Pill (2019), which takes a deep, surreal dive into the effects of right-wing extremism in academia. This time, Kunzru turns his gaze to the world of art and artists: his first-person narrator, Jay, used to make political performance art driven by his dislike of the art world and his abusive childhood. If not well-loved, he was well-revered, a niche talent patronised by those with some faith in his ideological pursuit pose.

Blue Ruin

By Hari Kunzru

Simon & Schuster Ltd

Pages: 272

Price: Rs.699

When we first meet Jay, he is delivering groceries during the pandemic. He tries to hand over a bag of supplies to a customer, Alice, who turns out to be the estranged love of his life. Recovering from a bout of COVID-19, Jay collapses at her doorstep. And so, he is placed in a barn on the plot outside New York where Alice is isolating with her husband, Rob—the narrator’s erstwhile chaddi buddy and fellow artist who became successful while Jay fell off the map.

Add to the mix a kooky collector by the name of Marshall, and Marshall’s Black girlfriend, Nicole, and the perfect opportunity is created for Jay to unfurl the story of the last 15 or 20 years of his life to maximum dramatic effect. Why did he leave London and the art world, and where did he go? What happened between him and Alice, and how did she end up with Rob? Who are Marshall and Nicole, and how will they play a part in the denouement of Blue Ruin? It is a strong set-up. But, over the following 250 pages or so, precious little actually happens.

Overwhelming glut

The narrative commentary that Kunzru engineers and delivers through Jay suffers from a lack of economy. The story of his past is filled with tedious scenes that tease purpose but go nowhere. Numerous thematic doors, all political in nature—sexual harassment, exploitation of women in the shared space of art-making, drug use among the poor, domestic abuse, police brutality, surveillance, far right conspiracy theories, the struggle for recognition in a gatekept art world—are opened and quickly shut. Observations are made that neither affect how we read the characters nor move the plot forward. What is worse, the writing is not virtuosic or rich enough to justify this glut.

In Blue Ruin, ideas are in abundance but emotions are in short supply. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Additionally, the cast is made up of people who are barely more than stereotypes. Kunzru fails most spectacularly in his depiction of the problematic and the powerful. He does not want to identify with them himself nor does he want his readers to do that: so, he creates cardboard cutouts. A famous dead painter, evil scion of the art world, who makes a cameo appearance towards the end, is called just “FDP”. Gallerists and curators go unnamed. Friend circles are vague background smudges, sweepingly portrayed by Jay as insensible to the real stakes of politics. Even Rob, whose unpleasantness we come closest to seeing from the inside, is revealed to be irredeemably bad and incompetent.

But here, a word of praise for Marshall, the Internet fuelled, PPE-clad disavower of housework who is buying time for Rob while the latter attempts to clear a debt by painting a masterpiece. Marshall is a rogue character. Although constructed as an on-the-nose caricature of a right-wing conspiracy theorist whose obnoxious sexism and racism are supposed to place him outside the ambit of the reader’s sympathy, Marshall manages to escape Kunzru’s condemnation to stage some of the genuinely funny and interesting moments in the novel.

It is Marshall who begins, against Jay’s will, to script him back into the art discourse that he has so deliberately spirited himself away from. Jay finds, to his horror, that he enjoys hearing his work analysed, treated as significant. In the process of talking to Marshall, Jay grapples with the troubling implications of performing art pieces that are revered by the very establishments and individuals he rejects. It is an interesting realisation that Kunzru could have teased out further. But he cannot because the moral world he creates is black and white, with agents of power automatically judged as bad.

Jay’s thesis about art is stated early on in the book: “I loved painting, but I began to feel that there was something rotten about it, something shallow and corrupt. I hated its aura of luxury consumption, the knowledge that whatever you did, however confrontational you tried to be, you were–if you were lucky–just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with.”

Instead of demonstrating how ordinary motivations bind us to and sustain this kind of corruption, Kunzru delivers a morality play, the only pleasure afforded by which for the reader is the self-congratulatory feeling that they are on the side of good. In Blue Ruin, ideas are in abundance but emotions are in short supply.

Dakshayini Suresh is a feminist writer and educator based in Bengaluru.