Blue Ruin

Hari Kunzru

(Simon and Schuster, 2024)

Review by Mirza Waheed

A man arrives in a battered car to deliver groceries at a beautiful house in a walled estate somewhere outside New York and collapses in front of his masked-up customer. It’s a striking, memorable scene that sets the stage for much of the narrative action in Hari Kunzru’s riveting new novel Blue Ruin. The fainting man is British artist and longtime under-the-radar runaway, Jay, who has been living in his car, making a living delivering groceries to affluent escapees from Covid. The masked woman is Alice, his girlfriend from a past life in 1990s London. Alice is sheltering with her artist husband Rob, his gallerist Marshal and Marshal’s girlfriend Nicole in the picturesque estate, far away from viral loads and corpses of the pandemic in New York. Rob is Jay’s old friend, rival and the man with whom Alice fled 20 years ago, without a word.

The novel soon transports us to their drug- and booze-filled younger lives, in the heady art scene of East London, through masterfully conjured flashbacks. Kunzru’s prose here burns with crackling energy, mirroring the lives of his characters. Jay and Rob are young artists, breaking out, both ambitious in their own way – Jay with a sneering iconoclastic stance towards the business of making and seeing art, Rob with a more conventional attitude, attuned to producing successful, lucrative paintings. Jay drives wilfully, intensely against the grain, positioning his radical conceptual style at the centre of his performance art practice, questioning both the artist and the consumer in the art world. ‘I hated its aura of luxury consumption, the knowledge that whatever you did, however confrontational you tried to be, you were… just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with,’ he says. Rob is a good painter, but with an unrelenting focus on selling. ‘Rob revelled in all that, the hype, being part of a fashionable scene,’ Jay says of his friend.

The two of them exhibit work around the same period and haunt drug and drinking dens when not making art. Jay and Alice meet during one of their East London drinking crawls, and Jay ends up escorting a drunk and unstable Alice to her home in Kensington. Soon they are ‘Jay and Alice, Alice and Jay’, living off Alice’s money in her flat, inseparable but quickly sucked into drug-induced seclusion, watching European cinema on VHS, not seeing anyone, not doing much. So much so that Alice secretly yearns for escape and Rob, initially not drawn to her, one day runs away with her, leaving Jay stunned and hollow.

Two decades later, when Jay serendipitously washes up at their door, recuperating in the barn where Alice has hidden him, the atmosphere of pent-up heartache, resentment and guilt, compounded by the stresses of quarantined life, makes for a live-wire tableau on which Kunzru lays out the characters’ back stories with gripping acuity, particularly that of Jay who emerges as a complex, tormented and fascinating figure. The novel plants us right inside the pandemic bubble, into which the other two participants, Marshal and Nicole, bring their own breakages. Marshal, the wealthy gallerist and paranoid survivalist, is a memorable creation. He ‘detains’ Jay during the latter’s excursion into the estate’s parkland, believing him to be an intruder. The extended scene in which Marshal points a rifle at Jay and binds his hands behind him delves deep into the anxieties and the collapse of everyday mores in the early days of the pandemic. The dialogue between the characters leaps off the page; one can hear them talk, feel the danger of the muzzle of the rifle waving at Jay.

But that is not all Marshal does in the story – it is he who has brought Rob and Alice to the safety of the doomsday bunker, so that Rob can paint a series of works to pay his way out of impending bankruptcy. And it is Marshal who presents a foil to Jay’s ‘life as art’ project by asking practical, sometimes banal questions. Even as he veers on conspiracist insanity, Marshal forces us to see both Rob and Jay’s artistic selves in the context of both the material world of money and their own lived lives. What do they and their art amount to?

Bue Ruin is a novel about art and the artist, examining age-old questions about the purpose of making and consuming art, but it’s equally a story about love and belonging. Jay loves Alice, but doesn’t fully grasp the value of this love, and he has damaged her. Having come to a clearer understanding of his love, he must leave again after the fevered last encounters with her and Rob. Alice has always loved him, but must remain where she is in order to survive. Through his fraught stay with them, Jay comes to fully grasp his continuing, uncompromising need to keep moving in the world, both as an artist and man. Deeply absorbing, and by turns disturbing and entertaining, this novel will probably rank among Kunzru’s finest works in an already shining body of work. 

https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Blue-Ruin/Hari-Kunzru/9781398528918