For some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends. Thoughtful criticism can play this role writ large. I can still remember the reviewers who first stimulated my interest in particular authors: Martin Amis’ collected reviews of various J. G. Ballard novels in The War Against Cliché; Alan Hollinghurst’s insightful review of Bryan Washington’s first novel Memorial and Washington’s excellent collection of interconnected short stories, Lot; or Rachel Kushner’s paean to Denis Johnson in The Hard Crowd. A decade ago, a colleague did me a service by handing me a copy of Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011), saying, “I think you will like this,” and making some reference to the book reminding him of Townes Van Zandt’s music. Interesting, I thought, and this recommendation has taken me down a Hari Kunzru rabbit hole, reading all his books I could collect, as well as his wife Katie Kitamura’s novels along the way. Kunzru is a polymath who brings deep cultural and political knowledge into play in his well-crafted and poignant novels. On his podcast Into the Zone for the Pushkin network, Kunzru mines his interests in philosophy and punk music. In his articles for the New York Review of Books, he has written insightfully about whiteness and the alt-right. Kunzru weaves together cultural, political, and technological analysis in his novels, which speaks to the best aspects of the “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit” at Warwick University of which Kunzru was a member in the 1990s along with Mark Fisher, Sadie Plant, and Nick Land. Since parting ways with his left-wing cyberpunk colleagues, Nick Land has become infamous as the godfather of accelerationism and a key figure in the Dark Enlightenment movement. The territory mapped out by Land and other neo-reactionary and European New Right thinkers is explored in Kunzru’s hauntingly paranoid novel Red Pill.
Kunzru’s latest novel, Blue Ruin (2024), is the third instalment in an excellent series of very loosely connected novels that also includes White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2020). Kunzru’s tricolore novels, like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, White, Red film trilogy, subtly explore questions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The stories propelling Kunzru’s last three novels forward revolve around intense intimate relationships and troubled friendships, loneliness and the production of art, the obsessive search for meaning and the rarest blues record on earth, and white male privilege. Like Kieślowski, with his brilliant earlier set of Dekalog films, Kunzru’s back catalogue of novels is just as good as his recent works.
Kunzru’s novel My Revolutions (2007) focuses on an anti-Vietnam war collective in London that radicalizes and develops associations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Most interesting in the novel is the increasingly destructive nature of this cell of radicals as they consider the need for violence and seek to purge spies from their ranks and bourgeois tendencies from within their own selves. This self-purification occurs through harrowing struggle sessions of “Criticism-Self-Criticism,” wherein members of the activist grouping sit in a circle and annihilate each other’s personalities and lack of political correctness. None of this, it should be obvious, is nostalgic about baby boomer activism or self-discovery. But it is a fascinating reflection on how the brutalities of the American and Israeli states, in a different era, led activists to justify acts of terrorism. When it comes to justifying political violence, My Revolutions reminds me of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel Creation Lake, which focuses on an eco-activist commune in southern France and its convoluted agrarian-Marxist ideology. When it comes to living anonymously after committing acts of violence, the novel is reminiscent of two novels set on the other side of the Atlantic: Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. The intrigue in My Revolutions centers around how one goes underground to live an inconspicuous life, and in the case of this novel a rather bland life, after committing acts of political terrorism.
If this all sounds too politically weighty and didactic for some readers, it is important to note that Kunzru’s novels all feature intense personal relations and that Kunzru handles political issues with a deft touch even when delving into the ugly, like the mindset of the modern far-right and long legacies of anti-Black racism. He is especially talented at describing the backstories of his characters, particularly their childhood relationships with their parents; this is done in a highly engaging manner in Blue Ruin and My Revolutions.
Possibly Kunzru’s best-known novel before his color books is Gods Without Men (2012). This is his Cloud Atlas; with different plots, from different time periods, centered around the deserts of the American southwest, coming and going chapter after chapter in the novel. The most engaging story of its multiple strands focuses on a young boy Raji, who is profoundly autistic, and the struggles of his parents Jaz and Lisa. Indian American Jaz is a math Ph.D. who works in Wall Street finance, while Jewish American Lisa is the primary caregiver for their very time-demanding son. Of their family division of labor Kunzru writes:
Every weekday morning for four years Jaz had felt guilty. Guilty as he closed the front door and headed for the subway, guilty as he bought his Times at the news-stand; it was always such a relief to be away from Raj’s relentless tantrums. Lisa had a shitty deal and he knew it and she knew he knew, and that was the hairline crack in the bowl, the start of their trouble. Before Raj came along they’d been fine. A terrible thing for a father to think about his son, but it was true.
The novel compellingly captures the bone-deep exhaustion of Lisa’s care for Raji, and the seductive pull of reckless behavior as a means of reconnecting with her body and reclaiming an identity beyond that of her son’s caregiver.
Raji is lost during a family desert sightseeing trip. Like many of David Mitchell’s novels, there is an element of mysticism and the supernatural in Kunzru’s Gods Without Men, but thankfully this mysticism is mostly firmly tongue in cheek as is often the case with the sly comedy of Kunzru. The most delicious example of his comic sensibility in Gods Without Men is the “Walter model,” designed to predict the behavior of global financial markets by the firm that employs Jaz, but may also have been responsible for the 2008 global financial crisis. The model doesn’t just rely on standard data, but draws on . . .
the most esoteric numbers: small-arms sales in the Horn of Africa, the population of Gary, Indiana, between 1940 and 2008, the population of Magnitogorsk, Siberia, for the same years, prostitution arrests in major American cities, data traffic over the TPE trans-Pacific cable, the height of the water table in various subregions of the Maghreb.
An invention like the “Walter model” shows what perverse fun fiction can be, both to write and to read.
Finally, Gods Without Men is worth reading just for the sections featuring an extremely entertaining, drug- and alcohol-addled aging British rocker who has disappeared into the desert on a U.S. tour. This midlife crisis brain-wreck gets to know Raji’s parents at a remote desert hotel and is briefly a suspect in Raji’s disappearance. The rock star has many wickedly funny lines, and the image of him shooting cacti while stumbling around the desert pleading on the phone for his onetime girlfriend to give him another chance is a combination of modern high farce and celebrity psychobabble superbly delivered.
The novel Blue Ruin narrates a love triangle between three London art students: Jay, Alice, and Rob. We first meet Jay and Alice as a couple who take huge amounts of drugs, nearly kill themselves as a result, in a relationship that would alarm even the most chill parents. Their family backstories turn out to be at different ends of the class hierarchy; Jay is from a poor and neglected background, while Alice’s family is extremely wealthy with terrifying expectations. The prospect of Jay meeting Alice’s family, and of being her boyfriend in a truly open way, is undermined by these expectations, including the anticipated disapproval of Jay’s Black skin color by Alice’s matriarch benefactor, her Vietnamese English grandmother. In this maelstrom, the more conventional, and white, Rob emerges as the more respectable boyfriend for Alice. When we move to the present, we discover that Rob is a very successful “Cool Britannia” painter of pop art, whereas Jay’s journey has consisted of working-class labor (in construction and the gig-economy) and complete anonymity, possibly as “performance art.” This “life as art” reminds one of Giddle in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers:
A waitress but also playing the part of one: girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag. Life, Giddle said, was the thing to treat as art. Once upon a time she had hung around Warhol’s Factory.
But unlike the characters in Kushner’s quirky epic, there is very little that is conventionally cool about post-art-school Jay’s hard existence of “art” at the margins of American society.
The contemporary sections of Blue Ruin are set in motion by a Paul Auster-type coincidence probably a little too unlikely and contrived for some readers, but as an Auster fan I embraced it in the spirit of fiction. The COVID-19 pandemic brings Jay and Alice back into contact when Jay delivers groceries to Alice at a rural retreat in upstate New York. While reading it, I thought if only I’d had a country house along the Hudson River or in New England to retreat to during the pandemic, like Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton or Gary Shteyngart’s hipsters in Our Country Friends. Sure, things aren’t always a picnic on these farms in terms of the human relations, and this is definitely so in Blue Ruin where the wealthy behave bestially as their ideas about safety, wellness, and entitlement trend toward neo-feudalism and conspiritualism (a topic Kunzru has written insightfully about for the New York Review of Books). I enjoyed the backstory more than the present in Blue Ruin, but the reunion of Jay and Alice kept me guessing and interested in what would come next. For such an ideas-driven writer, Kunzru is good at maintaining narrative suspense and getting you to ride along with him no matter how twisty or dreamlike his plots get.
Some reviewers of Blue Ruin have described the characters as “one-dimensional” — a common complaint of the nonplussed reviewer of several novels I have recently enjoyed. I often wonder if the use of this term tells you more about the reviewer’s lack of imagination than about the novelist’s inability to create deep characters. An overly drawn character in a novel can crush one’s imagination under the weight of pedantic detail; on balance, I tend to prefer novels that sketch the outlines of characters through memorable details and anecdotes, rather than overwhelming the reader with information. David Szalay gives a master class in providing just the right amount of detail in his portrayal of the inarticulate Hungarian leading man at the heart of his Booker winner Flesh.
The sociological issue running through most of Kunzru’s novels is racism: he returns again and again to it, often via mixed-race characters or relationships (this is autobiographical, as he is the child of an Indian father and a British mother). Exploring the privileges of whiteness is one of the many strengths of his novels, and it is most poignantly on display in White Tears, where the complexities and depth of white racism in the U.S. are inventively explored. This book recounts the obsessions of a couple of New York hipsters — a superwealthy, white, dreadlocked trust-fund baby and his poorer sidekick — to collect the rarest African American blues albums of all time. This novel starts out as the story of a college friendship, one that leads the friends to start up a Brooklyn-based record production and collecting company. However, the book takes a neo-Joycean turn in the thrillingly written last section, a dreamlike stream of consciousness in which the collectors visit the Mississippi Delta, passing through the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become a guitar god. In its experimental last quarter, the novel deals with racism in a powerfully visceral manner, attempting to make you feel how whiteness blinds his characters to the trauma deep in the blues, both as a cultural expression and as a music form that white collectors want to possess. White tears are created in the pursuit of the blues music borne out of Black tears.
The brilliant academic and gifted novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has challenged us not to use terms like “dark childhood” or “black mark,” as they rely on an underlying racism in which dark or black is the naturalized negative and light or white is a naturalized positive. An obvious example: a white lie is largely seen as harmless, whereas a black lie is understood as harmful. Then there are the highly negative connotations of the term “Prince of Darkness” in mythology, as opposed to the “Prince of Light” associated with the archangel Michael, who represents truth and light. Heeding Nguyen’s challenge to not use the terms dark or black as metaphors turns out to be challenging, because the terms are such commonplace ways of instantly describing negative, bad, or macabre things. Both Kunzru and Nguyen, in their deep and inventive novels, get us to confront these habits of whiteness. Luckily for those trying to do better, both novelists are brilliant at explaining why language, history, humility, and humor matter on the human journey of not repeating the mistakes and misdeeds of the past. Unfortunately, as Red Pill, the last novel I will discuss here, reminds us, the arc of the moral universe often bends backwards towards injustice.
Red Pill is interspersed with episodes of depression, isolation, fetishized TV ultraviolence, Norse mythology, and male angst, making its themes reminiscent of the world that produced the chronically online contemporary alt-right. However, the main protagonist of Red Pill is a lost liberal writer rather than a right-winger with a silly Roman pseudonym like Publius Decius Mus (a.k.a. Trump’s former head of Policy Planning at the State Department, Michael Anton). The unnamed male narrator starts losing his mind during a three-month writing scholarship at the Deuter Center around 2016, on the banks of Lake Wannsee in Berlin, where the Nazis held their “Final Solution” conference in 1942. He doesn’t want to follow the rules of the writers’ center and write daily in the communal space; instead, he wants to work alone in his room. However, once isolated, he grows depressed and obsessed with an ultraviolent crime show that seems to be spreading French New Right reactionary ideas.
Day and night intertwine, and the novel becomes increasingly nightmarish. Vignettes of characters and journeys emerge. First, at the writers’ center, he is told the life story of a cleaner, a former East German punk who was violently recruited by the Stasi. This fragment was published as a standalone short story in the New Yorker, and the thought that things like this happened further adds to the pathos and mythology of Berlin as the coolest city on earth for many hipsters. Once free of Berlin, the narrator wanders through various alt-right myths and conspiracies in his search for Anton, the creator of the cop show he has been obsessively watching and decoding. At this point in the novel, paranoia and conspiracies abound, and the narrative starts getting neo-Joycean in style, rather like Will Self’s novel Umbrella. Both Umbrella and Red Pill experiment with dreamlike states. They also enter R. D. Laing territory (Laing was a pioneer of the anti-psychiatry movement) and explore insanity as a rational response to increasingly irrational times, such as the rise of Trump and the alt-right in the case of Red Pill. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator is seeing doctors and taking medications to overcome his descent into paranoia, but he questions whether his “madness” needs to be “cured,” asking: “But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?”
Unfortunately, affairs in the U.S. and Europe have become only more insane since Red Pill published in 2020, making words like “mad” and “madness” more weighty double entendres today. Kunzru’s novels offer a powerful corrective to mainstream media’s tendency to underplay a long legacy of past injustices and to sanewash the daily insanities of Trump and his equivalents around the world. All of his novels delve deeply into the past as a way of understanding the present, often at a personal level even more than at a societal level. Listening to interviews with Kunzru, or reading his nonfiction, it is obvious how well read and learned he is, and it is hard not to be a little envious of his lucidity and intellect. Luckily, we have his very approachable novels to read, to benefit from the emotional intelligence and deep political reflections of someone who has done more reading and thinking than many of us combined. In an age that too often rewards ignorance and bad-faith arguments, Kunzru reminds us of the charisma of intelligence and beautiful writing.
Brendon O'Connor is a Professor at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of several books on anti-Americanism and American politics. His Bluesky account is: @brendonoconnor.bsky.social.
Thank you so much for this!