Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.

Review:

Blue Ruin, the third in a theme based trilogy by Hari Kunzru, is a novel that starts with Jay delivering groceries during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. He is very sick and living in his car due to his roommates kicking him out for not wanting to catch what he has. When Jay sees that the person who he is delivering groceries to is not only a ghost from his past but someone who ghosted him years early halfway across the world, he thinks it is a side effect of his sickness. Alice was his girlfriend, lover, and drug friend at a London art school, until she ran off with Rob, another artist and friend, while Jay was lost in his drug use. Now that they are facing each other, years later and thousand of miles away, the old feelings and rivalries quickly boil over. 

The main thing that keeps this triangle together (and tears them apart) is art and their individual theories on what art means. Jay is the one who does not believe that art should not be any sort of commercial commodity. Rob has built his life on selling paintings and his biggest struggle in the moment is creating six paintings that he has already been paid to paint. While Rob works to fulfill his obligations, Jay has always done things on his own terms, leaving art behind during a final art performance, to travel the world and do whatever he needs to do to survive. In the scheme of things, Jay is much more revered for disappearing than Rob is for having years of consistent art production. This difference in philosophies and work is what keeps the wedge drawn between the two men, and makes sure the tension is high enough to where where they will never get to the same place that they were when they were young.

Kunzru raises the question. “Is art a commodity, and if so what is it worth in a society that is struggling just to survive?” By setting Blue Ruin during Covid lockdown, where none of the characters know if society is going to collapse, and they are certain that they are witnessing the end of America, is there even an importance in creating new paintings? Kunzru has created a space where Jay in his anti-commercial art makes more sense than Rob working every day trying to get paintings finished. The only other book I have read by Hari Kunzru is White Tears, and I honestly expected a much weirder story, one that becomes more surreal and convoluted, but instead we get a story that is pretty straight forward, one that has more interest in conveying a question to the readers and hoping for a discussion than turning into a art project on its own. Due to the direct manner of the story, Kunzru is making me think more about the questions that are asked and feelings that are conveyed, because this is more important than letting the style become a distraction. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.