Blue Ruin

by Hari Kunzru

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A blazing story about art and commerce, ego and ambition. This is a literary page-turner about how we live now, the price we pay for the choices we make, and who gets to call themself an artist.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty and power, capital, art and those who devote their lives to creating it

Once, Jay was an artist. After graduating from art school in London, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career taking shape before him. That was not to happen. Now, undocumented in the United States, having survived Covid, he lives out of his car and barely makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. One day, as Jay attempts to make a delivery at a house surrounded by acres of woods, he is confronted by his destructive past: Alice, a former lover from his art school days, and the friend she left him for. Recognizing Jay’s dire circumstances, Alice invites him to stay on their property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting in motion a reckoning that has been decades in the making.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593801383
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	123,217
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

HARI KUNZRU is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper's Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/05/2024

Kunzru (Red Pill) takes on the excessive and rapacious tendencies of the art world in his dazzling latest. Jay, a 40-something undocumented performance artist from India, left behind the competitive milieu of his London art school after becoming disillusioned, and has supported himself with various manual labor jobs. Now, during the first summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, he lives in his car and delivers groceries in Upstate New York. The gig brings him to the home of his ex-girlfriend Alice and his former best friend Rob, whom Alice left him for 20 years earlier in London. Fatigued and beleaguered by brain fog two months after getting Covid, Jay cautiously reenters his old friends’ lives. Alice, stuck managing Rob’s studio, is reminded of the freer life she used to lead with Jay, while Rob, a successful painter, reveals himself to be a consummate art monster, cheating on Alice and spending too much of their money on lavish, boozy parties. When Rob’s gallerist, Marshal, learns of Jay’s long-running self-documentation project, Fugue, he’s desperate to work with the performance artist. If Jay doesn’t let his life’s work be documented, Marshal argues, “It will slip away into nothingness you’re just some guy who left the art world.” The gripping tension between Jay and the rest of the cast gives way in the graceful final scene to a feeling as melancholy as watching a beloved painting get auctioned off in a beige room at Sotheby’s. This is immensely satisfying. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

I read everything Hari Kunzru writes, for my highest pleasure and my deepest sustenance.”
—Rachel Kushner

“Kunzru brings his singular mix of dread and intrigue to his latest fiction, an intricate tale of artistic creation, greed and exploitation set in upstate New York under the specter of Covid.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A provocative portrait of a once-promising artist as a disillusioned man of a certain age.”
—TIME Magazine

“[Blue Ruin] promises to be harrowing and darkly funny. Kunzru has a knack for the nightmarish present, and few things feel more nightmarish than a forced confrontation with the past in the early stages of the pandemic.”
—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”

“Kunzru’s [Blue Ruin] is a triumph of beauty and a true ode to the artist.”
—Oprah Daily, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”

“Kunzru takes on the excessive and rapacious tendencies of the art world in his dazzling latest . . . [Blue Ruin] is immensely satisfying.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred

“A lively, ever-intensifying story of race, immigration, work, and what it means to earn a living . . . [Blue Ruin is] a darkly ironic tale of two bubbles—an art world divorced from economic reality and a Covid era that segregated us from society . . . A dark, smart, provocative tale of the perils of art making.”
—Kirkus, starred

“Exquisite writing and keen insights into class tensions and creative dilemmas. Kunzru affirms that it’s always a good time to live an examined life, even during a pandemic.”
—Booklist, starred

“Brilliant . . . Coincidence is a dangerous narrative tool to mess around with, but Kunzru pulls it off in Blue Ruin thanks to the subtle characterizations and intricate layers with which he expands his premise. Buried resentments and jettisoned ambitions come to the fore as Kunzru explores themes of racism, opportunism and the inequities of privilege and hardship. The result is an exceptional work that finds new variations on the familiar chestnut that people aren’t always what they seem.”
—BookPage, starred

From the Publisher

04/01/2024

While making a grocery delivery during the early months of the pandemic, Jay stumbles into a COVID pod occupied by, among others, his ex-girlfriend Alice and her now husband (and Jay's former best friend), Rob. Twenty years earlier, the three had been part of an artists' community in London. Rob has since become a moderately successful painter, while Jay, a conceptual performance artist, has disappeared from the art world; at the time of the novel's opening, is unhoused, living illegally in the United States, and subsisting on gig work. Rob, who is at the moment artistically blocked, is unwilling to believe that Jay's sudden reappearance in his life is by chance. Meanwhile, gallerist Marshall, who has fallen into the hole of online conspiracy theories, is trying to make lucrative art deals involving Rob and a former mentor. VERDICT Kunzru (Red Pill) has a gift for vivid, visceral description, whether it's the drug-fueled squalor of London's underground art scene or the gentrified New York compound where Jay finds himself. Along the way, there are thematic threads involving the commodification of art and conflicts of class and race (both Jay and Alice are biracial). Kunzru's unique style and perspective make for a fun, though edgy ride.—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Library Journal

★ 2024-02-17
A starving artist stumbles into his past—and the ugly side of wealth—in this prickly allegory.

Kunzru’s seventh novel is narrated by Jay, who in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic is in ill health, getting by delivering groceries in upstate New York. His route takes him to an estate that’s coincidentally occupied by Alice, a former flame, and her husband, Rob, Jay’s one-time art school rival. Alice is disinclined to bring him into their pod for fear of infection—or of stoking old drama—so instead hides him in a barn while his health improves. In the weeks that follow, Jay recalls the messiness of their relationships three decades prior: He and Alice were once inseparable, and he and Rob competed in British art school but were also friendly, bonded by ambition and drugs. But as their art world fortunes diverged, Jay’s despair and drug use intensified, prompting Alice to leave him for Rob. Kunzru cannily withholds a few details about this dynamic, but from the start the novel is a study of the complications of art, money, and identity. Is Rob more free as an artist for having access to wealthy patrons? Does Jay have more integrity for sabotaging his art world prospects? And why do muses like Alice absorb so much abuse up on that pedestal? This novel completes a kind of trilogy by Kunzru on contemporary social crises, from systemic racism (White Tears, 2017) to neofascism (Red Pill, 2020) to, here, Gilded Age income inequality, topped off with paranoia and misinformation. The love triangle plot is a bit potted, and tonally and thematically Kunzru is borrowing from Martin Amis’ 1980s work. But it’s a lively, ever-intensifying story as Jay weaves in discussions of race, immigration, work, and what it means to earn a living. It’s a darkly ironic tale of two bubbles—an art world divorced from economic reality and a Covid era that segregated us from society.

A dark, smart, provocative tale of the perils of art making.

Kirkus Reviews