Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

Reviewed by Harriet

Even with the mask on, I recognized her at once. She was standing on the porch of the house at the end of the drive, her weight on one foot, the other leg relaxed, her left hand gripping her right wrist so the fingers and thumb made a cuff, a distinctive gesture that I had sometimes teased her about, telling her she looked as if she were handing herself in to the authorities. Her hair was still long, pushed up into a messy bun. She wore flip-flops and cutoffs, a faded band tee shirt, a clear visor and a pair of blue surgical gloves. Her arms and legs were smooth and tan.

Before this novel came my way, I’d never read anything by Hari Kunzru, though Annabel has reviewed two of his earlier novels for Shiny [here and here]. Blue Ruin is the most recent of his seven novels, published last year and just out in paperback, and I was completely hooked by that first paragraph. Like all the best first paragraphs, there are so many elements that provide clues to what is happening and what is to come. The mask – given the date (2022) when it was written, probably lockdown? The recognition ‘at once’ – it’s a while since their last meeting, and the gesture ‘I had sometimes teased her about’ – a close and lasting relationship, but possibly one which had elements which were against the law, hence ‘handing herself in to the authorities’. The location – the house is at the end of a drive, so a large property. The long hair, the casual clothes, the tan – summer time, probably in the countryside, and the visor and surgical gloves – lockdown again, and a very strict one at that. 

Some of these clues are fleshed out straight away. This is Alice, and Jay, the narrator, has not seen her for twenty years, not since she left the ‘airless’ London flat where they had been living together, with ‘no letter, no goodbye…leaving me to pick up the pieces’. The back story is revealed with infinite slowness, and some of it has to be pieced together by the reader. At first all we know is that Jay is in bad shape, and had been living in his car since he was thrown out of his cheap housing after being diagnosed with the corona virus. He’s working as a delivery driver, is suffering from long covid, is dirty, battered, and generally in poor mental shape: he thinks of himself as ‘Nothing but a ragged membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing’. But Alice, who is now married to their old friend Rob, a much sought-after painter, insists that he stays in a barn on the large property where they now live: she will bring him food as he must keep hidden. The need for secrecy, it transpires, is that the estate where they are living is in charge of Marshall, a young, wealthy gallerist who is obsessively paranoid and patrols the grounds with a rifle. However, when Marshall meets Jay, after being dissuaded from shooting him dead on the spot, he becomes wildly excited, recognising him as a once-celebrated conceptual artist who has long been assumed to be dead. It’s only now that the past of the three main protagonists emerges: their art-school days in the 90s, Rob and Jay’s close friendship, the heavy and destructive drug-taking, Jay’s emergence on the art scene, when he narrowly misses winning the unnamed annual art prize (the Turner?), and his subsequent disappearance. This had been initially planned as part of a three-part piece of conceptual art, ‘The Driftwork’, which was structured as a sequence of three pieces: ‘No Trace’, ‘Return’ and ‘Fugue’. Backed by a gallery – Jay was pretty much flavour of the month at that point – it included passport burning, illegal entry into France and subsequently into the US, and final disappearance. Whether he ever thought he would come back is not clear, even to Jay, who has been living in New York as an illegal alien for decades.

The picture of the increasingly incessant drug-taking and its effect on the participants is  distressingly authentic, as is Jay’s art-school envy of the seemingly effortless ease with which Rob produces his paintings. But the novel portrays with infinite skill the intersection between money, class and race, from the 1990s to the present day. Both Jay and Alice are mixed race, but their backgrounds could not be less similar: Jay the product of a one-night stand between a Jamaican man and a working-class white woman, Alice half French, half Vietnamese, and coming from a background of wealth and comfort. As for the art world, the shocking emptiness with which art is bought and sold by multimillionaires more interested in the name of the artist than in the work itself becomes an important theme towards the close of the novel, in which Rob, now a womanising drunk, is under pressure to produce work he is no longer capable of, something which becomes crucial in the final twist. 

I enjoyed this novel more than I can say, and am happy that I now have Kunzru’s backlist to enjoy.

Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.

Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin (Scribner, 2025).  978-1398528949, 288pp., paperback.

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