After White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2020), Blue Ruin (2024) is Hari Kunzru’s third novel to invoke a colour in its title. A whole palette is suggested by The Impressionist, his first novel, published in 2002. Cognitively smart, not just talismanic, decisions.
Blue Ruin is a novel about artists and art. The title derives from a painting that Rob, one of the characters, made and lost. It is unexpectedly found but is widely supposed to be the work of another painter who is now dead. Rob violently reclaims the painting. This happens against the backdrop of the return of his wife’s former lover, Jay, who, Rob is afraid, has come to reclaim his old love. Two triangles meet in this way: two men and a woman, two painters and a painting. The curious geometries of art and life mirror each other, trapped in circularities that reflect ancient myths of departure and return.
The novel is also a fable about the relation of art and ruin, of art as a process of ruination at several levels and in many senses, including the peeling off of self-identity and the glimpses of the void. The story takes place mainly in ‘paradise’—a fenced and surveilled private estate, wooded and dotted with sculptures, outside New York. Centred here, the story moves backwards and forwards to London and New York, and to a few places in Europe and India. It is the time of the pandemic.
Other than those who dominate the writer’s visual canvas, there are characters in the background and the foreground. Each is drawn with a master’s spare, sure touch. But those who rule the canvas are rendered with a magical mix of lucidity and inscrutability. We never know anyone enough, hardly know even ourselves—Kunzru seems to be saying. The unpredictability of choices that propels the narrative in unanticipated directions comes perhaps from this mysterious brew of light and darkness. The force of ideas tangled with emotions complicates the characters, subtilizing them even more.
At the centre of the novel is Jay, a recalcitrant artist of mixed-race identity and scarred by traumatic memories of teenage. A kind of Hamletian rashness has been his saviour as much as his Satan. The self-doubt that debilitates him is also the source of his creative off-roading. The impostor syndrome he suffers from is, for this reason, also his validation and ironic badge of honour, which of course he cannot accept either. He dreams of recrafting, not just recreating, the classical restraint and clarity, unlike Rob who dives into artistic license apparently without the least self-doubt. Inhibited desire shackles Jay and he leaves his art projects self-stunted and gasping for air. His paradoxical artistic quest is for disappearance, but the art market reappropriates his long absence from the scene as another work of art. If art cannibalizes life, the market cannibalizes art. This is a case of embattled autonomy twice over. What might look like performative art to a spectator is actually a life of sheer precarity. Homelessness is not freely willed vagabondage. Convictions blur into delusions. The ability to see through it all brings no solace.
Kunzru’s characteristic touch is illuminating, also because it is encyclopedic. He sees art in relation to love, sex, bohemianism, drugs, death, race, precarity, wealth, gender, social norms, market, history, psychotherapy, and whatnot. And yet he can, as only Masters can, hold it all in his hands and shape the entire stuff into a coherent, invisibly controlled narrative of sheer abundance.
In an essential way, this is a novel about art’s reliance on story. In an equally essential way, it is about how our untold stories hold us up against disintegration; to have told them is to have done with ourselves. Both these insights are fantastically, devastatingly counterintuitive. But are they untrue? Kunzru is amphibian: he swims and also watches himself from the shore. This is the use to which he puts free style narration (which Flaubert arguably pioneered in Madame Bovary) at several crucial junctures, allowing the reader to be at once inside and outside the story, to be both a sufferer and a spectator.
Rajesh Sharma taught literature in Punjabi University, Patiala. He has authored eight books, including In/disciplines (Three Essays Collective, 2014), and Re-reading Aristotle’s Poetics (Copper Coin, 2021).