One day, a sage was being arrogant and proclaimed his devotion to the Lord Vishnu as his greatest devotee. Vishnu, as told by the acclaimed novelist Hari Kunzru, says, “Okay, I’m not sure that’s true.” Then stuff happens to the sage: he falls in love, gets married, sets up a household and lives an entire new life until his family and home are washed away in a flood. In the middle of the flood, the sage calls out to God for help and Vishnu comes down and says, “This has all been an illusion that I have produced for you, and you now remember me because you need something from me?” Vishnu asks the arrogant sage to gaze upon a peasant singing God’s praises as he drives his oxen and plows his fields, remembering God every day despite daily duties, prompting the sage to question his life as he has been living it.
Novelist Hari Kunzru really likes this myth and shares it with me over Zoom from New York. Kunzru was thinking about illusion while writing his tenth book, Blue Ruin—the kind of illusion that can “distract you from your purpose, and then you wake up from that and have to work out where you’ve been. That interests me a lot. And in a sense that’s what happened to Jay.”
I spoke to Kunzru from London, England, where he grew up, much like the novel’s protagonist, Jay, who went to art school in the big city, but who abandons art-making permanently in his twenties and begins living undocumented in the United States in his forties, where he struggles with long COVID while delivering groceries during lockdown.
Blue Ruin is astonishing, like every Kunzru novel, in its bringing together of various influences and lives one would not expect. Titled after a slang for gin, Blue Ruin intersects the art worlds of London and New York, prompting a transatlantic odyssey that is at once a reckoning with reality and a confrontation with what it means to make art in times of crisis. From the performance artist main man, Jay, to the gun-toting art dealer in the woods, Kunzru serves up a healthy dose of capital-R Romance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
The protagonist Jay stopped making art when he was younger and moved to the United States, where he’s living undocumented and working as a driver delivering groceries to people, one of whom happens to be Alice, his ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago in London, England. He faints at her doorstep because he has long COVID and she takes care of him (secretly) in a barn. When did you begin Blue Ruin?
Hari Kunzru
I’d been turning over in my head, for a really long time, a novel about artists and how value is created in art, which is a set of things I’m interested in, then COVID happened and it was changing social relations. It had really profound changes in the ways that people were able to interact with each other and relate to each other. I suppose like a lot of people, I ended up going to The Decameron by Boccacio, a medieval book set during a plague in Florence. The people in Blue Ruin are also holed up in a house, and they tell each other stories to pass the time.
I started thinking about who left and who stayed during the pandemic. I stayed in New York, but I knew a lot of people who left because they had places out in the country they could go to—there was this moment in New York where a lot of wealthier people in the city had vacated, so a lot of stuff about class and income became very stark. That turned up in the book as well. What’s COVID if you can spend your time baking bread from recipes in the New York Times?
The question of isolation also became a part of it. And then I realized that I could make this almost classically shaped story, because Blue Ruin is all set in one place and involves a very limited group of people. I was thinking of Midsummer Night’s Dream as well, since they leave the city to go to the enchanted wood, so there’s real life and then there’s this place where reality is suspended. That’s how I ended up with fancy people in an isolated house in the middle of this giant parkland, then somebody comes in from the real and entering these spaces disrupts their bubble.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
I failed at sourdough. Tell us about the artist novel and when that began?
Hari Kunzru
The artist novel began in a very, very different way with an artist who died and somebody else was asked to deal with their estate, and somehow that just didn’t work for me, so I shelved it after not very much work—I had some sort of chunk of a few 1000 words that sat around for a few years, but I was working on it.
As the pandemic started, I needed a way to try to kind of process what was happening. One thing I did that was very useful for this book was that I kept a diary. And so I have, maybe, 15 notebooks or something from those first two years, where I tried to track what was going on with the pandemic, what we knew, what we felt was true, because I realized that our reality was changing so rapidly. Remember there was this moment where we were all bleaching packages and keeping our Amazon boxes outside the house, then that turned out not to be a real danger? It’s very hard to reconstruct what we actually thought at any given time, because another thing I’ve really noticed since the pandemic is that we all had this profound need to memory hole—everybody wanted to get back to the world again, and to go back there was just painful and unpleasant. We’ve really almost deliberately forgotten the sequence of events, so I had to go back and reconstruct what we thought and how we thought it was transmitted, or how dangerous we suspected it was. I mean, we thought we might be looking at a full collapse of civilization. I mean, that’s extraordinary to think of now when things have bounced back and we’re all behaving as if it never happened.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Jay’s memory is troubling. His relationship with Alice was life-changing, but he says that he could barely remember his time with her and that his memories were “indistinct and had no particular emotional tone.” When he’s driving he also mentions being “in the time of no time, pandemic time, formless and without direction.” As a novelist, you must think about time a lot.
Hari Kunzru
Getting older is part of it too. I mean, if I think back now, I’m 54 years old, and I try and remember the blow-by-blow of what happened in a relationship that I had in my early 20s. It is hard, and with memory you have to reconstruct things, and you think these things are true that maybe even aren’t true—your stories have become so well worn that they’ve taken the place of real things that happened. I find that completely fascinating—that we garden our memories and curate our emotions in certain ways.
All through my writing life, I’ve been very interested in the question of whether we’re as continuous as people expect: am I really the same person as I was in my 20s? Is there a straight line that takes me from one place to another? I talk about it in the book a bit, this idea of breaks, of moving from one life to another. In the Tibetan Buddhist idea of Bardo, each state of life is in between other states of life and you move from one to another. In a sort of simple way, moving from a sleeping state to being awake could be like moving from one Bardo to another. Tibetans talk about moving from life to death as being a kind of transition from one state of existence to another state of existence. This idea that we’re constantly kind of moving from one thing to the next thing, and that you can’t actually go back to these previous lives, and each time you wake up in the morning, it’s almost like you’re born again, I find that somehow beautiful and true in a particular kind of way, or just useful to me to think about how it feels to look back on a life. The people in the novel have changed so much since their early 20s and they’re having to reckon with who they were and what they did, and it’s a complicated thing for them. It interested me a lot to make those connections and work out what happened there.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Jay chooses performance art as opposed to any other kind of art form like painting, which his friend Rob does. Performance art for me is a very immediate art form that’s focused on the present, which is fitting for Jay because life is so precarious for him, and the present is both evasive and pressing when living in precarity, because then you have to think of the future, but the present is really all you have and it’s intolerable. He eventually makes his life his art in this piece called THE DRIFT WORK. Under the title, Jay adds: “The only thing left behind by the artist is the scene of his disappearance.” Why performance art?
Hari Kunzru
This comes back to the question of value. As you know painting functions in the marketplace in this particularly elite way. Painters have the potential to make very large amounts of money from making these objects, which are tokens for speculation and function as signs of taste for wealthy people. Jay was very uncomfortable with that, the idea that he would be making objects that would just be decorative. And so as a refusal of the market, one way he is thinking about it is to refuse to make something that can be commodified. Though gallerists may end up with documentation of the work, the art itself is transient and it only functions in this way because it involves the presence of the artist. This idea of the presence of the artist fascinates me. The dissolution of art into life has been an ambition for many kinds of artists and Jay kind of achieves that in a way. But what does it mean when the dissolution is total? Marshal is right in that he has to bring the work to an end.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Alice’s and Jay’s relationship reminded me of this passage in Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, about the erotic:
“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.”
Why are they drawn to each other?
Hari Kunzru
They’re both young enough to be attracted to otherness in a certain way. They look at each other operating as someone who’s from the other side of things. Alice is from a wealthy family, she’s restricted in some ways, and he seems to represent a kind of wildness and freedom. His family doesn’t support what he does so he’s free to make himself and he takes from her a relatively sort of safe version of student life into a more exciting underground world. She’s this sort of princess in a tower. It’s not the best basis for a relationship, so there’s an element of it that’s based in illusion that kind of facilitates their fantasies about each other. But they do share a kind of extraordinary erotic charge and they make a little bubble and exist inside it. It was important to me to have movies be a part of their relationship in that it’s one way they’re sort of finding out about the fantasies. In being young bohemians, it lasts for a while, and it’s beautiful for a while, and then it collapses, and they hurt each other, which is so much so often the story.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Hmm. This coincidental confrontation with Alice leads to him telling his own story and remembering the past twenty years of his life.
Hari Kunzru
I think the book is a romance, capital R romance, because it’s like a fairy story-level coincidence that prompts what he could have had a chance to say, like, “This is how it happened to me back there, how was it for you?” It’s the kind of thing that in reality we almost never get to do. You don’t ever get that moment of closure and recuperation. And it’s taking place in this fantastical, depopulated sylvan paradise. He talks about paradise as a walled garden in the book. It’s both romance and fantasy, and in a really basic way, it’s a tall story. There’s something about love affairs that are like that, they’re these little bubbles that happen.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Why do you choose to write about the things that you choose to write about?
Hari Kunzru
I don’t know. I mean, they choose me in a way. There’s a point in any project where I take a step back and I’m like, this is a very odd thing you have decided to perpetrate here. I mean, you throw yourself into these worlds and they become completely absorbing for that period of time. I kind of look back and am very surprised sometimes when I think about the choices I made. It doesn’t feel rational looking back, but I did make them.
FICTION
Blue Ruin
By Hari Kunzru
Knopf Publishing Company
Published May 14, 2024
