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A Novel
by Hari Kunzru
Book Reviewed by: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.
Excerpt
Blue Ruin
I swung my legs out of bed and stood up carefully. I felt light-headed and hungry, though better than before. I decided to go and scavenge through the bags of groceries in the car, but when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I found a tote bag filled with supplies and a note from Alice saying I'd been asleep when she came and she hadn't wanted to wake me. There were some cut sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, bottled water, painkillers, toilet paper, a toothbrush, hand sanitizer, fresh masks. I held the bag as if it were a bomb. It had been a long time since anyone had made me a care package.
One corner of the barn had been partitioned with plasterboard, and I opened a door to find a basic but functional bathroom with a shower stall wedged next to the toilet. I went to the car to see if I had any fresh clothes. An hour later I was washed, dressed and shaved, feeling cleaner than I had in days, but so tired that I had to go back upstairs to lie down. Almost at once I ...
Like Red Pill and White Tears, the first two novels in Hari Kunzru's loosely connected Three-Colors trilogy, Blue Ruin stands alone as both a powerful novel of ideas and a compelling story. Although the three books are entirely different in theme, character, and setting, each focuses on specific cultural moments of the recent past. Blue Ruin alternates between the London art scene during the final years of the 20th century—in its exhilarating heyday of change, youth, and lucrative optimism—and upstate New York twenty years later, during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, which so sharply exposed the different trajectories of those with wealth and privilege and those without resources.
Kunzru is masterful at sprinkling surprising revelations into the plot, which will keep readers continually reshaping their impressions as more intriguing details are unveiled. This novel may raise more questions than it answers, but Kunzru is wise to utilize the urgencies of the pandemic—the very definition of an unknowable future—to spur his characters into grappling with their complicated pasts and imagining lives beyond lockdown...continued
Full Review
(675 words)
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
One of the many questions about the art world probed by Hari Kunzru in his new novel Blue Ruin is the notion of provenance in the context of a working relationship between a well-known artist and his paid assistant. Does an assistant's creative output in any way belong to them? Or does it belong solely to the artist for whom they work?
Artists have long utilized the support of assistants, also called fabricators, but these relationships have changed dramatically over time. The great masters of old carefully trained their assistants as apprentices, so their working relationships were closer to that of teacher and student. In their masters' studios, assistants would be given opportunities to hone their own skills. There are many ...
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