Hari Kunzru is one of the most exciting voices working today. And his latest offering, BLUE RUIN, finds him targeting the contemporary art world -- and also capitalism? how Covid threw inequalities into high relief? It's somewhat of a departure from RED PILL, gone is the paranoia so central to that novel, though thematically there are obvious through lines across the trilogy of books. And there's a central romance to consider. I found myself deeply drawn to these characters, and invested in their predicaments. And I look forward to whatever Kunzru does next.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

3.25/5 ⭐️

I'll start off by admitting that Blue Ruin wasn't my favorite read, but I can still greatly appreciate it for the profound and thought-provoking piece that it is. Hari Kunzru’s writing is undeniably gorgeous, and I love his unique way with words and capability of imbuing even the most dismal scenes with a special lyrical beauty. However, despite this strength, I still found that this particular book maybe just wasn't the right fit for me.

Marketed as a "thriller," Blue Ruin may not satisfy readers looking for traditional suspense or high-stakes action. Instead, the novel takes a more introspective and contemplative approach, exploring many heavy themes such as depression, substance abuse, & housing instability. The world Kunzru paints is extremely bleak, and the characters are often difficult to like, which made it challenging to stay engaged at times.

I very much enjoyed the initial chapters, which delve into Jay and his friends' early years as budding artists in the UK, fueled by ambition and amphetamines. However, as the story progresses and the pacing slows, I found my attention span beginning to dwindle.

Given the recency of the Covid-19 pandemic, the novel's exploration of life during the crisis might feel a bit too close to home for some readers. However, Kunzru handles this aspect with a deft touch, using it to heighten the already tense and claustrophobic atmosphere without feeling heavy-handed. Jay’s circumstances—living out of his car and delivering groceries to the wealthy— will be relatable to many who also endured the job instability and financial hardship that the pandemic created.

Ultimately, while Blue Ruin may not have been the right book for me, I most highly recommend it to those with an appreciation for slower-paced literary fiction that delves deep into the human condition.

Thanks for Netgalley & Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the ARC!

The beginning of this book blew me away - lovely and haunting and uncomfortable and tender. Imagine being reunited with your past at a time when you're currently not living your best life...I loved the experience of being part of this process for the characters. This is about artists and perceptions of each other and ourselves looking back and making sense of the different paths we take in life. While the first part of the book kept me reading, my interest waned as the book continued but the beginning was so lovely I continued reading. I'm glad I did. Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy.

This was completely absorbing, sometimes moving and funny, and really a treat. The London parts were far, far stronger than the present/US bits, which were often preposterous. But the London parts were so good you almost don't care.

I tried really hard to get into this one, but I just wasn't able to. I am still really thankful to the publisher, author, and netgalley for granting me advanced access to this digital collection before publication day.

In Blue Ruin, after Jay an art student graduate, contracts COVID during the early days of the pandemic, his roommates kick him out, His life has suddenly shifted courses and he’s forced to live in his car. He becomes an essential worker, delivering groceries to people with far better circumstances. During one of these deliveries, he has a chance run in with a former lover, Alice, now married to Jay’s best friend. Alice shows him kindness and lets him stay with her. Then the flashbacks begin – Jay remembers when he and Alice and Rob were all optimistic art students together and the unpredictable ways in which their paths diverged. This is a heavy read about ghosts from the past as well as an interesting exploration of what makes good art. Like a painting, the reader can spend a long time contemplating this story.

It started out so well, and then the second half was not nearly as good as the first. The prose is gorgeous, but the story. Eh. None of the characters are terribly likeable, which normally doesn't bother me, but combine that with a pandemic setting, and I feel like it lost some of its point about art and creativity.

"Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion."

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

Many years ago, Jay and Rob were up-and-coming artists in London. Both close friends and rivals, the two had a falling out when Jay's girlfriend, Alice, left him for Rob. Decades later, Jay is in New York, living in his car and delivering groceries for an app in Upsate New York after having recently survived Covid. On one of his deliveries to a home on a large estate, he is shocked to find the person who placed the order is Alice. Alice invites him to stay on the estate, where she is isolating with Rob, his art dealer, and his art dealer's girlfriend. Over the course of several weeks, Jay, Alice, and Rob confront what happened all those years ago, and the ways that set in motion their very different lives.

This is a powerful and perceptive story exploring interesting themes about what it means to be an artist, what makes art valuable, and what we owe the people we love and ourselves.

Highly recommended.

This portrait of an artist was fascinating. There is so much to Jay and we get to know him SO deeply that I miss him. Kunzru managed to make this devourable despite moving around in time I always felt grounded. I did not realize this was part of a sort of triology, and I haven't read the other two, this is still quite strong as a standalone. Yes, this is another pandemic book, but it is so much more than that. I hope many readers get entranced like I did.

Blue Ruin is the final part of Hari Kunzru's trilogy on art and what it means. Blue Ruin is my favorite of the three. It takes plae during COVID but goes back in time to get into the characters lives of what made them who they are today. It Jay who you could call the main character is an artist who moves to America to become the artist that everyone told him he was destined to be. Sadly, he ends up doig delivery jobs during Covid to makes ends meet. One fateful night he delivers groceries to and old girlfriend who is now dating a very successful artist. He ends up camping in a cottage on the property of the rich boyfriend and it where we go back in time of how evryone got to be who they ar. It takes a very specific goal of trying to figure out what is art and who decides who makes it as an artist and who doesn't. Do the rich dictate art tastes and make or break careers? It's truly a book for everyone in a sense that we have all seen art in musueums and do we ever ask ourselves how it got there? I'm a big fan of book about art and artists. I am myself a creative soul and see it all aspects of the crwative field. As the world gets smaller and smaller even though we thini it's getting bigger and bigger the people with the money are starting to dictate what is going to be successful and what we get to see or not see. This is a book for our times. Thank you #knopf and #netgalley for the read. PLEASE READ THIS BOOK!!

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC of this title.

this is the third book from Hari Kunzru with a color in its title - not sure if these form a loose trilogy. White Tears was wild in the best way and put Kunzru on my radar, but Red Pill left me a little cold. This was right in the middle of those two - a lot worked, but there were a few things that didn't.

This book is at its best when it's describing the 90s London art scene - Kunzru really has a knack for conjuring up the details of what you're supposed to be seeing in your mind for all of these YBA-adjacent art students and their output, and he paints a really evocative picture of the relationships between its main trio.

The modern-day bits are a little more on-the nose - this is definitely a Pandemic Novel, and that provides good tension, but the ride to the end of the book is a little too broad and neat for me. Still, really lovely prose, and I devoured this one in as few sittings as possible.

Unfortunately I DNFed this book at about 50%. The story was very slow and did not engage me enough to continue, though I will say it was written well.

I found this novel to be a self indulgent exploration by a bunch of immature kids, who become mal adjusted immature adults, about art and what it means to them. While the idealism during the college years can be forgiven, the lack of self awareness or understanding of the world around them and how it functions, cannot. There isn’t even a contrast or redemption for these characters as adults since they continue to inhabit their selfish and narcissistic lives without any growth or evolution.

The novel opens with Jay, an essential worker delivering sacks of groceries in the nascent days of the pandemic when people were “ruled by fear and misinformation.” One of his deliveries in an area of unimaginable luxury in upstate New York is to Alice, a woman he hadn’t seen in over 20 years: “One day we were together, living in her aunt’s airless London flat, the next she was gone, leaving me to pick up the pieces.” Jay is embarrassed when Alice recognizes him knowing that he hadn’t showered for several days and that Alice could see that he lived in his car. Worse, Alice discloses that she had married Rob, a former art school friend of Jay’s, who Jay had assumed was merely a rebound relationship. When Jay, suffering the after-effects of COVID, is too ill to complete his deliveries, Alice secretly houses him on the estate.

As Jay recovers and he and Alice reminiscence, it becomes evident that neither has lived up to their early potential. Jay traveled and was a performance artist and Alice confides, “I clean up Rob’s messes.” Jay and Rob had tempestuous and competitive relationship. Jay was in awe of Rob’s ability to “metabolize culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow.” Rob and Jay met Alice at a pub, and Jay helped a very drunk Alice home, unaware “how deeply she would mark me.” A month later, Jay and Alice reconnect, and Kunzru unspools their relationship and Jay’s abandonment of painting. “I loved painting, but I began to fell that there was also something rotten about it, something shallow and corrupt. I hated its aura of luxury consumption, that knowledge that whatever you did, however, confrontational you tried to be, you were — if you were lucky -- just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with.”

When Jay is discovered , a New York gallerist isolating at the estate is ecstatic, recalling when Jay was the promising artist Jason Gates. Will Jay, who pushed back on the commodification of art, be lured back in to that world and, at what cost? Kunzru wrestles with questions about potential, fate, and ambition and explores themes of racism, opportunism and social inequities. A most satisfying read.

This is at its heart a love story albeit intellectually articulated. It is also a philosophical discussion centred around the principles of being an artist in the true sense. Jay is a talented performance artist living in London on 90s, in love with another art student Alice. As Jay continues to stick to his principles not to let his art become a slave of capitalist collectors and expresses his political views in a radical manner, his career goes into a downward spiral. The consequential substance abuse takes a toll not just on his career but his relationship with Alice: we learn early on in the book that she marries his friend Bob, also an artist but seemingly more attuned to reality and hence more successful than Jay. Alice and Jay meet again several decades later by sheer coincidence while the world is in the throes of the covid pandemic and that's where the story unfolds. Narrated in the first person by a middle-aged Jay still grappling the aftereffects of Covid. I loved this story because of its unexpected twists and turns - pretty unpredictable. Easy to read prose adds to the reading pleasure. I also want to mention that the books contains a reference to my hometown of Goa India - the trance and hippie culture prevalent there in the 70s through the 90s. Always a bonus brownie point from me. This is a book I really enjoyed reading after a long time. Makes me want to seek out the author's past work.
Thank you NetGalley, Knopf Publishing and Hari Kunzru for the ARC

After a long introductory narrative, the book perks up with a highly thoughtful discussion of the meaning of art, particularly in the context of modern art and the meaning of creating art.

This was a great book! I very much enjoyed it and I look forward to reading the author’s next work! Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

This is a very well-written book about very dysfunctional characters, set in the art world. While I really appreciated the writing, I didn’t especially enjoy the story, I just couldn’t get invested in these characters and their drama. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Published by Knopf on May 14, 2024

Blue Ruin is, I think, about the difference between art and life. Whenever we interact with others, the is at least the possibility that life becomes a performance — and what is a performance if not art?

Two artists are at the center of Blue Ruin. The narrator is Jason Gates. He has used other names, but he’s known to most as Jay. After living in different parts of the world as he tried “to engineer a way to bump into myself,” Jay is now in America.

An artist who no longer makes art, Jay is delivering groceries during the pandemic. He survived a COVID infection but he’s fatigued and weak. He’s been living in his car because his roommates kicked him out after he got sick. He’s trying to save money so he can afford a security deposit.

Jay collapses while delivering groceries to Alice, a woman he used to date but hasn’t seen in twenty years. While Jay’s collapse is related to his health, it is triggered by his sense of shame at seeing Alice while he’s in a destitute condition. “I felt as if my spirit were being pulled from my body with tongs, stretched out on display. See me, Alice. Nothing but a ragged membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing.”

When they were together, Jay lost Alice to Rob, the novel’s other key character. Rob and Jay were once friends. Rob continued to paint and went on to earn a good living as a working artist.

Alice takes pity on Jay and brings him to a country home where she lets him sleep in a barn loft. She must keep Jay’s presence a secret because the property owner is only allowing Rob, Alice, a gallerist named Marshal, and Marshal’s girlfriend Nicole to stay on the property.

Jay’s backstory occupies the novel’s middle pages. Jay’s initial desire to be a painter gives way to performance art. Jay and his friend Rob do a lot of drugs, but Rob manages to produce an occasional painting. They are in constant artistic competition that draws them together and pulls them apart.

Jay’s most successful concept is to lock himself in a room where an audience can watch him on video as he paints a self-portrait and then destroys the painting. Select individuals see a blurry Polaroid of the painting but nobody sees the actual creation. In his next show, Jay stares at a wall (signifying a “stand in the corner” punishment that his parents used to impose). He enjoys modest success with his performances, enough to keep him in drugs, although Alice comes from money and pays their larger expenses. She falls into his drug use but doesn’t have Jay’s stamina. Rob blames Jay (with some justification) for inflicting damage on Alice.

When Alice took up with Rob, Jay disappeared, occasionally surfacing to make a work of art, often blissfully unaware that some parts of the art world were still noticing his contributions. Jay’s disappearance was itself a work of art, or part of one, the final piece (he calls it Fugue) of a three-piece performance. Jay’s art is a product of his inability to live an unexamined life. His life “presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices.” Through Jay, Blue Ruin examines the process of life change: “we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.”

As the story circles back to the present, Jay’s presence in the barn becomes a source of tension. Alice’s difficult relationship with Rob and her unresolved feelings for Jay contribute to the drama. Rob would like Jay to leave, but Alice wants him to stay. Malcolm sees Jay’s reappearance as the culmination of a masterpiece (he’s particularly impressed with Rob living in his car) and hopes to monetize it, although Jay isn’t sure that what he’s been doing is a performance or that, if it is, the performance is over.

Near the end, we learn of Rob’s backstory and gain insight into his anger. His life went off course when he was working as an assistant to a successful artist who turned out to be untrustworthy. Rob feels that he (unlike Jay) has sold out, that he’s no longer making art that is true but is working for money, feeding collectors with what they want, not with something he feels the need to make. He envies Jay for never allowing money to get in the way of his artistic vision.

Threats and violence are themes in the novel, as is the question of racial division. The story is not violent, although a threat of violence emerges at the end. Rob doesn’t believe that Jay’s reappearance was coincidental and wonders if Jay is there to kill him. The George Floyd murder occurs near the novel’s end and becomes a topic of conversation — and possibly of racial tension between white Malcolm and black Nicole. Rob’s Jamaican ancestry becomes an issue when he meets Alice’s Vietnamese family in France.

The nature of art is the story’s larger theme. Jay hates the commercialism of most art, at least the art that is displayed and sold. He arguably sabotages his career on a couple of occasions because he resents the way money corrupts the purity of art.

Perhaps Jay gravitates to performance art because performances can’t be traded in a marketplace. His Fugue piece is meant as an exit from the art world, “a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” But isn’t all of life a performance? Is Jay’s life really art? The dynamic between Jay and Rob embodies the theme of art as a commodity versus art as a mirror that reflects the artist.

Additional themes include the insecurity of rich people who buy art they don’t really understand or appreciate (“they’re always terrified someone will realize they’re just wankers like the rest of us”) and the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity — the freedom to create art that feels true — when earning a living requires the creation of art that appeals to patrons or buyers. The latter theme might be at the heart of the relationship between commercially successful Rob and impoverished Jay. Should Jay be jealous of Rob’s success? Should Rob be jealous of Jay’s freedom?

The story offers a bit of understated relationship drama in the Jay-Alice-Rob triangle. Both the drama and its resolution feel honest.

The quoted passages should make clear that Hari Kanzru’s prose is several notches above average. His story is thought provoking and his characters are carefully crafted. I don’t know much about art apart from literature, but I appreciate Kanzru’s ability to tell a meaningful story about the intersection of art and life.

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Jay is kicked out of his apartment by his roommates and landlord alike because he contracted COVID early on in the lockdown. He lives in his car and earns money by delivering groceries when he feels well enough to drive. One delivery takes him to this upscale compound where he is greeted by a woman with a mask who turns out to be his former lover, Alice, from 30 years ago. Alice is now married to Jay's former best friend Rob. When Jay passes out from his illness, Alice takes him to the barn where he can sleep and recover safely and in peace. As Jay lies on his bed delirious the storyline takes you back to the trio's youth when Jay and Rob went to art school together and were both up and comers. The book delves into the art world both logistically and philosophically. Rob is a painter and Jay is a performance artist.. Jay and Alice get obsessed in a drug centric culture and seem bent on mutual self destruction. Eventually, she runs away with Rob.

As Jay recovers from his illness he sees Rob and the others living in the compound. There is plenty of dysfunction to go around among almost every character in the book. That doesn't detract from the storyline as it delves into issues like how does the industry pick its losers and winners? If art makes money does that diminish the artistic quality?

Some of the characters are more unhinged then others as they try to find control during the early days of COVID. This is a particularly messy book, that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this early reader version.