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.

I really enjoy Knuzru's books and I thought this got better and better as went. Old flames from art school find each other in an unlikely spot in the middle of the 2020 lockdown. Their lives have taken completely different paths, and as they warily get to know each other again - we learn both about their past and their present.

Well told tale that I think almost everybody can relate to.

Blue Ruin, the third in a theme based trilogy by Hari Kunzru, is a novel that starts with Jay delivering groceries during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. He is very sick and living in his car due to his roommates kicking him out for not wanting to catch what he has. When Jay sees that the person who he is delivering groceries to is not only a ghost from his past but someone who ghosted him years early halfway across the world, he thinks it is a side effect of his sickness. Alice was his girlfriend, lover, and drug friend at a London art school, until she ran off with Rob, another artist and friend, while Jay was lost in his drug use. Now that they are facing each other, years later and thousand of miles away, the old feelings and rivalries quickly boil over.

The main thing that keeps this triangle together (and tears them apart) is art and their individual theories on what art means. Jay is the one who does not believe that art should not be any sort of commercial commodity. Rob has built his life on selling paintings and his biggest struggle in the moment is creating six paintings that he has already been paid to paint. While Rob works to fulfill his obligations, Jay has always done things on his own terms, leaving art behind during a final art performance, to travel the world and do whatever he needs to do to survive. In the scheme of things, Jay is much more revered for disappearing than Rob is for having years of consistent art production. This difference in philosophies and work is what keeps the wedge drawn between the two men, and makes sure the tension is high enough to where where they will never get to the same place that they were when they were young.

Kunzru raises the question. “Is art a commodity, and if so what is it worth in a society that is struggling just to survive?” By setting Blue Ruin during Covid lockdown, where none of the characters know if society is going to collapse, and they are certain that they are witnessing the end of America, is there even an importance in creating new paintings? Kunzru has created a space where Jay in his anti-commercial art makes more sense than Rob working every day trying to get paintings finished. The only other book I have read by Hari Kunzru is White Tears, and I honestly expected a much weirder story, one that becomes more surreal and convoluted, but instead we get a story that is pretty straight forward, one that has more interest in conveying a question to the readers and hoping for a discussion than turning into a art project on its own. Due to the direct manner of the story, Kunzru is making me think more about the questions that are asked and feelings that are conveyed, because this is more important than letting the style become a distraction.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A fascinating window into the art world through the relationships of the narrator Jay, his former partner Alice, and the man she left him for: his former best friend Rob. The flow of the story is centered more on Jay's memories of the trio's time together in their late teens/early twenties for the first two thirds of the book, but in the last third it becomes something quite different. I don't want to go into detail for fear of spoiling anything for potential readers, but I found this to be a really illuminating meditation on what it means to make art, and what art IS, and what drives the value of art. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read this book.

2.5/5
Thank you Net Galley and Knopf for an ARC of this book!
"Blue Ruin" is another pandemic novel which explores the changing social dynamics and art culture in the Pandemic world. My biggest issue with this novel was that it did not offer anything new to the conversation around post-pandemic life. I did enjoy the prose and writing style of this novel. The craft of writing kept me interested to complete the novel.

Jay, Alice and Rob were art students together but their lives have diverged tremendously- until now when Jay, unhoused and gig working, delivers a pizza to their home, Much of this- the relationship between Alice and Jay-is told in flashbacks of a sort. Is it a pandemic novel? Well, it's set in 2020 but it's also about the art world and how art is valued. Oddly it's somewhat emotionless but it's also more accessible than Kunzru's earlier work, Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

The past and present collide during the pandemic when a former artist delivers groceries to an isolated estate. Waiting on the porch is his ex—girlfriend. The artist, still recovering from COVID faints, and his ex cajoles him into staying at the estate. During the stay, the artist tells the story of his life over the past two decades and learns some astonishing truths about his reputation. A startling, engaging read that examines art and what it means to live.

4.5/5

A well delivered insight into a character’s reconciliation of their past and present. The beauty lies not with the story itself but the people that inhabit it and the paths that each one walks. Some of it felt melodramatic but subdued enough to get by.

Blue Ruin
Hari Kunzru
Knopf (May 14, 2024)
https://knopfdoubleday.com
978-0593801376, $28.00

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ruin-novel-Hari-Kunzru/dp/0593801377/

Give me a book about art and artists, and I’m a happy reader. I find Blue Ruin particularly interesting because it raises many questions about what art is, what it’s like to produce it, and how much of an artist’s life is performance. I'm still pondering it several days after finishing it.

Jay is attending art school in London; just before he graduates, he destroys the paintings he’s produced for his final show, abandons representational art, and puts on a performance piece instead. From there, he seems marked for greatness in the field of conceptual art. He and his girlfriend, Alice (who wants to be a curator), live in a bubble filled with drugs and sex in the manner of Timothy Leary's infamous line "Turn on, tune in, drop out" from 1966. She eventually tires of the lifestyle and runs off with his best friend, Rob, (who becomes a more traditional painter) to the United States.

Eventually, Jay tries to not produce art but to be art. He reminds me of the Bulgarian artist Alzek Misheff who swam across the ocean by swimming in the pool of an ocean liner back in the 1970s. Jay ends up living his life in a dropped-out mode as he travels the world without documentation (no passport, etc) and ends up an illegal alien in the US and is reduced to delivering groceries. He becomes very ill from Covid, is thrown out of his apartment by his paranoid roommates, and begins living in his vehicle. While recovering, he makes a grocery delivery to a large estate and is met at the door by Alice. She, Rob, and another couple (Marshall and Nicole) are self-isolating to avoid getting Covid. When his past and present collide, Jay must confront his feelings at being ghosted by Alice and Rob and take a closer look at his toxic relationships with Alice, Rob, drugs, and alcohol.

This is an exceptional book if you can overlook the huge coincidence that Jay meets Alice again. When he tells the isolated group his story, he says he had no idea he was delivering groceries to her, but he is simply continuing an artistic performance? I also liked the representation of other races: Jay is biracial, Alice is half French and half Vietnamese, and Nicole is Black. Except for the impact of Jay's race on his relationship with his bigoted stepfather, these people of color are just people. I liked this book enough to read Kunzru’s backlist.

Thought provoking, a fantastic Covid novel and one that in flashbacks captured the Y2K London art scene in what feels like a ketamine dream. A more relatable pandemic novel than Anne Patchett's /Tom Lake/ which I also submerged in. This book felt like a glimpse into maybe what happened during COVID to a characters who survived /Trainspotting/. I’ve read one other novel by this author and I will seek out more.

I read an ARC of this novel from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru is a compelling exploration of the tangled webs woven by London's artistic elite, unfurling against the backdrop of a pandemic-stricken world. Kunzru deftly navigates the complexities of art, ambition, and human relationships, drawing readers into a realm where the boundaries between creation and destruction blur with haunting clarity.

Jay, Rob and Alice are London artists who seek freedom of expression and freedom in their life. They compete with one another, sometimes in how outrageous, how abstract their artistic creations can be; sometimes; they compete in their relationships. Alice and Jay are a couple until Rob takes Alice away. After this, Jay disappears for years, traveling the world. When he accidentally turns up at her door with a grocery delivery during the pandemic, she takes him in to the remote house where she has sheltered with her husband Jay and friends, Marshall, a manager of artists and Nicole, his girlfriend. Marshall is excited to meet Jay, a legendary figure in his eyes. Hari Kunzru has given us a group of self-absorbed characters who are annoying and confusing at times. Flashbacks reveal the roots of their friendship and explain their present reactions to one another. They are never happy, never satisfied, still searching for their identities. I find it tedious all around.

A dark and clever tale about the perils of art making. The story takes place during the pandemic and is very thought provoking re: art and society. A very enjoyable read.
Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Kunzru concludes his shapeshifting RED WHITE AND BLUE project (WHITE TEARS, RED PILL, and now this) with a pandemic novel that also serves as a thought-provoking look at art and relationships. It's a strong read on those counts, although it didn't hit the heights for me of RED PILL and certainly not WHITE TEARS, which might go down as Kunzru's second masterpiece (after MY REVOLUTIONS). Still, it's a treat to see rich people upstate behaving badly as seen through someone who isn't rich. A good, if not great, novel.

When Jay delivers a pizza order on that fateful day during Covid, Alice is shocked to see him. She lives with Rob, has been married for many years with a 15 year old child but still remembers their time together. Years ago, Jay, Alice and Rob were students in art school in London.

A series of flashbacks begin to shed light on what happened in the past as we slowly see what happened to Jay, who once had it all and was a star in the Art World. The beginning is a slow burn but the last third is swift. A telling tale on Art, society and excess (and Covid) highly recommend! So Creepy and claustrophobic.
A great edition to the pandemic books! #harikunzru #KnopfPantheonVintageandAnchor, #Knopf

*Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.*Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.

I cannot wait to give every reader I know a copy of "Blue Ruin" by Hari Kunzru — what an incredibly written novel! I feel like the general consensus on COVID-related media and entertainment is still weary at best, but Kunzru somehow managed to take us through a journey of these people refining each other and their struggles and their feelings during this timeframe in a way I didn't know was possible. Kunzru has captured so much real life and emotion so accurately; I couldn't put this book down. I don't know what else to say without ruining it, but the writing is phenomenal, the ending was great (which I do NOT say often), and I can't wait to read more by this author.

really interesting portrait of an artist and the ripple effects actions have on people's lives. excellent work by Kunzru. tysm for the arc

A haunting treatise on the pandemic that moves intimately. This will be remembered as a small epic of our era. A must read to teach future generations about the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how far this book will go.

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for this ARC of Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru.

Having read many of the past works from the author, as always, my feelings are a bit mixed about this one. This is a COVID novel set in the world of art (or an art world novel set in the times of COVID). This is a slow languid story that sometimes takes too long to get to the point