A well-stocked bookstore would have no trouble filling an entire section with novels about art and artists, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Even connoisseurs of art-themed fiction, however, are unlikely to have encountered a protagonist like Jay Gates, the down-on-his-luck artist at the center of Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin. For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Blue Ruin offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.
Jay is a British man of Jamaican ancestry in his 40s, who was once a promising art student. At the start of the novel, he’s a COVID-19 survivor and undocumented immigrant in upstate New York, sleeping in his beat-up car and eking out a living by delivering groceries.
On one delivery to a craftsman cottage overlooking a lake at the end of a mile-long driveway, the masked person awaiting his arrival turns out to be Alice, a woman who was briefly Jay’s girlfriend in art school. Alice left Jay for his best friend, Rob, and Alice and Rob have now been married for 15 years. After Jay collapses from fatigue, Alice invites him to stay in a barn on the property until he recovers. Also isolating there are Marshal, Rob’s gallerist, who espouses conspiracy theories and calls COVID-19 “a Chinese bioweapon”; and Nicole, Marshal’s 20-something “trophy girlfriend.”
Coincidence is a dangerous narrative tool to mess around with, but Kunzru pulls it off in Blue Ruin thanks to the subtle characterizations and intricate layers with which he expands his premise. Buried resentments and jettisoned ambitions come to the fore as Kunzru explores themes of racism, opportunism and the inequities of privilege and hardship. The result is an exceptional work that finds new variations on the familiar chestnut that people aren’t always what they seem.
