The use of artworks – a difficult trick in fiction – is especially impressive ... Effortless ... As a whole, Blue Ruin is bracingly intelligent and often just plain beautiful. It’s a reminder that fiction, at its best, is a place to encounter new experiences and dwell in big ideas. Kunzru is known for ambitious novels that bring politics to rich, imaginative life; Blue Ruin shows him at the top of his game.
...his portrait of east London in the 1990s has real texture, grit and grunge rubbing up against the crude new money of the exploding art scene ... one of Blue Ruin’s greatest strengths: Kunzru’s creation of a body of work that possesses the heft and believability of something real. In both this, and the adroit way in which he makes Jay’s endeavours part of the fabric of the text — the revelation of which, incidentally, I found genuinely thrilling — makes for a novel that’s both a sharp dissection of the oily inner workings of the art world, and a compelling portrait of one man’s desperate attempt to escape complicity in the capitalist machine.
Overwrought ... Put a few thousand sentences like these between hard covers, add wooden dialogue...and you have Blue Ruin ... I was surprised to find so little to admire in this novel.
Kunzru turns his attention to visual and performance art, examining its intersections with issues of labor and consumerism. Through Jay, who has lived both as an artist and as an undocumented gig worker, Kunzru shows that these two lifestyles are perhaps not as different as they might seem, deflating the idea of art as a noble pursuit: Being an artist is just another job, and art is just another commodity ... Kunzru ends by imagining the artist’s ultimate power: refusal.
The achievement of Blue Ruin can feel...ambiguous ... Blue Ruin’s characters...tend toward the broad: Marshal, the gallerist, is a confusing amalgam of political signifiers ... The aura of dreamlike suspense that Kunzru is so adept at conjuring is almost entirely absent here, despite the appearance of multiple Chekhov’s guns ... If the binaries Blue Ruin wrestles with—money versus art, action versus refusal—feel familiar, it’s because we are still so far from resolving them.
Kunzru has always excelled at depicting excess ... Deft ... Kunzru applies layer upon layer of detail to each of the portraits in this intimate triptych ... Might...have become fatally introspective or, worse still, pretentious. But Mr. Kunzru’s satirical eye, keen wit and compassionate intelligence guard against any such slide.
Programmatic ... This narrative twist, however, only makes sense as an allegorical move ... I yearned for a more interesting chasm between what the characters do and what they think or feel. At one point, Rob and Jay clash over a rifle in the former’s studio. I might as well have been watching a Hollywood movie.
Even as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight ... In contrast to the nostalgic tendencies found in some post-pandemic writing, Blue Ruin’s success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career – and himself – to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum.
Kunzru draws the London art scene skilfully and convincingly. There is a slight game in recognising which art works inspired the fictional ones, and the weary hedonism and unearned cultural cachet has the queasy feeling of an embarrassing next-day recovered memory. That sour anger went hand in hand with delirious prices is the paradox the grates away in the book ... These ideas are presented with maturity, and in a prose which is beguilingly fluent...These novels are shrewd, nuanced, relevant and highly readable, but they are like an agon without a victor. The ideas are eloquently rehearsed, staged and dramatized but a judgement is unforthcoming. Aesthetics may not be salvation, but Kunzru seems quite bothered about it not to be bothered about it.
[A] peculiarly dread-soaked, intellectually engaged, state-of-the-nation take on the country house novel ... The result is like a stab at portraiture by a talented landscape painter: a novel that is considerably less convincing in figure than in ground ... All credit to Kunzru here: it is no mean feat, evoking that short but exceptionally well-documented period in British cultural history, to thread the needle between verisimilitude and poking fun at a subculture so naturally self-satirizing that it had exhausted itself of comic potential almost at the moment it emerged. Kunzru succeeds largely by virtue of restraint ... Which brings us back to the house in the woods. By comparison to the flashback material the scenes that take place in the novel’s present are oddly overdetermined ... It is in the implications of Jay’s Gatsby-esque self-erasure – more than in the somewhat soapy consequences of his reappearance – that Blue Ruin really comes into its own as a penetrating, hyperarticulate meditation on art as either an accessory to toxic consumerism or a means of rendering ourselves invisible to it.
Jay’s navel-gazing can feel overwrought, but that’s balanced out by the exquisite writing and keen insights into class tensions and creative dilemmas. Kunzru affirms that it’s always a good time to live an examined life, even during a pandemic.
Dazzling ... The gripping tension between Jay and the rest of the cast gives way in the graceful final scene to a feeling as melancholy as watching a beloved painting get auctioned off in a beige room at Sotheby’s. This is immensely satisfying.
It’s a darkly ironic tale of two bubbles—an art world divorced from economic reality and a Covid era that segregated us from society. A dark, smart, provocative tale of the perils of art making
