In the opening pages, I found Kunzru’s narrator’s tone too often to be one of shiftless complaint ... Kunzru deploys a knowing lugubriousness to offset the privilege, but even the undeniably deft prophylactics of self-awareness cannot quite distract from a sense of wallow. Bit by bit though, I was enlisted. For one thing, Kunzru’s intelligence is an irresistible pleasure ... The second section...is thoroughly absorbing—if, on first read, a little perpendicular to the whole ... By the third section— 'Apocalpyse'—I was loving it ... Kunzru’s rigorous, inventive and precise turns of phrase are now deployed not to carp but to whet ... By the end, Red Pill had become the most thought-provoking novel I had read in ages, not because I had not read these existential conclusions before—what other conclusions are there?—but because Kunzru’s own iteration was so well earned. From German Romanticism to Trump via the Stasi and the Nazis … a line newly drawn; this is a timely, interesting and resonantly intelligent novel.
At first, Red Pill resembles the kind of intellectual comedy of manners that has become familiar in contemporary American fiction in recent years...For some writers, the gently comic potential of this set-up would be enough. But Kunzru is too ambitious to be satisfied by academic farce ... What [Hannah] Arendt actually said was: 'everything that lives . . . emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.' This deeply intelligent and artfully constructed novel reminds us that this is true of human relationships and societies alike.
Kunzru is wise to keep the narrative both rooted in the real world and mostly divorced from the current moment more specifically. By doing so, he’s able to isolate the behaviors inherent to the online culture wars—the baiting, the debating, the veils of humor—and view them through a historical lens ... But Kunzru’s story isn’t strictly a critique. Anybody who’s struggled with shitposting’s influence on modern discourse, the layered irony and perpetual smirk, will identify with the narrator ... He worries he’s the butt of a joke he doesn’t understand. He obsesses over what he claims to hate. He wants life to be like a poem, despite all evidence to the contrary. Kunzru finds the humor and humanity in it all, but even as the story spirals into well-earned hysteria, he never downplays the severity of the mental derangement unfolding on both sides of the aisle in a post-truth era, nor the ways each can intersect in the realm of conspiracy.
... the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form ... a funny and suspenseful novel, dense with ideas, deliciously plotted, and generous with its satirical acid. Of the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novels, it has the sharpest cultural comedy ... In White Tears the schism between successive styles—from realism to magic realism—had a clear moral force. It’s hard to say the same about the conclusion of Red Pill, which dissipates some of the tension the book has gathered along the way, though in a manner that remains true to the nature of its shiftless critic narrator’s flimsy personality ... we know that the narrator’s interpretations of the world aren’t entirely reliable. Yet there is an undeniable logic to the unsatisfying ending of this otherwise very satisfying novel. The narrator’s red-pilling, his recognition of the world’s previously hidden fascist dark side, has allowed him to shed his vestigial Gen X cynicism and become a good neoliberal.
Red Pill is less a novel about right-wing trolling...than about liberal vertigo: it shows how progressives have been blindsided by the rhetorical pageantry of pseudo-intellectual bigots ... The mounting horror of Red Pill is Cassandra’s curse: watching the future—our present—spool out exactly as it already has. As the electoral college tallies its votes, the narrator’s madness transmutes into a terrible form of sanity. Kunzru is at his best in such moments, exposing the creeping malignancy of good intentions ... But for a novel that shares its title with a euphemism for far-right radicalization – in particular, a grotesque form of misogyny—Red Pill does not so much tumble down the rabbit hole as skitter around its dark edge. Kunzru largely evades the embittered machinations of the Manosphere ... As for the grandiose conspiracies of the red pill universe—they may be lurking in Red Pill, if you know where and how to look. Kunzru interrogates conspiracy thinking by mimicking it, throwing out ideas and airily encouraging us to join the dots ... Red Pill is a novel designed for us to parse, to scour for clues like a QAnon disciple ... As the narrator binge-watches Blue Lives, he wonders whether Anton’s metaphysical titbits are significant, or whether they’re some elaborate joke—a performative and empty cleverness. Kunzru’s sixth novel provokes the same maddening doubts
Hari Kunzru never has a problem coming up with the premise of his books, and as they unfold, the stories have a trademark style of gathering pace and Proust-like, sending us on wild-goose chases that suddenly turn up a nugget of gold, linking us to the theme of the book. However, as in White Tears, his previous work, the falling apart of the narrative as our protagonist loses it uses the same device, and unfortunately, the same issue prevails: the story thins a little too much in places, leaving too much space for the reader to fill in. But given the narrator’s focus sharpens in on self-destruction, maybe this doesn’t matter. The last chapter, although something of a punchline, still feels a little tacked on: we can see the seams. A more cynical view is that serendipity gave Kunzru the scenario in real-time he’d been searching for to round up his study of despots: Trump. The writing is, as ever with Kunzru, strong and engaging, full of brutal humor, and draws on historical events so completely that it’s hard to know how much of this story is, well, true. For those who enjoy writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tao Lin, others who often mix fiction into their biographical work, Kunzru will be a welcome discovery.
...clever but exasperating ... Red Pill depends on Kunzru’s skilled use of a seemingly unreliable narrator. We have to believe that maybe he really is being watched; at the same time, we want to shake him into sense, and with each page he grows ever more puzzling ... the generalized sense of dread that the narrator of Red Pill feels becomes all too specific, a dread to which names and causes are firmly attached and open for analysis ... Kunzru’s own journalism, however, will tell you much more about it than Red Pill does, and for all its technical skill the novel finally sings an old refrain: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
...an absorbing parable of contemporary paranoia ... Mr. Kunzru has always paired his sharp, elegant prose with visions of pandemonium, and in novels like Transmission (2004) and Gods Without Men (2011) the chaos is reflected in the deconstruction of the narrative—it is hard to follow what happens at the end of these books. But in Red Pill Mr. Kunzru concludes with a strictly realistic blow-by-blow of the 2016 presidential election. Current events, he suggests, illustrate the madness of the world more effectively than any literary device. Readers will decide for themselves whether this is farseeing or another instance of hysteria.
... Red Pill wanders, rather like a prestige television show after a bravura first season ... in a well-intentioned but absurd turn, [the narrator] tries to intervene in the life of a refugee he spies on the streets of Berlin ... A chunk of the novel is given over to Monika’s memories of life in the former East Berlin, where she was a punk and radical, then a collaborator with the national security services. It’s a digression and feels too pointed—the state brutalizing its citizens for no particular reason—and too long, like a multi-episode arc on a television show focused entirely on some guest star. The novel abandons logic to reveal the illogic of Anton’s worldview. The pace quickens, and the narrator bounces around Europe, but this action feels more like fever dream than story: overly constructed, too deliberate, occasionally silly ... Kunzru is an able storyteller; outlandish plot or not, I did not read so much as binge ... The only possible conclusion to this fable about the emptiness of right-wing blather is the election of Donald Trump ... it’s dissatisfying. Kunzru can’t accomplish a rebuke of Anton’s worldview not because he’s not a gifted novelist but because it’s already evident that the Steve Bannon mythos is a hodgepodge of prejudices, fears, and misinformation. Nor can the novelist answer why liberals have granted this claptrap such power. Kunzru posits this crisis as illness, as mental break. It’s a valiant attempt to literalize the troubles with the liberal left, but we’re not the crazy ones. Yes, it’s true that Anton, and Trump, and so many I could name, care only about 'the cynical operation of power.' But we knew that in 2016.
Ultimately, this ragged membrane is where the novel leaves us, on the line between rationality, faith, love, and something considerably more ominous. It is to Kunzru’s credit that he never lets the character (or, for that matter, himself or the rest of us) off this ontological hook. If he falters slightly in the closing pages—the last scene is set on the night of the 2016 election, which feels a little on the nose—it has more to do with the requirements of narrative, those necessities and insufficiencies again.
... exceedingly clever in feeding the reader this slow detachment, and mimics almost exactly how it feels to be taken over by a powerful, intoxicating, and dangerous belief ... Kunzru’s insistence on an unnamed narrator, his deliberate focus on how a privileged, well-educated man gradually grows estranged from his grip on reality, all adds up to a convincing portrait of what it looks like to be 'redpilled,' a phenomenon that we increasingly have to reckon with. In fact, the narrator represents a critique of many well-intentioned liberals who attempt to understand the Far Right in order to combat them, but never end up moving beyond the stage of obsessive research ... a terrific, vital portrayal, but it seems to be almost outdated. This is not to knock Red Pill. It’s a new development, and one that directly counters prior arguments of mere solidarity as the antidote to conspiracy theories. Even as red pill pushers prey on the most alone and vulnerable, they offer a sense of security and belonging, and their buyers have only swelled in number since Trump’s victory ... Being redpilled in 2020 doesn’t look like accepting a cold, empty world where your subjective life is meaningless, which is what it looks like in Kunzru’s novel, in the narrator’s inability to define the 'lyric l' and his descent into the rabbit hole. Now it means accepting and embracing a completely fictional world, with the knowledge that there is a larger We that you belong to ... a much-needed literary examination of the red pill phenomenon, especially in its demonstration of how it hooks those who should know better. The question now becomes what do we do when those addicted to the drug no longer feel isolated, and see the world only in terms of 'us versus them.' Kunzru’s novel gives us a means to examine how an individual can lose themselves in a well-executed mind game. It’s now up to us to apply it to a post-2016 world to see if we can’t pull some people out, or to fight it as best we can. As Anton tells the narrator, 'the only way out is through.'
There are spies, intrigue, Peeping Toms, conspiracy, and violence haunting the many corners of his novel, and yet the sensibility of the book is much more digressive, cerebral, and torturously self-conscious. That’s because at its core, Red Pill is a novel of ideas, probing seemingly disparate poles of thought: the conception of the self, the creation of whiteness in European Romanticism, and the threat of the Internet—the way it has destroyed our sense of privacy, circulated fringe ideas, and popularized the alt-right ... On its face, this premise and the style in which it is packaged are transparently ridiculous. But ridiculousness is also the motor for much of our world, especially the banter among self-serious people like our narrator. If there is a lasting value to Red Pill, it is in its clever and thoughtful critique of the urge of many creative and purportedly progressive people to make themselves heroes—or at the very least historical subjects—at a moment in which they clearly have so little agency or role to play. To Kunzru’s credit, he recognizes how far this kind of fatalist comedy can take us and makes the most of it. Red Pill, after all, is a bleak novel about how writers aren’t going to save anyone—including themselves ... perhaps Kunzru’s most overtly political novel. It not only engages the world of electoral politics but also offers an unsparing study of the flaccid state of 21st century liberalism and the intellectuals and creative types who hold on to its false promise of order and reason ... By focusing much of the book on the mental and moral contortions of those liberal but often apolitical writers who prefer to see themselves as above the risks and commitments of action, Kunzru offers us a cunning and damning portrait of many of his peers. But by throwing this character into a world of intrigue and political activity, he also shows the limited role these writers and intellectuals can play.
Kunzru accomplishes several noteworthy things with Red Pill, not the least of which is following nihilistic philosophies to their logical endpoint ... The author excels in capturing the geist in alt-right circles, down to the language used ... Perhaps the most remarkable features of this novel are its relevance to current events and the questions it raises with regard to the ethical frameworks we take for granted and within which we operate ... the parallels between a past that is never too far behind and a present that threatens to rouse those ugly ghosts are all too evident.
If we judge a novel based on how it addresses the current moment, then Hari Kunzru seems to have published his last two books out of order. White Tears , released back in 2017, is a ghost story that interrogates America’s historical (and current) exploitation of Black musicians with a message about the systemic racism that resonates with the Black Lives Matter movement and the global protests against police violence. In contrast, Red Pill is a nihilistic novel about the culture wars, white nationalism, and populist Presidents that feels more in keeping with the Charlottesville march, the “Dark Web,” and Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, a book about racism, whenever published, is never anything but relevant ... the questions and concerns that Red Pill considers, that haunt the book’s protagonist, right now don’t feel as pertinent as they did even six months ago ... Red Pill is hit-and-miss when it comes to examining the West’s abrupt lurch to the far right. Our protagonist has the distinct texture of a straw man: the liberal academic, deeply insecure about his work, but unaware of the world around him or how rapidly it’s changing ... Although the concerns discussed in Red Pill may seem like the least of our problems, it does come out a month before the November 2020 election, and at least here it acts as a reminder of what’s at stake when we eventually move beyond the seemingly endless horizon of the pandemic.
[Red Pill] is, essentially, the story of a man’s breakdown ... Kunzru makes the narrator’s wife a human rights lawyer, the epitome of Enlightenment values, and drops a reference to the blue flower, the symbol of hope and beauty during German Romanticism. And so, through hints and symbols, he implicitly sets up a framework of Enlightenment values versus anti-Enlightenment values, the conflicting ideologies currently dividing Western culture. Because that’s what the political divide is fundamentally about. On one side are people who believe in reason and human rights, and on the other are people who believe in nothing. We can call them nihilists, or opportunists, though they might call themselves realists. But what they call realism, Kunzru notes, 'is just the cynical operation of power.'
The ghost of history looms large too. Kunzru sets his protagonist in the grim shadow of the Nazi final solution. Near the writer’s center, the narrator comes across the grave of Heinrich von Kleist, the German poet, dramatist, and writer who committed a murder-suicide in Wannsee. As Kunzru’s protagonist slowly loses his hold on reality, he questions if what he’s seeing is just another whitewashed version of the truth. Kunzru has created a complex, challenging, and bold story about a world gone amok and a middle-aged man coming to terms with his one truth: his mediocrity.
Much like Kunzru’s excellent White Tears (2017), this novel features a lead character stumbling into confrontations about race and society he’s ill-prepared to handle ... Plotwise, the novel is clunky, slow to establish the narrator’s character and awkwardly introducing Anton into the narrative; a lengthy section featuring a Deuter Center housecleaner’s experience being manipulated by the Stasi is razor-sharp in itself but effectively a sidebar to the main story. Yet as an allegory about how well-meaning liberals have been blindsided by pseudo-intellectual bigots with substantial platforms, it’s bleak but compelling.
A subplot narrated by a cleaning woman who lives with memories of being controlled by the Stasi doesn’t quite tie together with the rest of the goings-on, but Kunzru does an excellent job of layering the atmosphere with fear and disquietude at every turning point. This nightmarish allegory leaves the reader with much to chew on about literature’s role in the battleground of ideas.
