Once, Jay was an artist. After graduating from art school in London, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career taking shape before him. That was not to happen. Now, undocumented in the United States, having survived Covid, he lives out of his car and barely makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. One day, as Jay attempts to make a delivery at a house surrounded by acres of woods, he is confronted by his destructive past: Alice, a former lover from his art school days, and the friend she left him for. Recognizing Jay's dire circumstances, Alice invites him to stay on their property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting in motion a reckoning that has been decades in the making.
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.
