A Portrait of the Art World Elite, Painted With a Heavy Hand

BLUE RUIN, by Hari Kunzru

Painters are more prone than writers, Edmund Wilson said, to “acquire the manners and the patter of the rich.” Sometimes those manners are no manners at all. In the cartoonish version of the contemporary art world that Hari Kunzru depicts in “Blue Ruin,” his new novel, we meet two competing artists. We can tell who the bad one is because he sniggers. And giggles. And spits. He has thinning hair and a paunch. He calls women “birds.”

A different scoundrel in “Blue Ruin” hisses. Kunzru’s bad people are obvious racists, goons who ask how their own daughters are in bed, gun nuts, security freaks or the makers of complicated health smoothies. Through this morass of bad taste and broken values strides the novel’s protagonist, a performance artist named Jay, who lives humbly, sleeps in his car, resembles a piece of driftwood, works manual jobs, moves around the world directing his imagination toward “a future free of domination and exploitation,” and is somehow, at the same time, probably the greatest artist in the world.

The two most tortured and pretentious memoirs I’ve ever read, from artists at any rate, are Marina Abramovic’s “Walk Through Walls” (2016) and Werner Herzog’s “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” (2023). In print, away from what they do best, Abramovic and Herzog can’t help inflating every emotion. Their books are unintentional comic masterpieces. “Blue Ruin” reminded me of both. The sentences read like these:

I have walked for miles along roaring highways, strafed by lights. I have been chased by feral strangers, who tried to throw me off a bridge.

This novel’s love story has the same overwrought tone, fit for a voice reading by Orson Welles.

We were star-crossed lovers, fleeing across Europe, looking soulfully out of the window at the flying countryside as we pondered the unsolvable problems of our lives.

Put a few thousand sentences like these between hard covers, add wooden dialogue (“you can’t love someone unless you love yourself, Jay”), and you have “Blue Ruin.”

I was surprised to find so little to admire in this novel. Kunzru’s reviews and essays, in places like Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, have style and bite. He’s a byline to search out.

“Blue Ruin” is the third and final volume in a loose trilogy of novels that began with “White Tears” in 2017. Then came “Red Pill” three years later. These books are his own Three Colors trilogy, in the manner of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films from the early 1990s: “Blue,” “White” and “Red.” The colors are those of the flag of France, and on a certain level Kieslowski was taking the pulse of France’s culture and civilization.