Blue Damage opens with the protagonist, Jay, delivering groceries to a palatial dwelling in a wealthy enclave of upstate New York. On the doorstep his buyer stands masked; that is occurring within the early days of the Covid lockdown. Thus it takes him a second to recognise Alice, his girlfriend from one other life.
Twenty years earlier than, Jay and Alice lived collectively in London. He was then an up-and-coming Younger British Artist, and she or he an aspiring curator. They’d a type of relationships that made individuals run their names collectively: Jayanalice, Aliceanjay. Now she is “radiant with the type of well being that’s fabricated from yoga and uncooked juices and therapeutic massage and cash”. She’s additionally married to Rob, Jay’s erstwhile greatest good friend and rival, for whom she left him with no phrase. Jay, in the meantime, is prematurely aged from poverty and the punishing jobs that go along with it. He’s sick with lengthy Covid and filthy from weeks of dwelling in his automobile. “See me, Alice,” he thinks. “Nothing however a ragged membrane. A unclean scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing.” She does see him; she calls out his identify. A second later he collapses, struggling to attract a breath.
Alice takes Jay in, hiding him in a barn to hide him from Rob and the opposite two members of her lockdown pod. In Jay’s lengthy, fevered days of convalescence, he’s haunted by recollections of their previous.
These lengthy flashback sections, which take up many of the ebook, are what’s most outstanding in Blue Damage. The seamy, drug-crazed, millenarian ambiance of the 90s British artwork world, with its intermingled idealism and cynicism, is brilliantly evoked. Right here radical artists squat in derelict industrial buildings, however fill them with work that pander to the tastes of rich collectors; any quest for authenticity instantly turns into only a cannier approach to promote out. Not solely artwork however artist is decreased to a commodity. Towards this backdrop, Jay and Alice search solace and humanity in one another, however are ineluctably introduced down by demons of previous and current.
The usage of artworks – a tough trick in fiction – is very spectacular in Blue Damage. Kunzru effortlessly makes us see why Rob’s art-school nonetheless lifes, “executed with just a few washes of watercolour that gave every object actual quantity and presence”, intimidate Jay and fill him with a way of his personal fraudulence. We really feel viscerally why the diagram-drawings Jay makes about his relationship with Alice are an inventive useless finish, whereas his efficiency items are each artistically transformative and personally harmful.
Kunzru additionally does an ideal job at conveying the outsider life into which Jay falls. “I’ve walked for miles alongside roaring highways, strafed by lights. I’ve been chased by feral strangers, who tried to throw me off a bridge … I labored building through the fracking growth in New Mexico, watching the fuel flares stand up over the sagebrush like portents of doom. I might be mendacity if I stated I by no means considered artwork.” I are typically sceptical of this gothic therapy of working-class actuality, by which being broke and doing unskilled jobs turns into a descent into the underworld and a purifying ordeal. However I’ve to confess it really works right here, if solely as a result of Kunzru does it so nicely.
When Kunzru returns to Jay and Alice within the current day, the ebook is much less profitable. It turns into a comparatively acquainted social satire of privileged individuals, who’re unsurprisingly revealed as self-centred, weak-minded and spiritually empty. Rob, as soon as an excellent firebrand, now spends his days consuming and making an attempt to sleep along with his gallerist’s younger girlfriend; Alice fumes about having to cope with the #MeToo accusations that collect in his wake. The gallerist, with whom they’re quarantining, has amassed an arsenal and fallen into fantasies of defending the home in opposition to a Covid-inspired breakdown in society.
Little doubt there’s some extent right here about how the indulgence of the 90s led individuals to this decayed situation, by which all capability for pleasure is exhausted, and nobody feels strongly sufficient about something even to drum up cynicism. However it will get a bit misplaced in lengthy stretches of dialogue by which characters snipe at one another to reveal how shallow and unattractive they’re. It’s additionally jarring to search out Alice flattened into the 2 dimensions of satire, once we’ve beforehand identified her as a fancy, absolutely realised human being.
However as an entire, Blue Damage is bracingly clever and infrequently simply plain lovely. It’s a reminder that fiction, at its greatest, is a spot to come across new experiences and dwell in massive concepts. Kunzru is understood for formidable novels that carry politics to wealthy, imaginative life; Blue Damage reveals him on the high of his recreation.
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Blue Damage by Hari Kunzru is printed by Scribner (£20). To assist the Guardian and the Observer purchase your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices might apply.
