Portrait of an artistic provocateur: Blue Ruin, by Hari Kunzru, reviewed

Whatever happened to the likely lads and lasses of the East London art scene at the high noon of Cool Britannia? Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin, loads much else on to its ideas-rich plate – not least a pandemic yarn set in the panic-stricken spring of 2020. At its core, however, his plot traces contrasting afterlives from the Sensation generation. It reconnects three survivors – two male artists and the woman both loved – from a time when making conceptual art could feel like ‘a kind of social repair’, even a ‘utopian laboratory’.

In his earlier career, Kunzru himself seemed to belong in a gilded group of younger British authors. As with several of his peers, the opportunities of America lured him, and the promise, or peril, of Atlantic crossings underpins Blue Ruin. Recent books (White Tears and Red Pill) have carried topical themes – from ‘cultural appropriation’ to alt-right ideology – on a stream of deft story-telling about men in crisis. Blue Ruin first feeds its interrogation of the artist’s vocation, and the ‘penumbra of money’ that frames it, into a fictional memoir of high ideals and low life in 1990s Hackney bohemia, ‘riled up on cheap triples and terrible London cocaine’. Later, it stages a plague-year farce on an isolated estate in upstate New York during the ‘Armageddon time’ of the first Covid wave.