Give me a book about art and artists, and I’m a happy reader. I find Blue Ruin particularly interesting because it raises many questions about what art is, what it’s like to produce it, and how much of an artist’s life is performance. I’m still pondering it several days after finishing it.
Jay is attending art school in London; just before he graduates, he destroys the paintings he’s produced for his final show, abandons representational art, and puts on a performance piece instead. From there, he seems marked for greatness in the field of conceptual art. He and his girlfriend, Alice (who wants to be a curator), live in a bubble filled with drugs and sex in the manner of Timothy Leary’s infamous line “Turn on, tune in, drop out” from 1966. She eventually tires of the lifestyle and runs off with his best friend, Rob, (who becomes a more traditional painter) to the United States.
Eventually, Jay tries to not produce art but to be art. He reminds me of the Bulgarian artist Alzek Misheff who swam across the ocean by swimming in the pool of an ocean liner back in the 1970s. Jay ends up living his life in a dropped-out mode as he travels the world without documentation (no passport, etc) and ends up an illegal alien in the US and is reduced to delivering groceries. He becomes very ill from Covid, is thrown out of his apartment by his paranoid roommates, and begins living in his vehicle. While recovering, he makes a grocery delivery to a large estate and is met at the door by Alice. She, Rob, and another couple (Marshall and Nicole) are self-isolating to avoid getting Covid. When his past and present collide, Jay must confront his feelings at being ghosted by Alice and Rob and take a closer look at his toxic relationships with Alice, Rob, drugs, and alcohol.
This is an exceptional book if you can overlook the huge coincidence that Jay meets Alice again. When he tells the isolated group his story, he says he had no idea he was delivering groceries to her, but he is simply continuing an artistic performance? I also liked the representation of other races: Jay is biracial, Alice is half French and half Vietnamese, and Nicole is Black. Except for the impact of Jay’s race on his relationship with his bigoted stepfather, these people of color are just people. I liked this book enough to read Kunzru’s backlist.
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Blue Ruin (Knopf, May 14, 2024) is available through:
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