Red Pill

July 1, 2020
A writer on retreat in Germany is unwittingly drawn into the world of alt-right ideologues. Much like Kunzru's excellent White Tears (2017), this novel features a lead character stumbling into confrontations about race and society he's ill-prepared to handle. The unnamed narrator is a Brooklyn creative-writing teacher and essayist struggling to write a book on the self in literature. A break (both emotional and careerwise) seems to arrive when, in early 2016, he begins a three-month fellowship at the Deuter Center in Wannsee, Germany. But almost immediately the good vibes turn bad: A blowhard scholar explodes the writer's thesis, everybody's online activities are creepily scrutinized, and what's with that staffer wearing a Pepe the Frog pin? (Adding to the queasy unease, it's hard to ignore that Wannsee hosted the conference where the Nazis finalized plans to implement the Final Solution.) Exasperated and demoralized, the narrator retreats into binge-watching a cop show whose leads are merciless with perps and who spew black-hearted monologues on humanity's fate. In time, the narrator crosses paths with the show's creator, Anton, a charismatic but smugly racist man. The increasingly paranoid narrator tries to get to the bottom of Anton's ideology; meanwhile, the U.S. presidential election approaches. Plotwise, the novel is clunky, slow to establish the narrator's character and awkwardly introducing Anton into the narrative; a lengthy section featuring a Deuter Center housecleaner's experience being manipulated by the Stasi is razor-sharp in itself but effectively a sidebar to the main story. Yet as an allegory about how well-meaning liberals have been blindsided by pseudo-intellectual bigots with substantial platforms, it's bleak but compelling. Our intellectual freedom, Kunzru writes, "is shrinking, its scope reduced by technologies of prediction and control, by social media's sinister injunction to share." This novel, in all its disorder, represents some worthy and spirited push back. "Kafkaesque" is an overused term, but it's an apt one for this dark tale of fear and injustice.

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Starred review from August 1, 2020
The mentally unstable narrator at the heart of Kunzru's (White Tears, 2017) dazzling novel can see the writing on the wall. Trump and Clinton are duking it out for the U.S. presidency, and this middling, Brooklyn-based author worries society has unraveled even before the 2016 results became known. So a literary residency at the fictional Deuter Center in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, feels like a lifeline, one the narrator willingly grasps. Unfortunately the center's strict accountability rules only further straitjacket the narrator until he slowly begins to unravel. He binge-watches a cop show whose alt-right creator, the narrator is convinced, is playing mind games with him. The ghost of history looms large too. Kunzru sets his protagonist in the grim shadow of the Nazi final solution. Near the writer's center, the narrator comes across the grave of Heinrich von Kleist, the German poet, dramatist, and writer who committed a murder-suicide in Wannsee. As Kunzru's protagonist slowly loses his hold on reality, he questions if what he's seeing is just another whitewashed version of the truth. Kunzru has created a complex, challenging, and bold story about a world gone amok and a middle-aged man coming to terms with his one truth: his mediocrity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

August 31, 2020
Kunzru’s powerful latest (after White Tears) follows an unnamed Brooklyn writer who lands in Berlin for a fellowship at the Deuter Center in 2016. What’s supposed to be a writing retreat and a way to get past the creative block he was experiencing amid a midlife crisis, however, soon turns into an escalating disaster. The Center’s strict policy that residents share workspace clashes with the writer’s need for isolation, driving him to binge-watch Blue Lives, a cop show. Trouble begins when the narrator grows fascinated with the show’s persuasive nihilistic worldview, thus triggering his anxiety that his own work is futile and irrelevant. The novel takes a bizarre turn when the paranoid narrator has a chance encounter with the Blue Lives creator, Anton, a smug, alt-right ideologue. Obsessed with confronting Anton about Blue Lives’s pernicious message during the increasingly divisive U.S. presidential race, the narrator plows headlong down a self-destructive path. A subplot narrated by a cleaning woman who lives with memories of being controlled by the Stasi doesn’t quite tie together with the rest of the goings-on, but Kunzru does an excellent job of layering the atmosphere with fear and disquietude at every turning point. This nightmarish allegory leaves the reader with much to chew on about literature’s role in the battleground of ideas. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown Group.

October 9, 2020

This latest from Kunzru (White Tears, Gods Without Men) meditates on the thin line between myth and reality, taking inspiration from the blue and red pill in The Matrix. (The red pill offers a wake-up call from ignorance but has also come to signify a rightward shift in thinking.) The narrator is a struggling American writer and academic who applies for a fellowship at the Deuter Center in Berlin to reignite his productivity. However, upon arrival he finds the center's policies, people, and historical ties to the Nazism unnerving. Isolating himself in his room, he becomes obsessed with German Romanticist Heinrich von Kleist and a television program titled Blue Lives. He abandons his writing project as he discovers apocalyptic messages in Blue Lives and comes to believe that the show's creator, Anton, is the catalyst of an increasingly anarchic world. Soon, his mind begins to unravel as he sees connections between the show's narrative and multiple conspiracy theories. The book ultimately culminates in the 2016 U.S. election, leaving readers to sit in the unresolved tension between fact and fiction. VERDICT Kunzru sardonically reminds us that the reconciliation of facts and truth is equally opaque in both fiction and nonfiction.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

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