Nevertheless, a past success and an ambitious work in progress are catnip to literary foundations like the Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research in Wannsee, a sleepy suburb of Berlin most famous as the place where, in 1942, the Nazi leadership formulated its plans for the Final Solution. But his big book, a hazy opus in which he plans “to make a definitive case for the revolutionary potential of the arts” has stalled-probably because he’s not sure he believes that thesis himself. “At a certain point” he explains, “I’d accepted that I could only communicate in my own way, which is to say by generating a sort of paratactical blizzard of obscure cultural references and inviting my reader to fall through it with me.” The results are mostly unpopular, although he did once produce a slim volume on taste “that kept the reader meandering along as I strung together some thoughts on literature, music, cinema, and politics,” and that did pretty well. The writer who narrates Red Pill has much narrower and more modest gifts. Kunzru has set his novels in Silicon Valley, in a UFO cult in the California desert, among the white fans of old blues musicians in New York, and in a placid suburb where a former student radical hides under a false identity. Unlike his creator, Kunzru’s narrator is not the author of six novels of dizzying variety and intelligence. Instead, it leaves the narrator holed up in a primitive cottage on a Scottish island, anticipating a fight to the death, and it’s brought on by the surveillance state and too much prestige cable television. But this collapse, a reckoning with his own mortality like all such crises, doesn’t present itself in the form of sexual affairs or a gambling addiction or similar thrill-seeking transgressions. Character and creator seem to be about the same age-that is, ripe for a midlife crisis, which is what the nameless narrator calls the complete breakdown he suffers in the course of the novel. He’s a writer, husband, and father who lives in Brooklyn, the child of Indian and British parents who grew up in England. The narrator of Hari Kunzru’s fascinating, provocative new novel, Red Pill, resembles his author in many respects. Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication.
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