The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 September 2022
by Hari Kunzru
The Matrix and all its countless sequels have become such a fundamental cultural reference point that you can not only take a reference from it to create the title for your novel, you can integrate its demented vision of reality into the crazy rantings of your unhinged narrator. (This reader wonders about the appropriation that represents. You can't copyright titles, and we guess the nature of the unsettling notion of living in a simulation is common enough.) In any case, that's not the book. There's a lot more than that in this book, lurching from a sedate literary retreat, to meditations on the Holocaust, the weird suicide of a romantic poet, and most particularly, the disturbing slide of (pretty much global) culture toward a kind of proto-violent libertarian individualism. OK, all of that in one novel?
Kunzru's unnamed narrator is very much in the world around him, absorbed in his own observations of it. But he is also a blocked writer of studies of romantic poets. His journey to the Deuter Center on lake Wannsee in Germany is an attempt to get a quiet retreat to make real progress on his latest book. Like any writer would be, he is excited by the acceptence to this elite center, excited enough that he doesn't quite pay attention to the details of his participation. The place turns out to be particular about visitor participation, and frowns upon the narrator's desire for privacy and solitude. His almost enforced dinner engagements with other writers end up being contentious arguments between bullying creative egos. In any case, our hero is turned off by the experience. He grows depressed and binges episodes of a grim TV show Blue Lives.
Our hero knows that this television show isn't a true representation of life on the mean streets, and he is disturbed by its nihilistic vision. The show's writers' reference to the intellectual history our hero is exploring implies to him he could reason with its creators, find out why they are pushing such a dark vision of reality. This leads to a deeply unpleasant encounter, then another in a refugee encampment. Our protagonist grows obsessed and unhinged, determined to deny the dark violence promulgated by those others who refuse to see in humanity any need for compassion or cooperation in making the world a "better" place. This unrelentingly bleak vision of the world causes our hero to become unmoored from the things he values, the Values of justice and compassion on which he thinks he's built his life.
What ensues is an ever increasingly disturbed descent into obsession. The writer so much wants to convey to someone, almost anyone, that this dark vision of the world he has suddenly been drawn into is not and can not be the way the world works. Eventually, our protagonist may find himself sliding off a deep end, and just when he seems to be recovering, the 2016 United States presidential election comes along to confirm some of his darkest fears. Your faithful reader's darkest fears, too.
Kunzru is on a journey that seems initially inspired by the wandering meditations of WG Sebald, and he has the same kind of moody awareness of his landscape and its history. But he is also engaged in a conversation with the world and its fractures as those have turned into chasms in the past several years. There is an increasingly dark individualism on the loose in the world, and it is the cause of a great deal of despair in those (admittedly liberal-minded) people who had happier hopes about our collective future. In the face of climate catastrophe, global displacement, draconian inequality, and an ever growing love of violence, it is indeed hard to hold on to hope for the better angels of humanity. The solution may be to turn to those closest to us, to generate our own microscopic bubbles of hope. In any case, this book is highly recommended.
Also by Hari Kunzru: [My Revolutions]