Asian American Literature Fans

After having read Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, I was supremely interested in what Kunzru had coming down the pipeline, a novel titled Red Pill (Knopf, 2020). Yes, the title does refer to that pivotal scene in The Matrix when Neo downs the “red pill” to find out he lives in a simulated reality. The truth at stake in Kunzru’s novel is not quite so literalized, but let’s let the official marketing blurb give us some background:

“After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives—a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life—and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all. Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that ‘no happiness was possible here on earth."’When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is ‘red-pilling’ his viewers—turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview—ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.”

The last line of this description is probably the operative one, as much of the novel makes the reader have to situate this narrative on the hinge point of whether or not you think the narrator is losing his mind. I fell on the side that he was not. While Kunzru’s narrator does question his own sense of reality at times, what he seems to be struggling with is whether or not there is any chance for his wife and his child to be safe, given all the possible bad things that can happen. Kunzru’s narrator, while on his writing retreat, seems to be wrestling with the reality that he cannot ensure that his wife and his child will ever be truly protected from all the different things that can harm them. The narrator’s connection to Blue Lives is thus quite thorny: he sees the show as too naturalistic and thus pessimistic in its determinism. There must be some sense of possibility and optimism despite so much darkness that can erupt in life. Indeed, there is a sequence involving a refugee father and her daughter that has the narrator question whether or not there is any justice at all for the weak and the impoverished. As the novel truly crashes into its apocalyptic ending, you begin to understand where Kunzru is really leading us. In this sense, the novel achieves its most devastating revelation and makes the entire sequences leading up to it pale in comparison to the danger that seems to have befallen all of us. Sparkling with this kind of darkness, the novel is certainly a compelling read for these complicated times.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-pill-hari-kunzru/1135275383