Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

Published by Knopf on May 14, 2024

Blue Ruin is, I think, about the difference between art and life. Whenever we interact with others, the is at least the possibility that life becomes a performance — and what is a performance if not art?

Two artists are at the center of Blue Ruin. The narrator is Jason Gates. He has used other names, but he’s known to most as Jay. After living in different parts of the world as he tried “to engineer a way to bump into myself,” Jay is now in America.

An artist who no longer makes art, Jay is delivering groceries during the pandemic. He survived a COVID infection but he’s fatigued and weak. He’s been living in his car because his roommates kicked him out after he got sick. He’s trying to save money so he can afford a security deposit.

Jay collapses while delivering groceries to Alice, a woman he used to date but hasn’t seen in twenty years. While Jay’s collapse is related to his health, it is triggered by his sense of shame at seeing Alice while he’s in a destitute condition. “I felt as if my spirit were being pulled from my body with tongs, stretched out on display. See me, Alice. Nothing but a ragged membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing.”

When they were together, Jay lost Alice to Rob, the novel’s other key character. Rob and Jay were once friends. Rob continued to paint and went on to earn a good living as a working artist.

Alice takes pity on Jay and brings him to a country home where she lets him sleep in a barn loft. She must keep Jay’s presence a secret because the property owner is only allowing Rob, Alice, a gallerist named Marshal, and Marshal’s girlfriend Nicole to stay on the property.

Jay’s backstory occupies the novel’s middle pages. Jay’s initial desire to be a painter gives way to performance art. Jay and his friend Rob do a lot of drugs, but Rob manages to produce an occasional painting. They are in constant artistic competition that draws them together and pulls them apart.

Jay’s most successful concept is to lock himself in a room where an audience can watch him on video as he paints a self-portrait and then destroys the painting. Select individuals see a blurry Polaroid of the painting but nobody sees the actual creation. In his next show, Jay stares at a wall (signifying a “stand in the corner” punishment that his parents used to impose). He enjoys modest success with his performances, enough to keep him in drugs, although Alice comes from money and pays their larger expenses. She falls into his drug use but doesn’t have Jay’s stamina. Rob blames Jay (with some justification) for inflicting damage on Alice.

When Alice took up with Rob, Jay disappeared, occasionally surfacing to make a work of art, often blissfully unaware that some parts of the art world were still noticing his contributions. Jay’s disappearance was itself a work of art, or part of one, the final piece (he calls it Fugue) of a three-piece performance. Jay’s art is a product of his inability to live an unexamined life. His life “presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices.” Through Jay, Blue Ruin examines the process of life change: “we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.”

As the story circles back to the present, Jay’s presence in the barn becomes a source of tension. Alice’s difficult relationship with Rob and her unresolved feelings for Jay contribute to the drama. Rob would like Jay to leave, but Alice wants him to stay. Malcolm sees Jay’s reappearance as the culmination of a masterpiece (he’s particularly impressed with Rob living in his car) and hopes to monetize it, although Jay isn’t sure that what he’s been doing is a performance or that, if it is, the performance is over.

Near the end, we learn of Rob’s backstory and gain insight into his anger. His life went off course when he was working as an assistant to a successful artist who turned out to be untrustworthy. Rob feels that he (unlike Jay) has sold out, that he’s no longer making art that is true but is working for money, feeding collectors with what they want, not with something he feels the need to make. He envies Jay for never allowing money to get in the way of his artistic vision.

Threats and violence are themes in the novel, as is the question of racial division. The story is not violent, although a threat of violence emerges at the end. Rob doesn’t believe that Jay’s reappearance was coincidental and wonders if Jay is there to kill him. The George Floyd murder occurs near the novel’s end and becomes a topic of conversation — and possibly of racial tension between white Malcolm and black Nicole. Rob’s Jamaican ancestry becomes an issue when he meets Alice’s Vietnamese family in France.

The nature of art is the story’s larger theme. Jay hates the commercialism of most art, at least the art that is displayed and sold. He arguably sabotages his career on a couple of occasions because he resents the way money corrupts the purity of art.

Perhaps Jay gravitates to performance art because performances can’t be traded in a marketplace. His Fugue piece is meant as an exit from the art world, “a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” But isn’t all of life a performance? Is Jay’s life really art? The dynamic between Jay and Rob embodies the theme of art as a commodity versus art as a mirror that reflects the artist.

Additional themes include the insecurity of rich people who buy art they don’t really understand or appreciate (“they’re always terrified someone will realize they’re just wankers like the rest of us”) and the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity — the freedom to create art that feels true — when earning a living requires the creation of art that appeals to patrons or buyers. The latter theme might be at the heart of the relationship between commercially successful Rob and impoverished Jay. Should Jay be jealous of Rob’s success? Should Rob be jealous of Jay’s freedom?

The story offers a bit of understated relationship drama in the Jay-Alice-Rob triangle. Both the drama and its resolution feel honest.

The quoted passages should make clear that Hari Kanzru’s prose is several notches above average. His story is thought provoking and his characters are carefully crafted. I don’t know much about art apart from literature, but I appreciate Kanzru’s ability to tell a meaningful story about the intersection of art and life.

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Think Twice by Harlan Coben

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 14, 2024

When Harlan Coben writes standalone novels, the results are hit-or-miss. When he writes Myron Bolitar novels, Coben ups his game.

Bolitar was a star player in college basketball. His pro career was immediately ended by an injury. He compensated by earning a law degree and becoming a sports agent. His career has moved in varying directions, but he is again working with his best friend, the almost equally athletic Win Lockwood. Bolitar and Lockwood have a knack for getting into trouble.

Think Twice is a serial killer novel. There are way more serial killer novels than there are serial killers, but the reading public’s appetite for fictional serial killers seems insatiable. I give Coben credit for making the serial killer theme fresh and interesting in Think Twice. The novel’s serial killer avoids detection and capture by framing someone else for each of the murders. Since the killings have no obvious connection and since cops will almost always fall for a frame (it’s easier to draw seemingly obvious conclusions than to conduct a full investigation), the killer has had a successful run.

Bolitar gets involved when the police show up at his office, demanding to know the location of Greg Downing. Bolitar believes Downing was cremated after his death three years earlier, making his location difficult to pinpoint. The police nevertheless suspect that Downing has committed a series of murders. Because DNA tests suggest that Downing’s skin was found beneath the fingernails of a recently murdered supermodel, Bolitar is prompted to look into Downing’s death.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Downing is still alive and has married a woman named Grace. It would be a spoiler to reveal whether Downing is the serial killer the police believe him to be.

Downing was a frenemy of Bolitar, a competitor on the basketball court who made his way to the NBA, stole Bolitar’s girlfriend (Emily), and had something to do with the injury that ended Bolitar’s career. Downing disappeared to Asia before (as far as the world knows) he died.

To find Downing, Bolitar and Lockwood follow a series of clues that lead them to a gay man named Bo with whom Downing was exchanging flirtatious messages. Bo’s boyfriend was also a murder victim. Could he have been another of Downing’s victim? The body count will increase before the plot resolves.

Bolitar also connects with his biological son, who was conceived by Emily the night before she married Downing. Neither Downing nor Bolitar are models of exemplary behavior, but they are partially redeemed by their guilty consciences and attempts to atone.

Lockwood makes fun of Bolitar’s tendency to examine the moral implications of competing choices (Lockwood tends to simplify moral issues by killing the bad guys), but Bolitar is a more interesting character because he considers (or overthinks) the consequences of his actions. I appreciate the recognition of moral ambiguity that most tough guy novels lack. Bolitar tries to practice forgiveness in his relationship with Downing, for example, but are there some betrayals that do not deserve forgiveness?

The plot has multiple threads, enough to hold the reader’s attention and perhaps challenge the reader to remember details. The ending, including a final twist, is surprising. Coben ties the threads together neatly at the end, but not too neatly. Coben recognizes that full truths are rarely known and deliberately leaves a few minor questions unanswered.

As the novel moves toward its ending, the story creates palpable tension as a key character is endangered. A moving chapter near the end may change the direction of future novels. Kudos to Coben for having the courage to shake up a popular series.

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This Country Is No Longer Yours by Avik Jain Chatlani

Published by Penguin Random House Canada/Bond Street Books on May 7, 2024

This Country Is No Longer Yours tells the story of Peru from roughly 1980 to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The story is told from different perspectives in five sections, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third.

The focus is on a civil war (or, depending on how you look at it, a fight between the government and terrorists) during the 1980s and 90s. The brief initial section is narrated by a Peruvian student who, at the behest of a professor, is in Cambodia during the late 1970s to study Pol Pot’s version of Maoism. He is tasked with watching “the end of the world” — or, at least, the end of more than a million lives at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, whose members have evacuated cities and towns, forcing residents to work collectively in fields, “liberating” them from capitalist excess while murdering university students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, members of the media, landlords, and Pol Pot’s critics. The student is uncertain that Pol Pot’s methods can be implemented effectively in Peru.

The professor is Abimael Guzman. He wants to lead his own Maoist revolution in Peru. To that end, he founds the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). The Shining Path wages a guerrilla war with the aim of liberating ordinary people from the influence of intellectuals, politicians, property owners, and anyone else who doesn’t follow Guzman’s brand of communism. Terrorizing the population with brazen robberies and killings, the Sendero kill and gut stray dogs before stringing them up on lampposts, symbolizing the fate of the “dogs who betray Mao.”

Within a few years, Sendero terrorists have chased Indians from the countryside into Lima, where they live in poverty. Most people with resources have secured visas and fled the country.

Part two is narrated by a government security officer who works under an advisor to President Garcia known as the Doctor. The officer is later recruited to work for Garcia’s successor, Alberto Fujimori (El Chino). The officer fights against the terrorists by adopting their tactics. He kills Sandero members who try to rob the passengers on a bus but raids aid organizations (purportedly to search for Sandero sympathizers) and steals their cash. He enlists surgeons to harvest organs from the dead. He matches the symbolism of hanging dogs on lampposts by hanging the corpses of terrorists from trees. As the two sides wage war, electricity regularly fails, streets are increasingly empty, food is in short supply, and all the people caught in the middle are losing hope.

Readers who are old enough to remember Dean Acheson will not be surprised that he makes an appearance in the novel, furthering the American policy of supporting any corrupt dictator who claims to be fighting communism. Acheson offers military support to Peru’s president by arming thousands of (mostly South American) soldiers and positioning them in Argentina in anticipation that they will “intervene” in Peru. Acheson is correctly portrayed as “a hopeless man” with “hopeless causes.” Naturally, Acheson supports the Peruvian president’s plan to fight communism by claiming more power for himself, effectively making himself a dictator. People in the streets cheer as members of the legislature are dragged away in handcuffs. So much for democracy. The U.S. is fine with anti-democratic dictatorships as long as the dictator isn’t a communist.

Newspapers are controlled with payoffs rather than overt censorship. The president intends to deal with terrorists by detaining them indefinitely without a trial and gathering information through torture, a reprehensible path that America later followed at Guantanamo and the various dark sites at which it stashed purported terrorists. The Peruvian president's plan also meets with Acheson’s approval. To me, the dissection of America’s exacerbation of Peru’s troubles is at least as interesting as the larger story.

The third section is narrated by a female journalist as she covers the election of 2001. A nationalist is running for president on a platform of expelling all people of foreign blood from Peru. To prove he’s tough, he advocates death by stoning as punishment for nearly every crime, including homosexuality. Sounds like a forerunner of MAGA. He will lose the election to a more enlightened but equally corrupt candidate. His daughter writes letters to the journalist that tell awful truths about her abusive father. Their differing perspectives call attention to the glory and shame of both Lima and its mountainous countryside.

The journalist travels to Andahuaylas in the mountains, where her grandfather was killed during the civil war because he was a shopkeeper. She is interested in the lives of the provincial women. She learns that they profess to be proud of their husbands despite their tendency to be violent, unemployed drunkards. It doesn’t occur to them that the post-war media attention the provinces are receiving has nothing to do with their husbands.

In the final section, two former terrorists meet again in a time of relative peace. One is now a teacher with a family, but he attempts to rekindle a relationship with a woman he once admired as a ruthless killer of dogs. She was captured, imprisoned, and repeatedly raped by soldiers. Now she has no papers and is selling herself on the street.

The changing perspectives over a period of years are a useful way to provide insight into the suffering of Peruvian people inside and outside of Lima because of both political leaders and purported revolutionaries. At the same time, the shifting perspectives impair the reader’s opportunity to become engaged with any character’s story.

I appreciated the novel’s illustration of the failure of leadership in Peru, both in the government and in the use of uncontrolled violence to challenge the government. The reader is nevertheless kept at a distance from the violence that caused so much harm. Characters talk about disappearances and rapes, but the story never focuses on an incident in a way that drives home the pain the country must have felt. For that reason, I admire the novel more as a history lesson than as a dramatic work.

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The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 7, 2024

At some point in The Instruments of Darkness, Charlie Parker tells a cop that he’s read all the John Sandford novels and believes Sandford is “as good as they come.” There’s no doubt that Sandford is an excellent storyteller. He populates credible plots with strong characters and writes snappy dialog. But John Connolly is also a gifted storyteller. Plus, Connolly’s prose has a literary quality that only a handful of crime writers can match.

Colleen Clark has been charged with murdering her son. She’s hired Moxie Castin to represent her. As usual, Castin has hired Parker to look into the charges. The police don’t have a body or proof of death, but Colleen’s husband says he found a bloody blanket in the trunk of Colleen’s car. The blanket came from their house, making Colleen a prime suspect.

Colleen suffered from postpartum depression and made the kind of remarks that parents typically make about regretting her choice to have a child. Parker believes those facts merit sympathy but knows they’ll be used against her. Her husband called the police when he found the blanket and, this being an election year, a decision was made to prosecute Colleen for manslaughter — with a promised upgrade to murder if the police find evidence that Colleen intended to kill her son.

The setup might seem flimsy, but the prosecution is based on the political reality that it doesn’t look good for the death of a child to go unpunished. Charging Colleen will satisfy the perpetually outraged public and help the career of an attorney general who wants to be governor and a prosecutor who wants to be attorney general. The prosecutor assumes that jurors will ignore the absence of evidence (apart from the bloody blanket) because they will be too outraged to care about reasonable doubt. This is a cynical and entirely accurate view of how the criminal justice system works. “A child was missing and his mother was about to be dragged into the machinery of the law. It chewed people up, the innocent as well as the guilty, and called the result justice, but only a fool would accept that as true.”

Colleen tells Parker that her husband admitted to having an affair but she doesn’t believe he would have killed their son. Parker’s investigation leads to a puzzling inability to find the woman with whom Colleen’s husband had sex. How that plays into Colleen’s innocence or guilt is revealed late in the story.

Connolly usually adds a supernatural element to his stories, both because he sees Maine as a creepy place (it produced Stephen King, right?) and because the supernatural is a way of envisioning evil as a force — the kind of force that is necessary to abduct and kill a child. A key character is a medium who speaks to (or at least hears) the dead. Parker has been known to converse with his dead daughter, so he is open to the woman’s help.

Another force of evil is white supremacy and nationalism, represented here by a group of kooks who live on land that is adjacent to land owned by a family of misfits — a family that seems to be harboring or perhaps ruled by the malevolent force that the medium senses. Connolly describes one of the nationalists as “a frightened creature, fearful of change; fearful of anyone whose color, creed, or language was different from his own; and most of all, fearful of others who refused to follow his path.” That about sums it up.

Parker and his two foot soldiers, Angel and Louis, have had unfortunate encounters with the supremacists before, paving the way for more violence when Parker interferes with their plans. The trio (plus Castin) engage in darkly amusing dialog, balancing dark drama with dark humor.

The Instruments of Darkness blends a detective novel with a horror story, although Connolly downplays the horror to an extent, at least as compared to some of his other books. I prefer detectives to look for clues and, while Parker does that for much of the story, he ultimately relies on the medium to solve the mystery. Still, Connolly maintains tension and ties up every thread by the time the story ends. Charlie Parker novels are always a joy to read, if only for Parker’s guardedly optimistic view of humanity as it struggles against evil. This one is no exception.

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Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood

Short story published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on May 1, 2024

Fern has MS, for which her three old (pardon me, “older”) friends blame eight men — or is it nine? — who caused her so much stress that they put her in “a wheelchair rolling downhill to the morgue.” The women plot revenge and since they are well educated, they quote Macbeth. The women all taught at universities at some point, but Myra wonders why anyone would want to teach these days, with students so eager to “rat the professors out for the slightest verbal misstep.” Look at Chrissy, who was mobbed on social media as being anti-woman for teaching ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Never mind that she chose it as an example of misogyny. In Myra’s view, kids today only want to study literary works in which everyone behaves perfectly all the time. “How French Revolution of them,” says Leonie. The story makes clear the difficulty of walking the line between sensitivity to the feelings of others and the excessive demands of expressive conformity on college campuses.

Amusing digressions to comment upon the state of the world (and the new cheeses they try during their weekly meetings) occupy more of the story than the plot to murder eight men (or is it nine?). The women all began their careers in the literary world (mostly as proofreaders), writing for each other in the hope that their work might reach a larger audience before opting for academia and steady paychecks. They still have connections in that world, mostly to the authors with whom they slept, but Fern is the only one who earns a living writing books.

Back to the plot. The eight or nine men savaged an anthology that Fern edited because she decided not to include a story by Humphrey Vacher, an affluent and conceited author who owns a few small press publications, the only publications that will consider their work. Because they owe Vacher, they trashed Fern’s work on the ground that it appealed to “the sloppy middle-age women and easily duped teenage girls” who are the reading public. They even condemned it as “girly,” a term they wouldn’t be allowed to use today.

Coming up with a successful assassination plan proves to be challenging. “Their respect for murderers is increasing: not so easy, this murdering business.” Ultimately they settle upon a workable revenge scheme that, naturally enough, does not go as planned.

The women learn that revenge, when served cold, might no longer have a purpose by the time it is executed. Which leads to the lesson that revenge is better left unserved. That’s always a lesson worthy of illustration, and Margaret Atwood does so in an enjoyable story that mixes amusing characters, pointed insights, and a few laugh-out-loud moments.

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