Two recent novels, by Hari Kunzru and Rachel Cusk, seem to have one thing in common to say: art cannot live without savagery
In a New York State suburb, during the pandemic: a food delivery guy named Jay drives up to a house to deliver groceries. He is in a bad way: he’s been living in his car and he is suffering from the aftereffects of the virus. In contrast, the house he is delivering to is utterly beautiful. It is not ostentatious, but that ‘very modesty was a sign of almost unimaginable luxury’. And, standing at the door to this place, waiting to receive the groceries, is a surprise: not the stranger Jay expected to deal with quickly, but the woman (Alice) who left Jay for his best friend 20 years ago. Jay is wearing ‘a grubby surgical mask’ and limping; Alice is rich, yoga-honed. And so we good readers of Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin, arriving here with our honed skills in decoding conventional romance novels, may jump to predicting how a contemporary novelist such as Kunzru will go about resolving this particular iteration of Beauty and the Beast.
It is a disarming start; easy to walk into unconsciously. But this beginning is really – we understand, eventually (when we are allowed to) – the final act in a piece of performance art that Jay (an artist) has been enacting for 20 years. Blue Ruin is one whole clear act of ekphrasis. The entire novel: a masterful laying out of a single work by Jay. Kunzru is the creator of the artist, inceptor of the piece of art, its first audience, its chronicler. And Kunzru guides us through the whole while hardly leaving a footprint.
Jay narrates the novel, taking us from Alice’s doorstep, back to his youth in London during the late 1990s, when he was an art student. His overview of the artworld at that time is delivered like a lyric: the drugs, the locations (Hoxton, Hackney), lock-ins, openings, collectors, collectives, YBAs. Jay is a keen observer of class and intention; of his half-Jamaican heritage and the nonchalant violence of his reception. While his best friend from art school, Rob, has ‘a simple creative language to express his experience of the world’, Jay is more tortured. He is an idealist and obsessive; obsessive about becoming free of himself. Painting feels shallow and corrupt to him, whatever he produces feels like just another ‘token for collectors to gamble with’. He turns to performance – such as ‘Unknown Masterpiece 60’, in which he disappears into a box, paints and then destroys the canvas before it can be seen – and begins to garner attention. But Jay refuses to play along with the galleries and collectors. He objects to the use of culture as a launderer of money. Although he wishes to protest, he hates protest art. He seeks to know how a man might escape himself enough to make art that carries no trace of him; he wishes for a world in which he cannot be bought or sold. Is the removal of the artist from the work of art possible? Is it desirable?
‘There are really only two kinds of artist,’ Jay tells us at one point. ‘You’re either an intellectual or a savage, and you don’t really have a choice about which.’ Jay’s ‘creative weakness’ is that he approaches making art like ‘a puzzle I needed to solve’. An intellectual, then. A beauty, rather than a beast.
When Jay’s girlfriend Alice leaves him for Rob, Jay reacts by creating a series of works, in the last of which he burns all his possessions and exits the space. The gallerist has been instructed to wait 15 minutes before announcing to the audience that ‘the work is ongoing’. Jay disappears, only to turn up with groceries on Alice and Rob’s doorstep 20 years later.
What unfolds from here is at times tender, and others superbly comic: staying with Alice and Rob in the luxurious lockdown house are a curator and the curator’s girlfriend; initially Alice hides Jay in a barn, where he is discovered by the curator brandishing a weapon who must work out that Jay is not an intruder, but a delivery guy, not a delivery guy, but Alice’s ex, not only Alice’s ex but Rob’s old friend, not just Rob’s old friend but a famous artist whom the curator very much wants to represent. There are periods plumbing the question of who ‘owns’ art; there is instruction, insight, psychological realism, regret, sex, paranoia. In other words: here are all the elements one might expect from conventional literary fiction – but it is all in service of something else: to finish a piece of Jay’s work. Every element of the novel, from character, to structure, to tone, can be understood as part of Jay’s performance which began when he burnt all his possessions, including his passport, and set off with nothing. The novel form has been hijacked here and put to use as a performance piece, ongoing, with Kunzru, its true artist, in hiding. There are no look what this writer can do! moments. There are no mechanics on show. It’s all smooth brushstrokes. All but once: when it is time for the denouement to begin, a character is spotted crossing the landscape carrying a painting and a gun heading towards a barn. It’s an overpowering image in the piece, a singular authorial decision in a work so fluid it seems to have been created entirely without them. A God move. Kunzru achieves what Jay attempts, disappearing behind the work.
Blue Ruin is about a beautiful idea – to be able to journey without identity, to make art without the artist – and the bestial moves required to make this possible (the wool over the eyes, the betrayals, the tricks). The savagery needed to carry out the intellect.
Years ago, a review of a book by Rachel Cusk was shared with me. This review had been commissioned by an esteemed publication, heavily worked on by the editors there and ultimately not published. The reason this edit was shared with me was because the editors at the publication had tried to temper, and in places blatantly reverse, the reviewer’s criticisms; it is not common practice for a publication to disallow a critic’s position, but in this case, they did.
Those who hold Cusk’s writing close, who enjoy her piercing dissections, her governing principle of truth-telling, her lack of embellishment, her balance of serious questioning with a seeming nonchalance for the meting-out and receiving of pain (it just happens), do so with fervour. They identify something fundamental and precious. It is as if Cusk, the intellect (the beauty), must be protected from the savages.
And then there are those on the other side, who see her as the beast. We can admire Kunzru for slipping unseen behind his work, but when Cusk does the same, her detractors seem to insist, where is she in this? What does she mean to do to me? Considerations of Cusk nearly always involve her reputation as a woman author, even as (perhaps because) she tries to rid her writing of the hierarchies of feeling and events that build a reputation. There is always an old-fashioned accusation of deviousness implicit in criticisms of Cusk, one that would not be levelled at Kunzru, despite their similar savagery.
Parade, Cusk’s 17th book, is split into four sections: three of which contain a series of interspersed stories, each delivered by a different first-person narrator. The penultimate section contains a single story, which maintains a unity of place and time, like a life raft in a choppy ocean of ‘I’s. All the stories are populated by a series of ‘G’s – all different artists, based (there are clues) on real figures. We hear from the people around each G or G themselves. The concerns here are familiar: can you be a mother and an artist? What does being an artist do to your children? What sort of emptiness does a monstrous parent leave you with? Are you your parents’ artwork? And (like Kunzru) can the artist remove themselves from the artwork? For some, truth-telling is separate from art; for others, truth-telling is art; for all, gender is a problem: ‘Their lives are so gendered… it is almost as if they trust gender more than anything else to tell them how to live.’
Cusk does not flag where compassion should be activated. It’s up to us to notice the real sadness in Parade, which lies under a tone of misery, and rely on our own faculties to comprehend it. Take, for example, a female artist in Parade who transforms her parents’ neglect into a glorious artistic power: ‘She was one riotous disorderly kingdom, bankrupt, continually menacing, but not yet invaded.’ She marries an abusive man and has a child with him, whom she truly, sweetly loves, though the husband does not allow her to inhabit her power or prestige as the child’s mother. It is sad: that she tasted the things – glory through her own work, as an artist and a mother – before they were removed from her; that the promise of life can be so casually wasted; that she has so little self-regard. It is possible that Cusk’s absence of indicators as to where compassion should be felt turns us into better, kinder, more parental readers. She works away at us.
In another story, a cruel mother is dying. Her cruelty has left her adult children with a void in them, and she has disbarred them from ever crossing that void by weaponising the only tools they could use to breach it – silence and language – leaving them to understand love only in its capitalist sense. And elsewhere in Parade, a man commits suicide at the opening of a grand retrospective at a museum. The female director of the museum watches the suicide while on the phone to her ex-husband. ‘It was as if the man were being directed to destroy himself,’ she thinks, ‘as my ex-husband would like me to destroy myself.’ If we take these moments in the book at face value (which is not something Cusk generally encourages) the pure sadness of these scenes may rise to the surface.
An extremely cohesive theory develops: again and again in the book, open violence is deemed somehow preferable to insidious violence – as one character notes, ‘at least everyone can see and understand what’s going on’. And self-pity is a weakness in the bourgeoisie art milieu of Parade, the softening of self-pity into self-compassion is just too soft, neither feral nor intellectual enough. There are repeated images throughout of children waiting for mothers on the other side of doors and windows. There are studio doors left ajar for children to enter, as well as studio doors that are firmly shut against them. There are several doors that are left open for death, either for midwives of death, who will see the old gently over to the other side, or, only slightly differently, for death’s deliverance with a small hammer.
Two paintings are described at the end of Parade, their ekphrasis brief: each shows a woman in a room with a child on the other side of a window. In one of the paintings the child is standing outside in the dark ‘looking in at her but she didn’t know he was there. She didn’t care enough to know.’ In the other painting the women is leaning towards the child behind the window, waving at the child through the glass, ‘her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm. The child was smiling.’ A grieving woman looks at these paintings, she soon feels that her own dead mother has entered her: the window that used to keep them apart has been broken. The dead mother (who is the artist of her child) has disappeared into her work (the child). Meanwhile, in Blue Ruin Kunzru has Jay work on maps: ‘On some of them I stencilled the phrase to get to the other side.’ Both books capture a break for freedom. Both books contain similar ideas of what sort of art exists ‘on the other side’ of self, in both books there is an understanding that there are not, as Jay has it, only ‘two kinds of artist… an intellectual or a savage.’ This is the beautiful alignment of Blue Ruin and Parade. Savagery and intellect go hand in hand.
Roz Dineen is the author of Briefly Very Beautiful (2024)
