Hari Kunzru, _Red Pill_

 HARI KUNZRU’S FICTION seems more “literary” than “genre” to me, and is as cerebral as any reader could hope, but he certainly has a deft way with genre fiction’s tropes. In White Tears, Charlie Shaw’s “Graveyard Blues” made a neat synecdoche for white America’s exploitation and appropriation of African American culture, but it also made a dandy MacGuffin with which to send Kunzru’s characters on elaborate journeys through hazards and revelations.

Red Pill is similar. Any novel that invokes Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph de Maistre, and the Wannsee Conference is cerebral enough for me, and the novel’s central preoccupation is a grave one—the novel’s over-arching preoccupation is the extent and power of the far right intellectual networks of our time. So...cerebral and serious...but also as brisk a page-turner as one could ask. Pynchonesque in its inquiry into almost invisible forces of oppression, yes, but in the sprinter’s mode of The Crying of Lot 49 rather than the marathon of Against the Day.

Red Pill’s unnamed narrator is an independent scholar, someone who researches and writes but has no college or university position to provide a steady salary. It’s a none-more-precarious way to make a living, I imagine, but our narrator has caught a break. His book on the idea of taste got some notice, and so he has a six-months grant from an institute in Germany to complete his next project, a book on the construction of the subject in lyric poetry.

Which sounds like a even more dated, wheezier idea than the idea of “taste,” as another fellow at the institute rudely points out. The “lyrical subject’? Who are we, Lionel Trilling? Our narrator seems blocked, actually, no longer sure of the validity of his own project. He self-medicates by binge-watching a cop show—in which, eerily, one of the cops starts quoting French reactionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

What the hell? Forget about the lyric subject. The narrator has to track this down. And that’s the novel, basically. Along the way, he and we the readers have plenty of occasion to wonder whether he (like Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49) is actually on to something or is losing his mind. 

Did I mention the novel is set in 2016? That might give us a clue.