RED PILL

 Red Pill, Hari Kunzru, Alfred A Knopf, 2020, 304 pp

This is an important novel about today's world, about intrusion into our privacy, about a sort of epic battle between left and right in politics, about the ways in which such conundrums wear us out and down.

The title refers back to the 1999 film, The Matrix. It is about a choice: the red pill reveals life-changing truth, the blue allows a state of blissful ignorance. (I did not remember this trope from the film so I plan to watch it again.)

The novel opens with a middle-aged writer, happily married, father of a three year old daughter, but stuck as a writer.

"It is when you first understand," he says of middle age, "that your condition...is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story."

In an effort to break through his writer's block, he travels from Brooklyn to Germany on a fellowship. He expects to have weeks of uninterrupted quiet and to work on his next book. 

Instead, he finds a regimented scene where he is expected to write at a desk in a large communal room surrounded by the other writers. He immediately becomes uncomfortable and gains a reputation as odd man out and troublemaker for resisting the rules.

He hides out in his room, binge-watching a violent cop show, and not writing. He takes walks around the town of Wannsee, historically the location where the Nazis planned the final solution. In the dining area he meets Anton, the writer of the cop show and perceives the man to be his nemesis. Eventually an obsession forms that Anton is living in the writer's mind. His actions become increasingly erratic.

I am drawn to descent into madness tales, perhaps because I have been on that brink a couple times myself. Kunzru has cleverly written one these tales but creates a parallel one; society and an individual making similar descents.

This creepy beginning ramps up into a type of psychological thriller. After a stint in a psych ward and finally being rescued by his left-wing lawyer wife, the book ends on the night of the 2016 election as he and his wife throw a party to watch the election results come in. Yes, that night!

I found the end of the book possibly a bit soft and improbable. As I thought about it over several days, I realized that it is so very Hari Kunzru that the nature of his story should be set against an improbable ending. After all, at this point in history we have little idea of where we are headed. 

Not a feel good novel but certainly an illuminating one.