Red Pill (Hari Kunzru, 2020)

This book has been describes as “the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form”, I discovered upon having finished it. I think it did a very fine job of commenting on changes in our cultural climate the past five years. I liked the opening paragraph:

I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition – physically, intellectually, socially, financially – is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

This rather bleak passage aside, I was happy to finally be reading some contemporary fiction, after almost exclusively reading books from the 20th century. Red Pill is a book of many parts, or multi-layered, as they say nowadays. Already in the title is an indication that it deals with contemporary themes, as “the red pill” is an expression popular in certain quarters of the newer right-wing movements, which is supposed to denote an informed mindset.

The story begins with the protagonist describing his arrival at a writer’s retreat in Germany. The other writers at the place are full of pretentious blather and the narrator doesn’t enjoy the management’s surveillance policy. He tries to write a book about poetry and is preoccupied with German romantic poet Novalis. One evening, he meets the writer of a TV show he likes, a police procedural. It turns out this TV-writer is also a public speaker on behalf of the “alt-right” movement. He becomes obsessed with this writer and loses his mind a little bit.

It is a initially a portrayal of the creative class and its ludicrous idiosyncrasies, and then turns to being more focused on the new right wing internet troll culture and the protagonist’s descent into madness. It includes scenes from a refugee asylum after the refugee crisis of 2015 and also comments on “cancel culture” and mental health issues. In the middle is a lengthy passage about a punk band in the East German Republic which doesn’t really fit into the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, I am impressed with Kunzru’s ability to weave together all these strands into a coherent narrative, and to engage with other worldviews in a non-simplistic way.