“The cruelty is the point.” They’re words made famous by an Atlantic headline about life under Trump, and they’re likely to ring throughout your head as you read Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a twisty and disquieting novel that, despite what its title might suggest, is not about The Matrix. Kunzru doesn’t explicitly define his title, but anyone who’s been online lately likely doesn’t need him to—to be red-pilled is, in certain circles, to be enlightened to the perceived ways in which liberals and feminists are destroying the world. If you’re red-pilled, you’re probably wearing a red hat.
But Kunzru’s novel isn’t a book about being online. Not on its surface, at least. It begins with an unnamed author contemplating middle age, that “gentle downward slope into darkness,” before leaving Brooklyn for the Deuter Center outside of Berlin. There, as part of a fellowship, he’ll spend three months working on a book about “the construction of the self in lyric poetry.” Our cultured, hyper-literate protagonist is soon undone, however, by the center’s demand for full transparency. Fellows work together, eat together, socialize. Unable to write in such conditions, he hides in his room, binging seasons of a cop show, Blue Lives, that sounds like an even more violent and nihilistic version of The Shield. When he meets the show’s creator at a party, his obsession with its “mockery of human dignity” opens a path to madness that begins to look a lot like Twitter, consumed as it is by identity politics, fascism, and trolling.
Kunzru is wise to keep the narrative both rooted in the real world and mostly divorced from the current moment more specifically. By doing so, he’s able to isolate the behaviors inherent to the online culture wars—the baiting, the debating, the veils of humor—and view them through a historical lens. One section unspools the tale of informants in the German Democratic Republic, framing it in a way that speaks to modern ideas of “cancel culture.” The German writer Heinrich von Kleist, who’s buried close to the center’s grounds, is characterized by the protagonist as a 19th-century “incel.” He’s versed in the archetypes of those who identify as far right, but he’s also, like many navel-gazing liberals, completely incapable of speaking to them.
Red Pill is, in many ways, a book about the fragilities of liberalism and intellectuality, concepts that are so often rooted in lofty idealism that they can’t withstand the “invincible sarcasm” and “constant hints of transgression” that distinguish the Trump-era Republican, who believes in nothing except for triggering (and, yes, owning) the libs. It takes practically nothing for the narrator to accept the vacuity of his thesis regarding lyric poetry. Later, after being baited into calling an adversary a racist, he urges himself to “remember why I believed the things I did, and why I had a right, even a duty, to defend them.” After years of perceived comfort under Barack Obama, the actual content of his ideology has curdled into a stew of buzzwords.
But Kunzru’s story isn’t strictly a critique. Anybody who’s struggled with shitposting’s influence on modern discourse, the layered irony and perpetual smirk, will identify with the narrator. He worries he’s the butt of a joke he doesn’t understand. He obsesses over what he claims to hate. He wants life to be like a poem, despite all evidence to the contrary. Kunzru finds the humor and humanity in it all, but even as the story spirals into well-earned hysteria, he never downplays the severity of the mental derangement unfolding on both sides of the aisle in a post-truth era, nor the ways each can intersect in the realm of conspiracy. He delves so deep into it, in fact, that his ending, affecting as it is, can’t help but feel pat, another lofty ideal in an era that routinely shatters them. But maybe all resolutions feel hollow when the discourse has grown so alienating. What even is idealism in a world where cruelty is the point?
Author photo: Clayton Cubitt
41 Comments
Wow, this sounds absolutely insufferable.
yup
Greetings
to you and I wish you success. I am also a basic lawyer in a judiciary and a
member of the World Bar Association. This is my website address. http://www.isfahanattorney.ir
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting the thrust of the book, but I don’t think I can handle another indulgent, leftist self-critique right now. While it’s necessary for us to remain conscious of what we believe and how we choose to act on it, leftist propensity for critical evaluation and reflection leads to a spiral of inaction.Compare that to right wing disregard for any consistent through line beyond being the biggest shit possible, and it’s obvious why we’re being buried under a movement liberated of a consistent ideology.So yeah, I’m sure the novel is quite good, but I’m not going to be indulging in a reflex on liberal fragility here at the end of the world.
Forgive me if I’m misinterpreting the thrust of the bookBut you’re right, sometimes it is easier to judge a book by it’s cover.
They’re really more judging a book by the review, and recognizing that the review may be offering a skewed presentation of the book’s content.
Yeah but it’s an AVClub review. It’s like judging a movie by a high school paper review.
That’s literally why books have covers
I judge books by their spines, nice and sturdy, with good glue
If White Tears (Kunzru’s first book) is anything to go by, I agree with you. The main character of that book was a cipher who seemed to have been created solely for the purpose of showing how vacuous and awful liberal-leaning young white men can be. A whole lot of shooting fish in a barrel.
I hope this won’t discourage anyone from reading White Tears. Yes, the lead character is something of a void, but it turns out it’s not really his story. It’s set up as a typical book about New York hipster privilege, then explodes the structure and launches a full-on assault of historical mystery, ghost story and dark-as-fuck class/race satire. Giving your protagonist an essential emptiness can sink some novels, but not this one. Without it, the slide from cultural appropriation into madness and horror in the latter half doesn’t resonate as deeply.
It’s a valid way to read it, and given the adoring reception the book received, you are probably in the majority. For me, while the formal experimentation in the second half was interesting, the vapid narrator, the doomed love interest (an all-too-common type of female character in novels written by men), and the burn-it-all-down ending did not work. It really depends on what you go to novels for—I’m always looking for nuanced characters and a strong underlying plot, especially at the end, regardless of any baroque prose or stylistic flourishes. Maybe what it boils down to is I prefer satire in small doses.
Fair enough – I read some critiques of the (intentionally) thin characterization, and I get it, I just think there’s so much other stuff going on that makes the book worth reading. I enjoy all kinds of novels for all kinds of reasons – I dig showy theatricality now and then, and for me the style suited the ideas about race and justice and anger and performance and authenticity. Subtle it ain’t, but I thought it worked on its own terms.
Thanks for this. I’m not going to check out Red Pill because of this shitty AVClub review; I’m going to check out Red Pill because of White Tears.
I’m checking out Red Pill because I don’t want to be left behind when the sequels, Blue Pill and Green Pill are written.
I dunno man, I read White Tears and while there is a fair amount of liberal navelgazing in that one, Kunzru hangs it on a pretty good narrative and doesn’t paint with the widely condemning brush you’re projecting onto him. It was more an examination than an indictment; I did not get the impression of one folding their hands and admitting defeat or overthinking their actions and coming up with nothing to show for it. They suss out the root of the individual impulse and the wider system behind it more than they malign it, and it does a really good job of looking at the dichotomy between the poor black musicians who were exploited and the privileged white fans who try (and sometimes fail) to give them their due. Based on the description of Red Pill, it sounds like this story goes in a similarly allegorical direction. I’m here for it.
That’s cool. Like I say, not having read any of his stuff, I have zero authority to say if his themes work or not.Mostly, I’m surprised to read a review so positive that has the effect of making me want to stay faaaaar away.
Well I’d just say don’t let The AVClub’s level of writing decide what you think of Kunzru’s writing.
I don’t think my opinions are always right and I definitely have room to learn and grow, as we all do. However facing a world right now that has more than enough people including the president saying the most morally repugnant things imaginable and lying non-stop. I reallydon’t feel like diving into a book telling me to self analyze more. I will continue to self analyze out of habit, but I don’t think I need this specific author to be telling me how. I find it kinda untrustworthy honestly.
Oof. I’d recommend picking up a book. Not this one, but something that might help you process and learn about what’s going on. I may be projecting a little (a lot), but I have a lot of friends who say they’re too drained to read or march when in reality they’re draining themselves scrolling doom twitter, and calling that self-analysis.
Oof look at your comments defending the fuck out this author. Talk about untrustworthy. I’m not stupid and I read quite a lot and you’re an ass.
Hey I was just trying to say the book might be more worth your time than trying to be the coolest dude in the AVClub’s comments section. Holy fuck do you suck.
leftists never self-critique. they project all of their insecurities onto “liberals”
shut the fuck up
This is the straight-up dumbest horsefuck I’ve read in days.
looks like i struck a nerve
none of this shit is “leftist”
Lol. Nice try. I know know the first modern prototype of the suicide booth from Futurama when I see it. Because I will definitely kill myself if I get close to considering reading this “book”.
My Incredibly Important Words on Snowflakes
…….the fuck was that?
Has the writer *seen* The Shield? I wouldn’t call it nihilistic
“He’s versed in the archetypes of those who identify as far right, but
he’s also, like many navel-gazing liberals, completely incapable of
speaking to them.”Why the hell would we want to? What is this BoTh SiDeS aRe tHe SaMe bullshit. Never mind I read this whole review and still have no idea what this book is supposed to be about.
No.
“… the layered irony and perpetual smirk”
– The A.V. Club
Greetings
to you and I wish you success. I am also a basic lawyer in a judiciary and a
member of the World Bar Association. This is my website address. http://www.isfahanattorney.ir
Greetings
to you and I wish you success. I am also a basic lawyer in a judiciary and a
member of the World Bar Association. This is my website address. وکیل جرایم رایانه ای و فضای سایبری اصفهان http://www.isfahanattorney.ir
are we sure he doesnt write under an alias? that name sounds like quite the troll by a right winger. a bit laboured but still.
perhaps the author equivalent of his gamer avatar being a super hot chick with a giant sword and armor everywhere except the places that arouse him?
‘concepts that are so often rooted in lofty idealism that they can’t
withstand the “invincible sarcasm” and “constant hints of transgression”
that distinguish the Trump-era Republican’If your convictions can’t handle sarcasm from a low-information idiot, you are just a different kind of idiot.
it sounds like this guy hates comfortable, navel-gazing neoliberal centrists.as a progressive, so do i but for very different reasons.
at the end of the day, I switch off my laptop and don’t think about pills or cancel culture or liberal politics. in this world, I am only responsible for my own stuff. these aren’t questions people like me get to ask, not ever.
but I do think there’s something going on here that we need to make sense of and properly understand. my reading list is full at the moment but I’ll definitely add this one.