hari kunzru

Hari Kunzru lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Katie Kitamura, and their two small children. He received a £1.25m advance for his first novel, The Impressionist (2002), while Booker Prize-winning novelist Aravind Adiga recently said: “The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next.”

Life, then, appears to have been relatively kind to Kunzru. So why did he feel the need to delve into the cesspit of the alt-right for his latest novel, Red Pill? “I wanted to write a book about privacy and surveillance initially, then I got a residency in Berlin,” he says. “I was in Wannsee, which is a sleepy suburb. There’s a lake and it’s not the hipster Berlin of Mitte or Kreuzberg. It was the middle of winter, so it was kind of bleak, dead.

“On the other side of the lake, visible from my desk, was the Wannsee Conference house, where they plotted the Final Solution. It became clear I had to set something in Berlin, then it got wrapped up with the alt-right. I’ve been online since 1992 and I’ve always dug around in the subcultures of the internet. I’ve developed this understanding of the intellectual currents of the extreme right, which you wouldn’t do unless you were a hobbyist lurker in these spaces.”

Why was he lurking there?

“I always felt like it was an early warning system,” says Kunzru. “If I paid attention to what was coming from that direction, I would know about it in time and I would have some ability to respond to it and protect myself or my family. I’ve always been, I guess, a mildly paranoid person.”

Like Kunzru, after receiving a prestigious writing fellowship, the unnamed narrator of Red Pill arrives in Wannsee from New York. The fictional character struggles to accomplish anything, however. He doesn’t work on the book he has proposed to write but instead masturbates, takes long walks, talks to the cleaner and binge-watches Blue Lives, a violent cop show with which he gradually becomes obsessed.

At a party, he meets the creator of Blue Lives and begins to suspect that this man is “red-pilling” his viewers – turning them toward a nihilistic, alt-right worldview.

Can Kunzru explain what “red pill” means?

“It comes from the film The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves is offered a choice between a blue pill and a red pill. If he takes the blue pill, everything will remain the same, but if he takes the red pill, he will see the world as it really is.

“The idea of the red pill is that the scales will fall from your eyes and, more recently, that became a metaphor among the far right. Essentially, it’s the idea of someone having a new and very, very bleak view of the world presented to them, as though they are Alice falling down the rabbit hole.”

The narrator who falls down the rabbit hole in Red Pill shares many details of Kunzru’s biography – he is a writer with an English mother and an Indian father who studied at Columbia University before taking up a residency at a Berlin academic institution. Is Kunzru just messing with the reader by including all of this?

“I wasn’t trying to be particularly tricksy,” he says. “I was flirting with trying an auto-fictional thing but then I’m not really wired up for that. It was just the simplest solution to a set of problems, to give him the furniture of my biography.”

In spite of its humour, Red Pill is a depressing book, not least because the narrator considers suicide.

“I’m sorry!” says Kunzru, laughing. “I’m always sorting something for myself, partly, when I’m writing a book and I can’t deny that I’ve been in quite a bad place for a few years. The world has been drifting into a terrible future and one of my ways of dealing with that is to write this novel.”

Does he not feel any responsibility to give the reader a good time?

“For me, humour and bleakness exist very close together.”

The plot of Red Pill is reliant on the narrator being unable to return home to his wife from Berlin, even though remaining there is clearly making him ill.

“He is so ashamed and I wanted to go into this aspect of masculinity, which is about bottling things up. I think this is a true thing about straight relationships: men worry that if they show women their emotions, women will say: ‘Oh no, you’re awful, you are incompetent and useless! I want a man who can actually deal.’

“In doing that, men underestimate women’s understanding and tolerance, because women are used to dealing with each other as human beings rather than as these kind of Greek statues that men believe they have to be all the time.”

What I’m reading now

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

“It is fantastic, really amazing. She’s a historian and it’s non-fiction, but she’s using a very daring literary mode.”

What I’m reading next

“I’ve got a little pile, as we all have. I’m going to read a Clarice Lispector novel, I can’t remember which one I’ve decided on.”

This interview originally appeared in the i paper