What appears to be an average midlife crisis for an agitated midcareer male writer tumbles headlong toward existential apocalypse in Hari Kunzru's engrossing, mind-bending sixth novel, Red Pill. It is his second work (after White Tears) to borrow its name from an Internet meme, whose compressed implications he nimbly unpacks and grapples with through a mounting haze of terror.
From the outset, the narrator is sleepless and skeptical of the high-minded Deuter Center in Wannsee, Germany, where he has taken up a fellowship in both an effort to find himself and produce a book about the Self. His desire for privacy, however, conflicts with the establishment's utopian ideals of openness. So, instead of working under scrutiny in the glass-walled workroom with the other fellows, he hides away in his room, where he videocalls his wife and daughter back in New York, eats Chinese takeout and binges the police drama Blue Lives.
His already addled mind seizes on the unusually violent show: he begins recognizing 18th-century philosophy embedded in the characters' nihilistic monologues--the same kind of Romantic thinkers he's been circling in his own work, like Heinrich von Kleist, whose grave lies in the vicinity of Wannsee, and whom he describes as "a man desperately stabbing himself with the needle of his own personality in an attempt to get a response." Abject as the image is, can he relate?
As in Gods Without Men, Kunzru takes his time to establish the true stakes of this novel, which emerge organically from a scatterplot of dilemmas about privacy and openness, surveillance and security, paranoia and gaslighting, collective good and individual glory. But it all snaps into an anxious overdrive when the narrator enters an unlikely but ruthless showdown of ideas with Anton, the dapper American creator of Blue Lives, whose subliminal messaging may be trying to unlock a brutal future world. "You know what the best part is?" Anton laughs after performing an esoteric Nazi salute. "I'm going to be living rent free in your head from now on."
Amid the rising tide of nationalist politics worldwide, Kunzru has intrepidly traversed the festering neofascist underbelly of the Internet Age so readers don't have to. Red Pill is a virtuosic portrait of the moment. Yet even as it asserts, "An argument at a party isn't any kind of action, neither can it bring about some particular version of the future, nor prevent it from coming to pass," the novel illuminates, alarmingly but with resiliency, the raw power of strange and fragile thoughts. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: In a paranoid philosophical showdown, with real-world stakes, a writer in midlife crisis grapples with a neo-Nazi embedding esoteric messaging in a popular television drama.