New York now, lead me back to New York then. There isn’t one New York, it’s too mediated and historicized and romanticized— a city haunted by images and stories of itself. In New York stories, one theme is retold like a chorus: people don’t work here, they hustle. Hustling plays into the urban dream for everyone, but for artists, hustling is celebrated as a mark of a visionary experience, a rite of passage.
But dreams are stubborn things, and within two years of the stroke, the thought of camping down a river to the sea reared its head above the water’s surface of my injured brain again. To surrender this dream to the stroke, as a completely sane person probably would have, was something I simply wasn’t willing to do. Not pursuing the dream might prolong my life, but would life without audacious goals really feel like living?
How did this fruit for privileged picnickers turn into the multimillion-pound industry that, in today’s summer months, outsells supermarket basics such as bread and milk? The story begins with romantic happenstance. Sweet, fragile Fragaria chiloensis found itself alongside the tougher Fragaria virginiana in the nursery of a French botanist. The hybrid offspring was juicy yet hardy, with a delicate hint of pineapple that earned it the name Fragaria ananassa. We don’t trouble ourselves with the names of strawberry species today because everything we buy comes from this “garden strawberry”.
What ultimately distinguishes the novel is its searching quality, a greater open-endedness than his two preceding works, whose moral universe was more clearly defined. It requires a reader to think rather than to offer a sage nod of agreement. Blue Ruin isn’t strictly autobiographical, but it’s clear that whether Kunzru is writing about the degradations of the art market, white profit from Black pain, or the conservative romanticism that runs through mass culture like sewage, he, like his protagonists, is aiming to create works of literature that do more than satisfy a contemporary publishing niche. In other words, there’s something distinctly meta about Jay’s resistance to the institutionalization of his art.