Red Pill

Red Pill is what happens when your publisher pushes you to quickly follow up a successful book (White Tears). The latter was amazing and one I want to reread again and again.

Red Pill moves slowly at first. The middle gets interesting, yet the main character is a depressing human who stays that way. Redemption never comes. And the last 50 pages just seem to be filler / the authors own thoughts on the Clinton/Trump election. Yes, we all thought Clinton would win. Does this need to be rehashed in a novel?

Even if youve enjoyed Kunzrus previous works, this is one to skip.

I am a fervent reader, reading authors from all over the world and even if I don’t care for the writing, the story, the effort, I always am able to finish their work, that includes Hari Kunzu’s writing.
But Red Pill made me give up after 60%, it made me remember books I have read by daring writers in the sixties, seventies that engaged me enormously in their stories which delved into similar territory as Red Pill.
Hari Kunzru book in comparison is sleep inducing on a level comparable with three Ambien sleeping aids

A red pill implies a reality beyond what yoy think reality is. In thus case it is merely anxiety on not being able to write a follow-up to a first success. self indulgent schizophrenia.

As someone who has been observing from the sidelines many of the alt-right movement/trends online since 2008-ish through sites like Zerohedge, which started as a decent financial analysis blog during height of the financial crisis and devolved into full on Trumperism and insane comment threads over the years…I did find the author’s perspective on this to be on the money. The rate of the main character’s accelerated/rapid descent into the rabbit hole didn’t quite true, like a red-pill mixed with meth, but if you can get over that part as a necessary story telling device, this is a interesting and dark tour of the fringes of this movement and their crazy-making “philosophies”. Overall a fun ride!

Brilliant. Everything about this novel is sheer brilliance. The plotting. The characterizations. The deep thoughtfulness. The humanity. The wisdom. It’s written in four sections and each one is a tour de force all on its own. I could not put it down (except for a two hour lunch break) and this is usually not the case with most longer novels that I read. It was not so much the plot which kept me reading, though the plot itself is brilliantly and complexly designed and executed, but rather the deepening experience of the protagonist’s humanity as it reaches a sort of rock bottom from which it seems only barely by the end of the novel to have risen back into some semblance of normality. Or I could say, it was not so much the plot that kept me reading but where the novelist’s mind was taking me via the plot, into a deeper and deeper encounter with what we call our goodness and our humanity. I should add that for one important reason or another I find most contemporary novels lacking something essential no matter how dazzling their evocation of this or that life. This wonderful novel didn’t leave me with that feeling at all. Everything felt perfectly and exquisitely narrated and very painfully realized at the deepest human level. I repeat, a novel I found to be brilliant in every way which I consider important in a work of fiction.

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