‘Red Pill’ Navigates Distortions of Privacy

For a novel whose namesake is the option of knowing the painful truth in 1999’s cult classic “The Matrix,” “Red Pill” is, above all else, about lies — both the lies told by those around us, and the lies we tell ourselves. From there, it becomes not so much a question of choosing the red or blue pill as it is an issue of distinguishing between the two at all. Set in a modern, technologically-conscious world that still comes across as vaguely foreign, Hari Kunzru’s latest work follows in the same vein of sharply crafted pseudo-realities as his earlier novels — in particular, “White Tears” and “Transmission.” Here, what “Red Pill” lacks in structural coherence, it makes up for in twisting thrill.

The story starts out simply enough: The protagonist, an uninspired writer who wakes up one morning to find himself facing the bleak horizon of middle age, receives a fellowship in Berlin, where he is meant to work on a proposed book about lyric explorations of self. There, he hopes to finally dispel the growing sense of malaise in his life, and come home to his family a new man. Yet there is a certain disquieting irony in that among all the specific places and people he mentions throughout his narration, his own name is never made known to the reader. Without it, one can’t help but feel that his search for identity, whether in a literary or personal sense, is fated to failure.

Instead of a secluded environment conducive to quiet writing, the narrator finds himself in a communal workspace where he is monitored at all times, with a “statistical breakdown of… hours spent, documents created, sites visited, and so on” distributed to him each week. Demoralized by the impersonal insincerity of this new environment, his next few weeks are spent in a limbo of self-indulgent inertia — during which he develops a fixation with a disturbing cops-gone-bad TV show called “Blue Lives” and its creator. As he is “red-pilled” by a nihilist philosophy where “the truth of existence lay in a sort of ceaseless impersonal violence, merciless and without affect of any kind,” his individual mid-life crisis becomes a window into the moral disintegration of the entire world.

Throughout all this, the deluge of obscure cultural references — ranging from outlandish political conspiracies to German romanticism — throws the reader down a disorienting spiral that not only parallels the narrator’s mind, but the current culture of Internet news, as it becomes increasingly difficult to draw the line between what is playing out on-screen and what is happening in reality. Through his depictions of actual alt-right ideologies and where they fall along the increasingly blurred line between his characters’ private and public spheres, Kunzru addresses legitimate questions regarding the toxic, immersive culture of news — in both its creation and consumption — with a wry, refreshing tone that avoids coming across as too preachy.

It is at around the halfway point, however, that “Red Pill’s” lack of a fully sympathizable (or even identifiable) narrator runs its plot slightly off course. The chapters of him stalking his one-dimensional antagonist across Europe is not so much a rabbit hole as it is an endless maze of funhouse mirrors: intriguing until it quickly becomes tiresome, without any kind of centralizing force to hold so many geographical and psychological tangents together in the reader’s mind. It isn’t quite the right build-up to the climax, which relies on a single external event rather than the untapped potential of its own plot to drive shock, leaving a sense of vague disappointment. Still, the prose remains grippingly readable, and there is a certain feverish drive that provides enough momentum to propel the reader towards the finish line.

Despite the hasty onset of the ending, it is nevertheless a redemptive moment that allows Kunzru’s language to make its final point in clean, lyrical simplicity — not quite filling those murky plot holes, but at least lulling the reader into forgetting them. “We must remember that we do not exist alone,” the narrator muses, and it is a relief that his words no longer hold a sense of paranoid warning, but of comforting closure.