Red Pill

The narrator of Kunzru’s ninth novel is a writer on fellowship at a literary center in Berlin, but of course cannot write. Instead he spends the precious time away from his family touring the gothic shadows of the town’s Nazi past and obsessively bingeing a police procedural that seems to be deploying subliminal alt-right messaging. This is a thrilling novel that bridges the real and the fictional, bringing the last four years of political strife under the guise of a fractured mystery. In a year where everyone is asking others to question their politics, Red Pill questions our very cores: the issue of the self and who controls it. Kunzru has stated that this is the middle volume of a loose trilogy about the arts—the first being his novel White Tears which took on music just as Red Pill takes on writing—and we look forward to the third, which will explore the visual arts.