RED PILL by Hari Kunzru

(contains spoilers, but it’s not really that kind of book)

 Red Pill, the latest novel from Hari Kunzru, begins with the unnamed protagonist arriving in Berlin at what may truly be the world’s worst writing residency, catalogues his related spiral into madness, and ends with the election of Donald Trump. So it’s a fun book. Honestly, though, it’s some of the best writing on what feels like a manic episode that I have ever encountered.

But back to that writing residency. The Deuter Center, named after one of the titans of industry associated with Germany’s post-WWII economic miracle, prizes itself not so much on community but rather absolute transparency and openness. This translates to shared meals (okay so far, seems like most live-in arts communities do some version of this) and, way weirder, shared writing space. No cozy, private nook to sink into. No imagining the space in which you create as your own. Rather a room with utilitarian tables where all of the residents are expected to work, in plain view of each other.

Expected is a key word, because when the protagonist insists he will be much more comfortable, and thus more productive, in his room, he causes a rather large hullaballoo. Productive is another key word, because the powers that be at the Deuter Center have actually gamified the writing process. Residents receive reports detailing how much progress they have made. Keystrokes measured, files created, you name it. Residents, like our protagonist, who, for whatever reason fail to meet expectations, are told they may be asked to leave and threatened with the prospect of having to reimburse the the Deuter Center for any funds received. Our protagonist admits he may have overlooked these details in the fine print, but the whole setup feels, in a word, crazy making.

Indeed, this is what happens. The protagonist spirals into an out-of-control state in which he begins to obsess over Anton, an alt-right activist he meets at a party who dresses up his racism with faux-intellectual arguments and a shit ton of nihilism. One scene in an Imbiss with a few of this character’s equally racist friends is especially uncomfortable, all the more so because the protagonist is a man of color, a British national of Indian ethnicity.

Anton—though this may not be his real name—takes on a larger-than-life hold over the protagonist, and as a result, with a couple of plot points along the way, the protagonist ends up first in Paris instead of on his flight home to NYC (after being kicked out of the Deuter Center), and then in a cabin in a remote area of Scotland because he is convinced that Anton, who works in television, once filmed an advertisement there. This is where our protagonist is arrested and eventually, after spending time in a Scottish psychiatric ward, makes his way back to his worried wife and child.

The next thing we hear from our protagonist is that some time has passed and that he is now on meds, including an antipsychotic to prevent manic episodes. This is the only use of the word ‘manic’ in the book, which also steers clear of any of the familiar language of symptoms (‘racing thoughts,’ ‘pressured speech,’ ‘paranoia,’ ‘delusional thinking’) and instead, brilliantly in my view, simply details a thought process that is manic, one in which everything is connected and even small, probably insignificant details take on enormous weight. And yet the protagonist’s particular fears about the coming tide of the societal forces that will eventually lead to the election of Donald Trump, which more particularly lead him on his ever-more disorganized quest to follow Anton (in order to keep tabs on him in some way, thereby defending his own family from harm), feel perfectly reasonable. They make sense. In a way, the protagonist is not merely coming apart at the scenes, he is also a Cassandra.

This sets up a thoughtful critique of psychiatry, one that is certainly not original to our protagonist, but no less valuable because of that. If anything, it bears repeating, in fact, cannot be voiced often enough: “”My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?”

This is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years, though I suspect there are no easy answers. I suppose the truth is, the system and culture we live in really are sick, but in the meantime, we have to survive it, and it’s the people who genuinely can’t survive in the conditions they are handed that get labeled sick, and who are treated, at least in the West, according to the medical model of mental illness. Unfortunately, so much emphasis is placed on surviving that the underlying sickness, a society that is unjust, uncaring, and expects too much (or whose expectations are unreasonable from the get-go) never gets dismantled.

Capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homo- and transphobia all have a lot to answer for when it comes to mental illness (and I am no doubt leaving a number of factors out). Certainly, there are those who are chronically mentally ill, but a lot of other people, who, yes, may be in one way or another predisposed, become ill as a result of stress. For our protagonist, the final stress factor boils down to being subjected to a new environment where he is expected to produce at a certain level (and is monitored in invasive ways to ensure that he succeeds!) while at the same time is stripped of the conditions in which he can work. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s a lot. Add a crumbling world order and his resulting fear for his family, and the resulting environment becomes a nest of vipers.

Books that get mental illness right and, along the way, also deliver a fair and compelling examination of both the conditions that lead to that illness as well as the circumstances and events leading away from the collapse don’t come around every day, and when they do, should be read and celebrated. In Red Tears, Hari Kunzru gets it right.