It's strange to see Hari Kunzru standing, almost completely still, as he waits to meet us at London's Aldgate East tube station. This is, after all, a man whose literary creations are fond of—perhaps entirely predicated on—movement, on man's willingness to slither from one identity to the next, to bounce between places, to skip past a first destiny and on to a second.
His previous work, The Impressionist (Dutton, 2002), was an end-of-the-empire epic that evoked (not always, one senses, to Kunzru's liking) comparisons to Rushdie, with a character named Pran Nath cast out of his home in India for having British blood, then embarking on a near-biblical journey of re-creation.
Transmission, out this month also from Dutton, pounds to a similar beat: It's a story of disconnect at the world's turning point. Like The Impressionist, its main character, Arjun Mehta, is a lonerish sort who has lit out from his home in India—only this time he has chosen to do so, the setting is the present (or more plausibly, the day after tomorrow) and he is damned to wander not the harsh sands of the empire but the unforgiving freeways and office parks of the Western U.S. A glistening high-tech job turns to disappointment, and the consequences, in the form of an unruly computer virus Arjun unleashes, rocket around this networked world. Motion. Fluidity. Shrinking of distances.
Yet here Kunzru stands, quaintly engaged with a newspaper in front of a subway ticket machine while a Western capital circulates madly around him. He is wearing a trendy-but-understated lightweight beige sweater, and a coat of moss clings to his chin in an aesthetic that might be described, at least stateside, as playoff-beard chic. "I though you had a plane to catch," he remarks on our lateness, smiling but not entirely joking—and unwittingly keeping the movement theme going.
Talking to Kunzru, we realize his return to the theme in this book is not just an attempt to revive The Impressionist's magic. For Kunzru, technology and movement connect in surprising (and sometimes depressing) ways, a point made immediately on Transmission's cover, with its abstract image of freeways and circuit boards. "We've retailed this whole vision of a global future," Kunzru says, as we slide into a Brick Lane cafe. "There's a highly mobile [set] who works and expands our wealth. But we've forgotten a whole other part: the class who pays for it, who are trapped in the logic of one place."
Indeed, it's hard not to also feel in the novel an antiglobal current, that the speed enabled by technology doesn't only smooth the way for global business but also makes it easier to spread unhappiness. The title, with its epidemiological double meaning, its scent of the contaminated and the sickly, only reinforces this. "I'm suspicious of the term anti-capitalist because it can be taken as an old leftist rejection of aspects of the market. [But I] certainly have problems with the way globalization has been conducted, the way aspects of it have been sold."
Around us, on Brick Lane and the side streets of the Whitechapel district, change of many kinds proves his point—and shows that all globalization is local. The techno-gleam of new offices and nightclubs superimposes itself on the immigrant and the industrial in the awkward manner of so many changing neighborhoods in the modern world. It's an awkwardness Kunzru appears to be keenly aware of and not uncritical toward. Transmission is partially set here; in one subplot, a cartoonishly slick entrepreneur from the Tomorrow consultancy (tagline: "In today's fast-moving future the worst place to do business is the past") named Guy Swift (again, that movement thing), evokes a kind of dot-com-era Jay McInerney character, burying truth and soul under mountains of cocaine and platitudes until, inevitably, he too is avalanched.
"I wouldn't call it an anti-technology book," says Kunzru. "I love the ability of technology to produce a world where I can burrow into some wonderful stuff. But one of the most pernicious ideas is that we live in an Information Age. Yes, it's true, people in the U.K. are not hewing coal. They're in call centers. You can say objectively that it's a better life. But there's a price."
That price is made evident everywhere in Transmission. Guy Swift's scenes fit neatly with the deceptions that await the wide-eyed Arjun, who believes that talent alone can redeem him from sharpie bosses. Each think they have found a way to play the game, but each, in the end, are played by it, victims of their own hopefulness as much as the system itself. Or perhaps, Kunzru would say, the system's bug is precisely this: trafficking in unreasonable hopes.
Strong Motion
From many writers, such techno-ambivalence might sound hollow, the reflexive grumpiness of the literary technophobe (see under: Jonathan Franzen). But Kunzru is different. The author is that rare literary species whose criticism of technology comes from engagement, not disconnection. Once an editor at the British Wired, he remains a contributor to the cutting-edge music magazine Wallpaper and talks excitedly about things like "natural language" in spam messages. This is someone who applied the MS Word auto-summarizer to the entire text of his first novel ("Pran nods. Pran glares. Pran knocks. Pran nods. Pran nods. Times passes")—partly out of fun ("The Novel According to Bill," Kunzru jokes), but also out of genuine curiosity. ("It's actually not bad. It kind of gets it.")
The son of a Kashmiri and a Briton, Kunzru is a natural for the subject. The hybridity, the ambiguity, the in-between-ness of his background—all are logical precursors for postcolonial narratives. But technology, with its attendant themes of exploration and alienation, its tension between oppressor and oppressed, fits neatly, too.
Kunzru's barely known in this country, and, even a few weeks after the release of Transmission, it's too early to predict whether the book will change that. In England he doesn't have such problems. The 34-year-old is already a celebrity of mega-proportions, a paragon of Cool Britannia (that's the one obsessed not with tea and Wimbledon but with Radiohead and multiculturalism) who either "a significant talent" capable of a "considerable achievement in style and substance" (TheObserver), someone "whose mocking tone distances emotion" (The Daily Mail), or simply an eloquent author who combines a precocious sweep of history with a keen eye for the future (and who probably has more flair for story and Big Ideas than character).
Though he is far more a part of the world he's criticizing than Franzen is, the comparisons aren't far-fetched: he is, like Franzen, something of a wunderkind. He, too, is preoccupied with the loss of soul in a techno-fast universe and finds a particular emptiness in pharmacological solutions. There's also a clear structural parallel between this book and The Corrections. If Franzen in his novel managed to link several discrete stories using the conceit of family, Kunzru in Transmission has pulled off a similar trick with technology. It serves as theme, glue and backdrop all at the same time—and allows the book to wrap Bollywood, business, Western media, police chases and bisexuality into a surprisingly taut package.
Most noticeably, like the Oprah-disser, Kunzru has a preternatural, sometimes unintentional, ability to show up in the news. It started when The Impressionist landed Kunzru, A-Rod—style, the biggest advance for a first novel in the history of England (rumored in the $2-million range by chattering columnists; he says the number has been "variously misrepresented and hilariously inflated." He does allow that "[p]ublishers need buzz" and so "overpay first novelists to get the process going").
Then came the novel itself, which drew passionate reviews even by British standards. Some time quietly passed, then he was back in hot type, named to Granta's esteemed list of best young writers, compiled only once a decade. (McEwan made it the last time; and the decade previous—who else?—Rushdie.) Another few months, then a flap involving the conservative tabloid The Mail on Sunday, whose prize he won, then rejected on political grounds. (The paper has since launched a sort of offensive against him, even writing a nasty article about his artist girlfriend. For his part, Kunzru says that he finds the paper's coverage of immigrants "despicable" and says he didn't even know he had been entered for the prize.) Enter national debate about (a) whiny writers, (b) philistine tastemakers, or (c) literary vs. pop culture.
Yes, there are some Franzen similarities.
Kunzru is a much better sport about a lot of this; instead of sounding aggrieved about the Mail flap, he is prone to saying, as he did in our conversation"I really didn't mind. I used to have to talk about money, and now I get to talk about refugees." He is also something of a comedian, lapsing into an Eastern European mobster accent in talking about posters in Poland that touted his advance. He once answered a question about what book he'd take to a desert island with, "The Boy's Own Manual of Boat-building, Ship Signaling & DIY Palm Frond Radio-Transmitter Construction."
Movement of a Different Kind
Perhaps a sense of humor is a good idea if you're being judged as part of a literary movement, especially in a country where critics bare their teeth at such a thing. Kunzru is often grouped with Zadie Smith, that other British darling who writes of multicultural worlds both personal and grandiose (the two are stablemates of Hamish Hamilton editor Simon Prosser), despite many differences. But, he says, "I don't think it that's bad. I understand it." Besides, he can't get too worked up since he's not even on the main card. "She has Monica Ali," he says, smiling as he brings his two fists together to simulate a smackdown.
As much as he is joined with Britain's literary future, Kunzru is often traced to the past, especially as a literary heir to Rushdie. It's understandable: Both have a penchant for the historical sweep, both can comment at least as well as they can invent, both take into account distant global corners even as they write wide, accessible books. Kunzru never says it, but there's something in his manner that suggests a bristling at the comparison, either because he thinks it's superficial (English writers of Indian descent! They must be alike!) or for more particular reasons. "Except there's no magical realism in it," he says quickly when reminded that critics compared The Impressionist to Rushdie's best.
Instead, Kunzru espouses something he has dubbed "Realesque," which lies somewhere between magical realism and the regular kind. "It's highly unlikely to happen. But it could happen," he explains.
For all of Kunzru's contemporary significance, though, Transmission is probably most meaningfully viewed not so much for its role in the latest phase of British fiction but for its sophisticated and not always veiled essayism. That is, as an elegant narrative rebuttal to both the global businessman and the entire damn enterprise, the kind symbolized by the ads at nearly every Western airport. "You see these ads, with the subject shot from a low angle, playing with some kind of gadget, a man fetishizing his own busyness," Kunzru says, in a tone you could call passionate slyness. "This is the person who much of the culture is aimed at. He's a kind of a rube in a poorly constructed loft apartment that he's paid too much for, who buys a $1,000 chair that he doesn't really know is good, but he bought it because someone has told him it was. He's a man, really, who's outsourced his opinions."
Comments like this hint at what Kunzru really wants and who he might increasingly be. As an author and a media figure, he has positioned himself as a Jeremiah of a new Gilded Age, with Transmission a pre-exile warning about the dangers of too much technology and too little feeling. "I imagine Transmission to be at the crest of the dot-com era, where there's kind of a happy bubble. Even post-9/11, you can walk into a pub on any night in London and see people whooping it up. But there's a fragility to it."
Even as we talk in the beginning of May, a new computer virus is making its way around the world, causing the kind of panic that would fit well in Kunzru's novel. This has the effect of proving the author prescient where he might have otherwise seemed alarmist—and demonstrating that, sometimes, those best tracking the future's curvy roads don't have to move very far at all.
