In 2003, when he published his first novel, The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru was already a recognizable enough print and TV journalist to receive a record-breaking advance. The protagonist of The Impressionist hides and reinvents his identity, assuming different names and claiming different ethnicities repeatedly in order to survive in different spaces and cultures. Although Kunzru has maintained a stable public identity for decades, in his work little is as it first appears. In Gods without Men, the story of a middle-class New York family’s stay at a bed-and-breakfast in the Southwest becomes an inquiry into paranormal events and the limits of faith and reason. In White Tears, a story about two liberal arts grads opening a music studio in Brooklyn becomes a blood epic unearthing centuries of violence that have been struck from written history. 

When I read one of Kunzru’s novels, I find one of my own obsessions pursued to a satisfying end. White Tears connected my nerdy fascination with analog recording technology to the exploitation implicit in our cultural economies. Gods without Men, a pastiche spanning centuries, synthesized my excitement about psychedelia into a series of neat epistemological premises. In a world in which new and frightening questions emerge every day, it’s startling to discover how many of them Kunzru has already anticipated, engaged with, and answered.