...his portrait of east London in the 1990s has real texture, grit and grunge rubbing up against the crude new money of the exploding art scene ... one of Blue Ruin’s greatest strengths: Kunzru’s creation of a body of work that possesses the heft and believability of something real. In both this, and the adroit way in which he makes Jay’s endeavours part of the fabric of the text — the revelation of which, incidentally, I found genuinely thrilling — makes for a novel that’s both a sharp dissection of the oily inner workings of the art world, and a compelling portrait of one man’s desperate attempt to escape complicity in the capitalist machine.
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