36. Hari Kunzru

 

“In this way, by the time I’d been home for two months, a kind of normality emerged.” -Hari Kunzru

    

           Note, specifically, that he doesn’t say “normalcy.” That word, popularized by Warren G. Harding during his 1920 presidential campaign, may have largely replaced the previously standard “normality” in everyday English usage, but Hari Kunzru doggedly continues to prefer the older term. In his 2020 novel Red Pill, a book that questions the assumptions of what constitutes a normal life, Kunzru pointedly sticks with “normality,” refusing the sour history of the more recent coinage and, no doubt, pleasing language purists (myself very much included) along the way.

        When Harding first used the term “normalcy” in 1920, it had the lure of the new. Although the earliest recorded use of the word dates back to 1855, it did not stick, and so when Harding, campaigning in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, identified the country’s “present need” as “not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy,” it struck a chord with the electorate. Adapting “Return to Normalcy” as a campaign slogan, Harding offered Americans a chance to erase not only the hardships brought on by war and disease, but the political reforms of the previous decades as well. Dubbed the Progressive Era, the years before Harding began campaigning were marked by the establishment of antirust laws, new government regulatory bodies, and woman’s suffrage. Harding promised voters a cleansing conservative vision—“The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation” he said—and they responded, handing him 60 percent of the popular vote and 37 of the 48 states. 

        The parallels with the United States’ current situation—in which we suffer under the twin ills of COVID-19 and Trumpism, while looking to electoral politics for a solution—have been much remarked upon and hardly need elaboration. The major difference is that, rather than longing for a more socially and politically conservative time, Biden supporters want to turn back the clock to an ostensibly more liberal era, one to which our current president’s election itself served as something of a Harding-style backlash. Regardless of whether we can return to the “normal” times represented by Obama’s presidency or what “normal” might even mean in the first place, though, this wish remains strong across wide swathes of the electorate, and it’s one to whose promised comforts I’m far from immune.

      But as the narrator of Red Pill suspects, things were never as normal as we like to believe. At the beginning of the book, the narrator, a writer, is beset by a vague discontent, a worry that the things he spent his life affirming—essentially, liberal humanist values—were hollow to the core and that the safety he and his family took for granted as middle-class U.S. residents, might be, at any moment, withdrawn. Over the course of the book, he leaves for a residency in Berlin where he becomes obsessed with a brutalizing cop television drama, meets and stalks the show’s nihilistic creator, and by turns tries to resist and reluctantly accepts the idea that the world is nothing more than a struggle of brute forces that render irrelevant the comforts and illusions of civilization.

This way madness lies, and the narrator’s red pilling, his awakening to the “true” nature of life, leads to a breakdown on a Scottish island, after which he returns to his domestic Brooklyn life, where he attempts to re-assimilate into a normalized existence. The book’s final scene takes place during a 2016 election day party, in which the narrator’s wife and the couple’s liberal friends, all certain of Hillary Clinton’s impending victory, stand shocked and defeated. The narrator, although in no mood to gloat, is not surprised at all. For he has sensed that, lurking beneath the progressive worldview of his wife and his friends, in which the future is predictable, can be extrapolated from the past, there lies an “occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us.” 

For him, the 2016 election represents the welling up of these subterranean forces, present if invisible all along, to make a mockery of the normality that the people at the party had falsely believed existed. The narrator, who after his adventures, is more than content to retreat into this normality, is denied that opportunity at the very moment when it finally seems attainable. Falling back on some lame bromides about solidarity, the narrator can only wait and see what the future brings.

Four years later, at the end of another election cycle, it remains uncertain whether that kind of normal is even possible, regardless of the result of the upcoming contest. What Kunzru suggests, in tracking his narrator’s physical, intellectual, psychological, and emotional wanderings—and contra that narrator’s friends, their real life liberal counterparts, and that old reactionary Warren G. Harding—is that it may never have existed in the first place.