Running on empty

Early in Hari Kunzru's third novel, "My Revolutions," there's a scene that highlights its edgy clarity. It's 1968, and Kunzru's protagonist, a young radical named Chris Carver, has just been arrested after an antiwar rally in London turns violent. In his jail cell, he meets another protester, self-proclaimed revolutionary filmmaker Miles Bridgeman, who asks about the world Chris means to build.

"[W]hat kind of future will it be?" Miles wonders. "What exactly? . . . Picture it in your head. What's different? How does it work? How do they do things? What do you see?" Frustrated, Chris can summon up only the image of "walking down the street smiling," as if the future were a kind of ad. "I was angry with myself," he admits. "Was that really all I could imagine? Not even to have a picture of freedom. How abject. How bleak."

It's precisely this tension -- between the romance of insurrection and the elusive goal of a new order; between the anger of the young, the disillusioned and the entrenched structures of society -- that is the underlying theme of "My Revolutions," which opens 30 years after Chris' jailhouse revelation in an England where "the old town-center tradesmen have gone out of business, butchers and ironmongers and family-run tea rooms edged out by branches of Starbucks and Pizza Hut." Chris now lives quietly under the name Mike Frame, with a common-law wife and an adopted daughter who know nothing of his history; he's been hiding in plain sight since the early 1970s, when the radical group with which he was affiliated embarked on a virulent bombing campaign.

How, Kunzru wants us to consider, does idealism lead to violence, and then to a passivity that nullifies them both? In recent years, similar questions have motivated a host of novels, including Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance" and Susan Choi's "American Woman," both of which re-imagine the strange saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Dana Spiotta's "Eat the Document," which also traces the after story of a 1960s radical gone underground.

But if "My Revolutions" has much in common with these efforts, it's a more inward-looking book. Beginning at the very moment when a much older Miles blows Chris' (or Mike's) cover, this is a novel about identity as much as politics, built around the notion that our most cherished beliefs, hopes, desires, even memories, are little more than constructs in the end. "All things are transitory," Chris reflects. "All things must pass. Attachments, whether to material possessions, to people, to places or a name, are futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away."