In Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill, the nameless narrator leaves Brooklyn for a residency in Berlin at the Deuter Center, where he hopes to finally write something ambitious that will dispel his secret fear of his own mediocrity. But that hope is dead on arrival.

The Deuter Center’s philosophy of ultra-transparency and the intellectual provocations of a fellow resident make the narrator at first self-conscious, then increasingly mentally unstable. Over the course of his nervous breakdown, our narrator moves into the orbit of an influential neoreactionary media figure, subverting his political and personal identity and loosening his grip on reality.

At Bookforum, critic Christian Lorentzen holds up Red Pill as “the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form.” The novel’s theme of political disorientation, particularly liberal impotence and uncertainty in an age of reaction, also make it a likely prototype for Trump-era novels to come.