A few years ago, I had lunch with Jonny Geller, a literary agent with a knack for generating disgustingly fat advances for first-time novelists. The conversation was due to cover a range of dull but important topics relating to the publishing industry but when he remarked that he had recently discovered an incredibly talented young Asian writer - an incredibly talented young Asian writer who was a journalist! - for a mad moment I thought he was going to make an offer I couldn't refuse.
"He's very special," he added as I grinned moronically - especially moronic as I hadn't written a word of fiction in my entire life. "People should watch out for him." Really? "Yes, Hari Kunzru, do you know him?"
I didn't know him and at the time I don't think many others did either, apart from, perhaps, some readers of the UK edition of US technology magazine Wired, where he had been an associate editor, The Observer, where he had written travel journalism, and Wallpaper*, where he had been music editor.
But it wasn't long before Geller had secured his client one of the largest advances in publishing history - a disgustingly fat seven-figure sum for a two book deal - and suddenly Kunzru became unavoidable. His first novel, The Impressionist, won him the Betty Trask Prize in 2002 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. He was subsequently named by Granta as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.
Having only managed to get through 12 pages of The Impressionist, this meteoric rise perplexed me. And when his second novel, Transmission, arrived in the post, it was greeted with a groan. But to my surprise, the tale, set in London, Bollywood and Silicon Valley, turned out to be funny, elegant and rather fantastic, so much so that I gave The Impressionist another shot, only to discover that, after the rather off-putting first chapter, it was funny, elegant and rather fantastic, too.
So when I finally meet the 35-year-old, half-Indian, half-English writer at The Dove, his local pub in Hackney, east London, I feel a need to apologise. "The beginning of The Impressionist is misleading," he responds, generously. "I've had lots of people who have looked at it and thought, 'Oh God, here's another flowery, overblown Asian novel'. But what I was trying to do was a lot more undercutting of that quasi-magic realist kind of style."
We are sitting at a table in the sun outside the pub at 4pm - which sounds relaxing but isn't for a number of reasons, not least because the air is thick with the smell of drains and there is a man fixing his Mitsubishi Shogun very loudly in front of us. But Kunzru, with a pint of Belgian beer in his hand and sunglasses resting on his nose, looks utterly relaxed.
I ask him how he feels about the advance now - such deals can be a mixed blessing and it must have been a shock to those close to him. "Initially, with my friends, there was a certain amount of jealousy," he admits in a drawl. "There was a general holding of breath as they waited to see if I was going to go all Puff Daddy. I had to be quite strict with my arseholery." A laugh. "But I think, now, it has actually been good in a straightforward way. It has given me a place to live and a chance to write. The books have been critically well-received and when I meet journalists, by and large, we are talking about the work rather than the publishing story."
I take his point and switch from "the publishing story" to Transmission, which is coming out in paperback next week and recounts the tale of Arjun Mehta, an idealistic computer programmer from New Delhi who unwittingly unleashes a destructive computer virus on the world. It is a great read, not only because Arjun is a charming protagonist but also because, so rarely for a contemporary novel, it depicts the business world with subtlety and humour.
"Well, I suppose writers, on the whole, have no contact with that world," he responds, adding his time on Wired was crucial in the development of his business understanding. "It was a funny old office: 50 per cent American, 50 per cent British. There was absolutely none of the low-level whinging that permeates British offices and I had a wonderful West Coast sacking experience that I used in Transmission." He puts on a San Francisco accent. "'We're extremely ruthless but we're also conducting ourselves with a veneer of empathy. We care about your sacking experience'. Ha!"
Kunzru's depiction of Guy Swift is particularly entertaining - the thirtysomething marketing executive spends his time moving between locations, churning out ridiculous sales talk ("what we do best is imagineer the future for our clients"), worrying about the shaky financial state of his company and leading the kind of relentlessly trendy, relentlessly international life promoted by Wallpaper* magazine. Do people like Guy Swift exist in real life? "They do. I have a friend who runs a lifestyle management company and the people he's in contact with are like that - extraordinarily time poor and cash rich. I live the opposite kind of life, in that I have lots of time to do that kind of choosing…"
This is an odd thing for Kunzru to say, he gave an interview not long ago where he specifically discussed hiring a "lifestyle management company" when renovating his home. He was quoted saying: "Hiring lifestyle managers meant I could just tell them what I wanted done, give them the keys and then get on a plane to the States for six weeks to research my next book." But the comment does raise a question: is there a bit of Guy Swift in Kunzru? Is he too cool for his own good?
Where writers are usually neurotic and awkward, Kunzru is achingly hip: he lives in a shabby but trendy part of London, at the Hay Festival he has been known to spend evenings relaxing by DJing at parties, he hires lifestyle managers to help him move house, he dresses like he is about to be photographed for an exceedingly fashionable magazine at any moment, and he wears sunglasses throughout interviews with the FT without any self-consciousness. "I suppose I'm better at the presentational side than some people I know." He pushes his shades up his nose. "But I did acting as a student and have a level of extroversion that isn't shared by a lot of writers." A sip of beer. "The word 'cool' is in the eye of the beholder but I'll accept it gratefully."
Such slickness would be insufferable if it weren't for two things: (1) Kunzru is evidently one of the most promising writers of his generation and (2) he hasn't just used his success to expand his wardrobe, he has also used it to promote causes close to his heart. He hit the headlines recently, for instance, when he rejected the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys literary prize on the grounds that it was sponsored by the Mail on Sunday, which, he said, exhibited an unacceptable "hostility towards black and Asian people". He asked for the prize money to be donated to the Refugee Council - an act he doesn't regret in the slightest.
"I would have felt a hypocrite had I had to shake the hand of the editor of the Mail of Sunday and be part of the presentation of itself as a decent newspaper when in fact its values are vicious and unpleasant. And the Mail's behaviour after the whole thing has made me feel even more justified." The sound of Shogun man whacking his engine with a spanner provokes a short pause. "One of these days there'll probably be a picture of me with a spliff in my hand or something. They are trying to work out what would undermine me most. And they seemed to have settled for describing me as a public schoolboy."
Other commentators have also been snide about Kunzru's apparently privileged upbringing. Does he reject the analysis? "No, I do think I have a privileged background, my father's a doctor, I grew up in well-heeled suburbs, I was privately educated and then went to Oxford - all middle class credentials. It would be foolish of me to pretend anything else.
"But in Essex in the 1980s there was a constant level of hostility to black and Asian people. I was made well aware that I was a Paki and that was a bad thing to be. I think that did politicise me."
We move on to the book he is working on at the moment, which he has provisionally entitled My Revolution and which will be about a man who drifts into radical leftwing politics in the late 1960s. "He disengages himself in quite a messy way and 30 years later he finds himself living a straight suburban life. It will explore what happens when you cross that line into violence and make certain decisions in your early twenties that you have to abide by as someone older and more pragmatic."
I remark it is striking that his first three books aren't inflicted with the heavy autobiography that characterises the early novels of so many other contemporary writers. Does he have plans to produce something more autobiographical, the definitive Essex novel perhaps?
"Actually, I did try to write the definitive Essex novel - there were two unpublished novels before The Impressionist, one about the M25 called Orbital and the other about a group of Essex boys on a stag weekend in Amsterdam. But I wouldn't try to publish either now." A final glug of beer. "I think I'm better when I have distance. I can look at the characters with that necessary sliver of ice."
