White Tears: A novel

by Hari Kunzru

Overview

From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.

Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451493699
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

HARI KUNZRU is the author of four previous novels. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

In his fifth novel, Hari Kunzru confronts America's racially stained history through an ingenious premise: the eerie appearance of a 1920s blues song in contemporary New York, where two young white men obsessed with black music persuade themselves that they've made the record.

It's a sly setup for a book that takes on the controversial topic of cultural appropriation, whereby the ethnic majority adopts or even attempts to co-opt the cultural elements of an ethnic minority. The meaning of the term referenced in the title, "white tears," is elastic, but in essence it describes the propensity of some white people (even, and perhaps especially, those who regard themselves as enlightened) to focus on their own feelings and responses in issues involving race, instead of acknowledging their privileged position.

In the case of the two twentysomething Brooklyn hipsters in Kunzru's novel, connoisseurship of the blues is a ticket to a kind of personal cachet that neither feels in possession of on his own. Seth, socially awkward and still recovering from a vaguely described nervous breakdown after the death of his mother, worries that he's a parasitic presence in the life of his buddy Carter, heir to a fortune his family has built on their private prisons and security business.

Carter himself is uncomfortable with the privilege that his wealth conveys. He doesn't like to discuss money at all, though he's happy to use it to finance his and Seth's budding music business and to pursue a passion for collecting old blues records. "He listened exclusively to black music because, he said, it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people. He spoke as if 'white people' were the name of an army or a gang, some organization to which he didn't belong."

Seth, a devoted audiophile, takes long walks through the city, during which he makes surreptitious recordings. One day, Seth records a man in a park singing a haunting blues song, and Carter urges him to create a "recording," with crackles and hisses to make it sound old. Carter posts the resulting file online as a period recording by a singer whom he dubs Charlie Shaw, and collectors clamor to buy it. One in particular, with the handle JumpJim, insists that the man and the record really existed.

Carter celebrates this bizarre development as the ultimate imprimatur of authenticity: "These fuckers think this music was made in 1928, but actually we made it. We made it, fools! We made that shit last week! So who's the expert now? Who knows the tradition? We do! We own that shit!" Carter hopes to parlay the interest in the fake Charlie Shaw record into the purchase of other rare records from the mysterious JumpJim. Unfortunately, a disaster soon sidelines Carter — by far the more interesting of the duo. Seth and Carter's sister, a troubled artist on whom Seth has a hopeless crush, are thrown together as they attempt to solve the ghostly historical mystery surrounding the record and how it may be entwined with Carter's fate.

As he's done in some of his other novels, notably his rightly acclaimed Gods Without Men, Kunzru begins hopscotching through time and geography. He takes his characters and his readers on not one but two road trips through the American South and leaves his narrator, Seth, for firsthand accounts of JumpJim and, finally, the half-figmentary Charlie Shaw himself.

The trouble is that our primary guide through the kudzu of history that White Tears creates is Seth, a young man afflicted with self-loathing and social anxiety, the kind of storyteller who has to resort to college-essay tactics to tackle a big subject:

When did I lose touch with the future? I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting . . . Now I would say the future is behind me. It is, in any case, out of my reach. It would be easy to put the blame on Carter, on his melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss, but I bear my share of responsibility. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek "nostos" — homecoming — and "algos" pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.

Seth is so listless that he excites only a cerebral pity. He remains a cipher, dispossessed from the business he and Carter built by Carter's parents and older brother, and barely tolerated by Carter's sister. After a cameo by his father, his own family doesn't figure at all in the story. Seth says early on that he "made a run for it, away from human history and its dark places," and he's as good as his word. He has no context and spends a lot of the book adrift, seemingly so he can be a fly on the wall for Kunzru's project. Eventually, this function is literalized: He's simply a tool.

The character of Charlie Shaw isn't fully embodied either, though for different reasons. His short, shattered life seems like a carapace in which to fit the reflexive lock-him-up racism of a local policeman, the rages of a prison chain gang overseer, and the casual appropriation by record companies whose representatives traveled the South panning for musical gold but leaving the musicians themselves behind.

JumpJim is the most fully realized of Kunzru's narrators, though he gets a fraction of the airtime Seth does. The sections in which JumpJim describes his youthful road trip through the South in the 1950s with a veteran record collector and heroin addict named Chester Bly are among the book's most engaging. In one memorable scene, a patrolman in a small southern town stops the car in which they are traveling as they seek out rare records. Wary that they may be civil rights agitators, the trooper makes a veiled threat. Chester responds that he's a "proud American. I stand with the white man, one hundred percent."

Afterward, JumpJim reflects on the exchange: "I don't think Chester meant a word of it. No one could have loved that music so much and harbored a speck of racial prejudice. All the same I felt ashamed. It seemed wrong to have said what he said. For a moment I wished I really had driven along those bumpy roads to register people to vote, to tell them they ought to be free." This conflict is the dark heart of the book, but it seldom emerges with clarity in Seth's meandering narration.

Cultural appropriation is a natural subject for Kunzru, who's displayed an intense curiosity about an astonishingly diverse cast of characters, from the half-Indian, half-English protagonist of his debut novel, The Impressionist, to the lonely Indian computer coder in Silicon Valley in Transmission, to the middle- aged onetime English radical in My Revolutions, to the chorus of characters — nineteenth-century silver miners and ethnographers of native Americans, 1970s UFO cult members, Iraqi emigrants, a disconsolate British rock star, the parents of an autistic boy who goes missing in the desert — whose narratives together form his kaleidoscopic Gods Without Men.

Unfortunately, the characters in White Tears are missing the blood and heart that would bring this important story to life. There's a painstaking quality to the novel that's reminiscent of Carter and Seth's studious reproduction of that old record. An agenda of condemnation appears to have overtaken the curiosity that has allowed Kunzru to imaginatively inhabit so many different people. In arraying himself against his book's appropriators, racists, wealthy elites, and corporate opportunists, he has transmuted his considerable literary gifts into a weapon that seeks out its targets, again and again.

Sarah L. Courteau is an essayist and critic who has written for The New York Times, The Wilson Quarterly, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She is at work on a novel about a murder committed by four brothers in the rural Ozarks.

Reviewer: Sarah L. Courteau

The Barnes & Noble Review

White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing, some swallowing up the pages around them the way a single song—"A Change Is Gonna Come," say, or "A Day in the Life"—swallows up the side of an album. Kunzru is particularly eloquent and evocative when it comes to music's mysteries, the way music reverses time's flow…In the final quarter the story…gathers force, offering its strongest passages and revealing, in this Book of Secrets, the biggest secret of all, and one that often only a stranger's perspective recognizes: the sense of possibility that was not only a young black bluesman's in an unforgiving South but the Republic's, the sense of possibility that hovers in every song heard just out of earshot, just beyond that edge of perception that the author has defined.

The New York Times Book Review - Steve Erickson

★ 12/05/2016
The excellent new novel from Kunzru (Gods Without Men) opens as a coming-of-age yarn and ends as a ghost story, but its real subject is a vital piece of American history: the persistence of cultural appropriation in popular music. Twenty-something white roommates Carter and Seth are audiophiles, record collectors, and budding producers living in New York. They’re obsessed with black music, whether it’s reggae, jazz, funk, or hip-hop. When Seth records an old chess player in the park, Carter remixes it into a counterfeit blues song and markets the record as the work of an obscure black singer named Charlie Shaw. Almost immediately, they are approached by a mysterious collector who insists that Shaw is real—and after Carter is savagely beaten and left in a coma, Seth begins to discover just how real. With Carter’s sister, Leonie, for whom Seth nurses an unrequited crush, Seth undertakes a perilous journey from New York to Mississippi to unravel a mystery that weaves together the blues, obsessive collectors, and the American South. What he finds is murder and the unquiet ghost of Shaw. White Tears is a fast-paced, hallucinatory book written in extraordinary prose, but it’s also perhaps the ultimate literary treatment of the so-called hipster, tracing the roots of the urban bedroom deejay to the mythic blues troubadours of the antebellum South. In his most accessible book to date, Kunzru takes on the vinyl-digging gentrification culture with a historical conscience. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for White Tears:

“Kunzru has done his homework on racial history and white privilege, but the novel is also lifted on his sharp descriptions of music, which he makes so concrete and delectable you understand why his misguided, ill-fated heroes fall so hard for it. A well-turned and innovative tale that cannily connects old-time blues and modern-day minstrelsy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
 
“A compulsively readable ghost story that features masterly—tour de force—writing about early American blues.”—Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

"White Tears is a hallucinatory and eerily accurate journey into America's racial unconscious—like an updated version of The Crying of Lot 49, in which race itself is the secret and arcane system that controls all of us in ways we never fully understand. In an era when the past seems to be collapsing into the present on a daily basis, you couldn't find a more urgently necessary, compulsively readable book."—Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine

“White Tears is a masterful ghost story about a blues song which may or may not exist, but is definitely alive. Sound, in Kunzru's hands, is both force and material, carrying fear, power, and revenge from body to body. When someone cries "Rewind," proceed with caution. History is audible.”—Sasha Frere-Jones

"It's rare to read a book by such a good writer who also knows so much about music. He clearly loves early folk music and especially early blues and knows it very well."—Peter Duchin

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
At college, an alienated tech nerd named Seth discovers a mutual kinship with wealthy Carter Wallace over audio equipment, and afterward they start up a recording studio and become avid vinyl record collectors and blues fans. When Seth prowls the streets of New York City and records a black man singing a blues line, they piece together a full song recording, then put it out on the Internet as a rare find. From here, they both descend into to a surreal alternate universe, a grail search, and a mystery story, wherein Carter winds up permanently injured in a hospital and Seth and Carter's sister attempt to discover who did it. They travel to the Deep South and end up digging up secrets concerning the Wallace family wealth and the possible true story of the blues singer they thought they had invented. VERDICT From the author of Gods Without Men and My Revolutions comes something different and imaginative, occasionally gloomy and affected. A stirring story of audiophiles, rare recordings, slavery, and the dangers of uncovering the past. [See Prepub Alert, 9/26/16.]—James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Library Journal

★ 2016-12-06
Record collecting turns dangerous in a smart, time-bending tale about cultural appropriation. Seth, who narrates most of Kunzru's fifth novel (Gods Without Men, 2012, etc.), is obsessed with sound, making field recordings of his travels around Manhattan. Carter, his old college buddy and scion of a wealthy family, is similarly obsessed with old blues 78s. Together, they're an up-and-coming production team that works with white rappers and rock bands looking to make their music sound antique and "authentic." They're so good at it that, as a prank, they take Seth's recording of a Washington Square denizen singing a mordant blues song, use modern tools to faux age it, attribute it to the made-up name Charlie Shaw, and upload it, whereupon online vintage-blues fans go bonkers. Kunzru signals early on that Seth and Carter are playing with fire, from Seth's hubristic suggestion that his blues knowledge is a passkey to blackness to Carter's exclusionary and officious family, which made its fortune in private prisons. But Kunzru attacks the racism the two represent indirectly and with some interesting rhetorical twists. Carter is mysteriously beaten into a coma in the Bronx, and once Seth begins an investigation with another collector and Carter's sister, the narrative begins to deliberately decouple from logic—suggesting, for instance, that a real Charlie Shaw recorded the fake song Seth and Carter created. This weirdness reads subtly at first—a record skipping a groove, a playback glitch—but in time commands the narrative, allowing Kunzru to set the deadly mistreatment of blacks in the Jim Crow South against the hipster presumptions of whites now. Kunzru has done his homework on racial history and white privilege, but the novel is also lifted on his sharp descriptions of music, which he makes so concrete and delectable you understand why his misguided, ill-fated heroes fall so hard for it. A well-turned and innovative tale that cannily connects old-time blues and modern-day minstrelsy.

Kirkus Reviews