White Tears

This book is bananas. It's grotesque and haunting, and I don't know that I would recommend it widely... but it's also brilliant. I think I'd comp this as Dream Girls meets Get Out, but through a white lens and sicker. Yikes. BUT the examination/critique of whiteness here is accurate, brutal, and necessary in my opinion. Some parts are baffling initially. I thought I didn't “get” the story until almost the last chapter and then it clicked, which is pretty impressive pacing. This might be the most perplexed I have ever been by a book and yet it get 4 stars

Haunted by a tune
with his cash cow running low
white boy gets the blues.

This book, ostensibly about two white college friends who are obsessed with black music, and who make a recording that takes on a life of its own, deceived me in a dark and beautiful way. I was drawn into the story about the two white guys, and felt a lot of sympathy for Seth, who was from a working class background and didn't have the glamour and privilege that his friend Carter had. The book seemed to be about their friendship, and I settled in for a novel about this rich boy-poor boy friendship over a background of obsessive record collecting and pre-WWII black music. Then the book took a turn and I began to realize that it was not a story particularly about Seth and Carter at all, and the very fact that I thought it was says something about me and the culture I've grown up in, where white appropriation of black culture is so normal.

White Tears won't be for everyone. I would call it a ghost story of sorts, but I've also seen it called a horror story, and I can't argue with that. It's haunting, for sure. The clarity of the first part of the book gives way gradually to the shadows and ambiguity of the second part of the book, but some things are not left ambiguous. I don't have a high tolerance for gruesome violence, and I stay away from anything labeled ‘horror,' but I couldn't put this book down. It's one of the most riveting books I've read in the last year.

The first half of the book sets up our hipster duo worshipping at the shrine of old black music. Deemed “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people.” Carter is a trust-fund douchebag that sports blond dreadlocks in college while DJ'ing and Seth is a “sonic geologist” riding Carter's monied coattails.

When Seth captures snippets of a song while travelling the city doing field recordings Carter matches it against a guitar riff recorded elsewhere and they fit perfectly together. The two fuzz it up and pawn it off as a long forgotten blues artist. They fabricate the name of Charlie Shaw and call the frankensteined track Graveyard Blues. When someone reaches out saying they haven't heard Charlie Shaw since 1959 things get a little crazy.

What starts off as a biting satire on cultural appropriation turns into a blues ghost story that becomes full-on Korean revenge drama. The second half goes a bit off the rails but I can't begrudge the fun Kunzru has at our hipster protagonists' expense early on.

“So tell me, was that a black thing or a white thing? No, that was music.”

Whoever knew that record collecting could be so violent? White Tears is a haunting novel that revolves around record collecting, cultural appropriation, and the ownership of music. It is a very dark tale that gives voice to the ghosts of obsession, racism, and exploitation. At the center of the novel is a piece of blues music: a song that may or may not exist by a remnant of a man who may have been invented.

White Tears is a strange and terrifying tale that pulls off the amazing feat of getting to the soul of American racism. It is a story that begins with and maintains a high level of realism then shifts, becomes part horror with elements of the supernatural. It may seem the book goes off the rails at this point, because the continuity differs from what the reader has come to expect, and it certainly takes a while to feel like it's back “on track.” In the end, the pieces all come together and make a solid portrait of obsession and vengeance. Despite the instability this abrupt midpoint change may cause, the book never loses its cadence or brilliance.

And it is brilliantly written. It works on several levels and the more one contemplates it, the more one may find. For instance, it just dawned on me right now that throughout the novel, there's an obsession with “What's on the B side?” of this mysterious song. The book is similarly divided. The first half is straight-forward and audible. But the second half—that's the unknown.

Hari Kunzru's latest is unique and breathtaking in a sea of books that often mimic one another. It takes some flexibility from a reader and certainly demands one's full attention, but it's worth the effort.

This is a really strong novel, one that lifts the barricade of time and brings the blues from gentle historical curiosity under glass to a visceral beating bloody heart of a thing, a scream of outrage at injustice down through the decades. What starts as a tale of college boys messing with music swings into fullblown horror by the end, but there is none of the cosy distance of genre here. The only monsters are human, there are no silver bullets or crosses, no escape. In these years of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, it's a timely read, powerfully fuelled by passion and rage.