White Tears

Starred review from December 5, 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.

Starred review from December 15, 2016
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.

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February 15, 2017
Two young white men from disparate, dysfunctional family backgrounds meet in college, bond over an obsessive devotion to black music, and create an in-demand production studio in Brooklyn. Their piece de resistance is a clever hoax: an outdoor recording of a singer that's remixed to sound like a 1920s blues song on vinyl. Near-instant success comes at an impossibly high price. Erratic, impulsive Carter, presumptive heir to a multibillion-dollar fortune, lands in a coma after a vicious attack. Seth, too ready with apologies and lacking net worth, is discarded by most of Carter's family. Desperately chasing answers, Seth heads into the Deep South with Carter's sister, embarking on an odyssey that quickly turns surreal, unreliable, and tragic. Ambitious and sprawling, Kunzru's (Gods without Men, 2012) fifth novel is a convoluted montage of cultural appropriation, entitlement, mental illness, and Jim Crow history presented as a buddy drama intertwined with mystery, horror, and even (not-so-) magic realism. Alas, this proves to be more muddled than masterful, with so many multilayered intentions and garbled narration, not unlike the skipping of the old vinyl 78s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2016

In this latest from Kunzru, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, introverted Seth and wealthy Carter, great New York buddies, get blown out of their young, white lives when Seth inadvertently records an unknown singer in a park. After Carter posts the recording on the Internet, proclaiming it a long-lost 1920s blues recording by a musician named Charlie Shaw, they learn that the song and the singer are real. That leads them to a story of greed, envy, murder, and America's repressive racial past. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 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.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.