White Tears

This starts out as a novel about two white hipsters who want to become music producers. Seth, the middle-class, socially awkward computer guy, spends his time recording sounds, while Carter, the trustafarian, is obsessed with blues and other black music from the first half of the 20thC. They record and sample and mix and are on the verge of breakout success, catering mostly to white musicians who want "authentic" analog sound. Then disaster occurs and the story takes a turn from acerbic and satirical to angry and hallucinatory.

Seth is initially a moderately sympathetic character, an EveryWhiteMan who hasn't done anything obvious to make his privilege infuriating; unlike Carter, who is a walking stereotype but a very accurate one. But show more then, after Seth is basically on his own, the past becomes present and the roots of their appropriation grow and wrap themselves around Seth, Carter, and the rest of Carter's family. There are living and dead narrators (sometimes it's hard to tell which is which) and at times the reader is just as confused as Seth is. But Kunzru never loses control of his narrative threads no matter how much fury pours from these pages.

Musical appropriation, particularly of the blues tradition, is something that whites are either ignorant of, take for granted, or excuse away as "the way art and the creative process work." Elvis stole, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones stole, Clapton stole, and their sincere love for the music doesn't change the fact that the original artists are barely known by most listeners. We attribute brilliance to the appropriators but render the original creators invisible.

In the novel, the white characters pay the price for their theft, but it takes ghosts to do it. In the real world, they just keep getting richer. show less

A masterful book of controlled tension and terror. It's brilliantly-executed on the level of narrative and symbolism. An incredibly layered story about slavery and the prison industrial complex, about black people as property and possessions for the white owners, and draws a line down to record collecting and the music industry in terms of who owns black music. Cultural appropriation as the "liberal" form of ownership. And thus this injustice, embedded in the very core of America, can only be addressed to white capitalists via a different kind of "possession". It left me reeling; the message was powerful.

In thinking about how this book is structured, the question of responsibility in art comes up. To be precise, the ethics of writing a show more story about the legacy of slavery and black people's suffering when you haven't endured it or are not descended from people who have. Structuring the narrative this way strikes me as a responsible choice on Kunzru's part because the focus, and thus the blame, is rightly on the oppressors, on the people who profit from slavery and prisons. But the depiction of American whiteness in this book is not monolithic; class is a factor in how Seth, the white narrator, is used and abused and discarded.

This review doesn't do the book justice. So much to think about. show less

This novel starts as a pretty average read about two culture-appropriating, music-loving bros. I kept reading because every few pages there would be a detail, a comment, that rose above that morass of mediocrity and said something clever and true. As the book went on those details became paragraphs, then pages, then chapters, but still I was not so impressed. Then I hit pages 252-255 and this book took my breath away, as in, it punched me in the solar plexus, then kept punching right until the end. The last 20 pages transform every page you've read before, make this okay book brilliant, terribly true and horribly pertinent. I started reading it again from the beginning when I finished just to see how Kunzru works this magic. It's an show more incredible risk, making your reader wait that long for such revelation, but what a reward. All of which is to say, if you're thinking of quitting in the middle: Keep Going! And don't skip to the end because, like a piece of music building to its climax, you need all of those early bits to understand, be moved by, the climactic finish. (That second-to-last paragraph!) show less

When you listen to an old record, there can be no illusion that you are present at a performance. You are listening through a gray drizzle of static, a sound like rain. You can never forget how far away you are. You always hear it, the sound of distance in time.

I didn't want to read this book. Two dudebros meet at a prestigious university and through their shared love of old school methods of recording music and their authentic love of the blues, open a recording studio and do well for themselves. Which is, I discovered to my delight, not actually what happens. Yes, there are two dudebros, wealthy, out-going Carter and passive, detail-oriented Seth. They do become friends in college and, after graduation, they do move to New York and show more create a recording studio, which specializes in using old equipment for a more authentic sound. But there's more at work here. Seth and Carter aren't really friends. Seth is Carter's sidekick, the faithful friend who tags along and who does the actual work. Carter is wealthy, of the kind of wealthy that can buy himself a recording studio, fill it with obscure and expensive equipment and then run that studio badly, without having to worry about paying the bills. He's wealthy enough to become a collector of old, hard to find blues recordings and to allow that hobby to fill up his time.

Seth spends a lot of his time wandering around the city, recording the ambient sounds. He records a small segment of a song sung by a man leaving a chess match and that piece of music becomes the basis for a recording that Carter and Seth made, intended to sound like it had been made in the 1920s. That recording sets off something much deeper than either man are prepared to handle.

There's a lot addressed here, from classicism to the appropriation of black culture, but Hari Kunzru's skillful handling allows him to hit these issues hard, while never sacrificing the forward momentum of the story. The last third of the novel is relentless and frightening, with every thread and character trait developed in the opening chapters bearing fruit in the final ones. This is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership. show less

“On your record deck, you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn't have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk...”

The story begins in NYC, with two young white guys, Seth and Carter. One poor, one rich and they share a deep passion for vintage blues music. Seth, the poor guy, clandestinely records a black guy in Washington Square, singing a blues tune and they end up posting this song on the internet, as a long lost blues classic. This spirals both of them into a nightmarish rabbit hole, that leaves death and misery to the pair and their family.
I did not have any idea where this story was headed but it show more turned out to be a complex, statement on racial abuse in America and the way music has been purloined from it's originators and commandeered by pretentious geeks, that think they understand the craft better than the creators.
I had not read Hari Kunzru before. He is a British novelist, of mixed English and Kashmiri Pandit ancestry, which only enhanced my opinion, on how well he handled the subject matter. Obviously, it may not resonate with every reader but the depth of the writing here is truly impressive. show less

Hari Kunzru's novel tells of a mysterious recording found by Seth, a tech nerd, and his best friend, a handsome slacker named Carter Wallace, both young white men. While Carter's love of music is enabled by his standing as heir to a family fortune, Seth is from a somewhat lower social strata. Seth operates a studio with Carter and is obsessed with recording the errant sounds found around New York, which he does with a handset device by walking through the city. Carter is solely interested in music by black musicians of the twentieth century. and also bankrolls the music audio engineering business that Seth and Carter run together. One day, using recordings that Seth made of different people singing and playing music on the street, they show more create a song called the Graveyard Blues and upload it to the internet, attributing the song to Charlie Shaw, a name that Carter picks at random.

Seth—the brainy, awkward one—is annoyed by this arrogance, but the accompanying perks are too fun to pass up. Who wouldn’t want to make a bunch of money by playing music? “You seem to have a very high opinion of yourself,” Cornelius, Carter’s much more responsible brother, tells Seth. “Of your importance in the scheme of things.” Seth definitely lacks power, or confidence; rather than tell a crush how he feels when they’re at a party together, he ends up literally watching her have sex with another man. But when his life is upended by a shocking turn of events, he has no choice but to involve himself more directly in the story.

The shock is created when a record collector tells them something unnerving: Charlie Shaw is real, and he has a history that Seth and Carter want no part of. Soon after, Carter is found beaten unconscious in a dangerous Bronx neighborhood. Carter’s wealthy and powerful family bars Seth from coming to see Carter at the hospital. They also lock Seth out of his and Carter’s recording studio. Carter appears to be in a permanent coma. Seth tracks down Jim, who tells Seth of his own connection to Charlie Shaw. In the 1950s, Jim and his friend Chester Bly traveled to Tennessee and Mississippi in order to swindle African-Americans out of potentially valuable blues and jazz records. They eventually arrived at the house of Miss Alberta, Charlie Shaw’s sister. She possessed the only known copy of Shaw’s Graveyard Blues record. Bly stole the record after Alberta refused to sell it. Soon after, Bly died in a mysterious fire. Jim decided that Bly’s death must have been a type of cosmic comeuppance for his acts of cultural appropriation. In order to avoid similar danger, Jim sold all of his own records.

He and Leonie, Carter’s Boho artist sister, venture down South to solve the mystery of Shaw, who like many other obscure blues musicians known to us only through a song or two, exists on the margins of history. What they find takes on the texture of a ghost story, as Seth and Leonie bond in sweaty motels indistinguishable from each other, on the trail of a man who might not exist but might be implausibly real. “With each mile we are heading further into the past,” Kunzru writes. “This is what I made her understand, that night in her apartment. That we had to repeat something, to go back to meet the force that is reaching out towards us from history.”
“Shock of white hair, thick black eyeglasses that scanned as fashion until you checked the raincoat with the grubby collar, the unpleasant-looking scab on his forehead,” Kunzru writes. “Exactly who I did not want to meet. Very slowly, he raised an index finger and pointed to me, a gesture like firing a gun.” The man, who Seth only knows through his internet avatar, is sort of a decrepit weirdo. But what else could Seth have expected from someone who’s dedicated his life to compiling the arcane and unglamorous?

White Tears seems almost hallucinatory at times as the past and present blend together to create a nightmare for the duo. Seth’s rationality diminishes as the book paces toward its violent conclusion, with Kunzru’s prose rising to a hypnotic, entrancing level. The book cuts across time periods and perspectives, sometimes in the same chapter, as Seth falls further into the horror of the 20th century, for which Charlie is just a proxy. The mixture of disparate themes including the blues musical heritage, black cultural appropriation, and the threat of billion -dollar conglomerates provides for both an endlessly interesting and sometimes exciting novel. show less

This book exemplifies why I like jumping into books I know nothing about, have few preconceived notions about the story,.... I picked it up because I had seen it mentioned on a list or two, liked the cover style, & was intrigued by both the title & the author's name. The cover art too. And the story delivered. More than delivered.

I'm not going to go into summaries or anything (in case anyone else wants to try it out while going in fairly blind -- which is the way I recommend approaching this story); it starts out as a fairly straightforward novel, interesting enough to keep me reading. You start getting hints that a change is coming, everything is not as it seems. And suddenly, you're abseiling into a related story, progressing between show more present & past, with the barrier getting looser & looser as the narrative unspools. Kunzru is a fabulous writer with great turns of phrase, use of regular narrative style morphing into something more modern, more stream-of-consciousness, more innovative in style. And when you get to the end & look back at how he crafted his story, it's impressive. A mastercraft, imo.

White Tears has tiny shades of both Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (re: the art-y scene) and Tom McCarthy's C (re: radio/transmission/voices from the past or the future). And it is still very much its own unique piece, so timely for today that it's stunning.

I know some innovative writing is not everyone's cup of tea; I say that in relation to the writing style as well as some of the topics -- it can be fascinating, but also unnerving & uncomfortable, horrifying but also breathtaking. And for those that cringe at not using quote marks, well, cringe away -- none are used here. He does use leading dashes to indicate conversations &, in this book, it works very well because there are sections of conversations that then leave you wondering... was that said out loud, or just in the character's head, an afterthought, something else? It's perfect, stylistically, from the non-use of quotes to the morphing narrative style, the innovative writing to the cover design.

Wow. What a book. show less