MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
Kunzru’s latest offers a fascinating intermingling of the mistreatment of black Americans, immorality in the music field, and magical realism—all delivered by three talented narrators, Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, and Dominic Hoffman. Seth and Carter are representative of the self-serving personal agendas of the millennial generation. They pair set up a recording studio, and, after recording a black street musician singing the blues, they release it on the Internet as an “original find.” A series of mysteriously surreal events lead to Seth’s becoming permanently injured. Far more than a mystery, the story poses questions about false “facts” and the often illusory connection between white and black musical artists. Hoppe, Campbell, and Hoffman perform this engrossing, convoluted tale with all its serious implications intact. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 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.)
From the Publisher
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
Library Journal
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.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 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.
