White Tears

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.

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

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.