White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

Overview

A PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD FINALIST

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • GQ • Time • The Economist • Slate • HuffPost • Book Riot

Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music—White Tears is all of this and more, a thrilling investigation of race and appropriation in society today.

Seth is a shy, awkward twentysomething. Carter is more glamorous, the heir to a great American fortune. But they share an obsession with music—especially the blues. One day, Seth discovers that he's accidentally recorded an unknown blues singer in a park. Carter puts the file online, claiming it's a 1920s recording by a made-up musician named Charlie Shaw. But when a music collector tells them that their recording is genuine—that there really was a singer named Charlie Shaw—the two white boys, along with Carter's sister, find themselves in over their heads, delving deeper and deeper into America's dark, vengeful heart. White Tears is a literary thriller and a meditation on art—who owns it, who can consume it, and who profits from it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101973219
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	282,956
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

HARI KUNZRU is the author of four previous novels. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn.

Read an Excerpt

Kunzru / WHITE TEARS
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "White Tears"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Hari Kunzru.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about White Tears, Hari Kunzru’s dark and powerful novel about two young men whose lives are forever changed by the discovery of a forgotten blues record.

1. In the first chapter of White Tears, Seth describes listening to a field recording, saying he felt “I was slipping, that if I wasn’t careful I’d lose my grip on the present and find myself back there, seventy or eighty years in the past” (page 3). How do the temporal shifts in the novel often blur the lines of reality or destabilize the narrative? How are Seth’s experiences with blues records—in particular, listening to Charlie Shaw—otherworldly?

2. When Seth meets Carter, he is “in awe of” him (page 8). Did you find Carter magnetic? How does Seth’s personality change as a result of their friendship? Does Carter’s relative ease in navigating the world embolden Seth to become more confident?

3. On page 18, Seth states, “We really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it.” What do you think this “right to blackness” means? How does it mirror Chester Bly’s attitude? Do you think anyone can claim a “right” to a heritage that is not his own?

4. On page 22, Seth states, “There is a place I sometimes go to where no value attaches to anything. The world is flat. One sensation is exactly equal to the next.” At what points in the novel do we see Seth retreat into this attitude? What are the consequences of his doing so?

5. Carter describes himself as “disinherited” from his family, but Seth and his trip to the Wallace summer home reveal the situation is not that simple. How would you describe Carter’s relationship with Cornelius? Leonie?

6. Discuss Seth’s first impression of Leonie. How does his understanding of her change over time? Do you think that Leonie ever possesses any romantic feelings towards Seth? Is theirs a love story, or not?

7. The character introduced as “JumpJim” acts as a narrative bridge between the present and the past. How does Kunzru use JumpJim to provide context for the record’s history?

8. The character introduced as “JumpJim” acts as a narrative bridge between the present and the past. How does Kunzru use JumpJim to provide context for the record’s history?

9. How is systemic racism addressed over the course of the novel? What does Kunzru’s use of temporal shifts assert about the existence of racism in this country today?

10. Discuss the dual plotlines of the road trips taken by Chester Bly/JumpJim and Seth/Leonie. How do both groups navigate their time in the South? When is their privilege most apparent? How does each trip explore the fraught history of race relations in the American South?

11. The scene in which Chester meets Charlie Shaw’s sister is a pivotal moment in White Tears. How does the idea of “ownership” of black music come into play? How does he use his status as a man to assert power over her? How does he use his status as a white American?

12. Discuss the scene in which Chester and JumpJim are pulled over by the police outside Clarksdale. How does Chester’s ease in disparaging African Americans affect his road trip partner? How does this relate to the larger cultural conversation currently happening in the United States about race, privilege, and police relations?

13. What did you make of Charlie Shaw appearing in the flesh to Seth? What is the purpose of him revealing himself now? Do you attribute this to Seth’s instability? Why or why not?

14. Leonie’s murder—and the police interrogation that comes along with it—is a shocking turn of events. Discuss the scene in which the questioning of the suspect occurs. How does Kunzru play with reality and narrative structure in this scene?

15. White Tears is a deeply complex examination of race, identity, and history in America that is as technically intricate as it is topical. What was the most challenging aspect of this reading experience for you? The most thought-provoking scene? What do you think of classifying White Tears as a “ghost story”?

16. Robert Johnson is considered to be the king of the Delta blues and has become a mythic figure—most notably for the story that he sold his soul to the devil for musical prowess. In recent years, interest in Johnson has soared. How would you account for that? How does Johnson’s story and mythic status illustrate the ideas presented in White Tears?

Editorial Reviews

"White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing, some swallowing up the pages around them the way a single song . . . swallows up the side of an album. . . . Kunzru brings a canny and original insight to his American subject. . . . [His] awareness and discernment have particular value in an America of the moment where nothing less than the country’s meaning is at stake.”—Steve Erickson, The New York Times Book Review
 
"White Tears is a book that everyone should be reading right now. . . . The reverberations of [this book] echo long after it's done. Part ghost story, part travelogue, White Tears is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul."—Claire Howorth, TIME
 
"[White Tears is] a novel that's as brave as it is brutal, and it lets nothing and nobody off the hook. . . . Stunning [and] audacious . . . an urgent novel that's as challenging as it is terrifying. . . . completely impossible to put down . . . [Kunzru’s] writing is propulsive, clear and bright, whether he's describing an old blues song or a shocking act of violence. . . . [White Tears] will shock you, horrify you, unsettle you, and that's exactly the point."—Michael Schaub, NPR
 
"[A] truly impressive novel. . . . White Tears is Kunzru’s best book yet."—Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
 
"Captivating. . . . Kunzru’s graceful writing is exquisitely attuned to his material. . . . [White Tears is] neither a clever Time and Again story of time travel nor a tricky Westworld sort of past-present parallel. White Tears is a profoundly darker and more complex story of a haunting that elucidates the iniquitous history of white appropriation of black culture."—Katharine Weber, The Washington Post

"An incisive meditation on race, privilege and music. Spanning decades, this novel brings alive the history of old-time blues and America’s racial conscience."—Rabeea Saleem, Chicago Review of Books 
 
"Simply extraordinary. . . . Kunzru is a master storyteller and this is both a thrillingly written ghost story and an exploration of race conflict in America which is surely one of the best books you will read this year. Don’t miss it."—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller (Book of the Month pick)
 

From the Publisher

In his fifth novel, Hari Kunzru confronts America's racially stained history through an ingenious premise: the eerie appearance of a 1920s blues song in contemporary New York, where two young white men obsessed with black music persuade themselves that they've made the record.

It's a sly setup for a book that takes on the controversial topic of cultural appropriation, whereby the ethnic majority adopts or even attempts to co-opt the cultural elements of an ethnic minority. The meaning of the term referenced in the title, "white tears," is elastic, but in essence it describes the propensity of some white people (even, and perhaps especially, those who regard themselves as enlightened) to focus on their own feelings and responses in issues involving race, instead of acknowledging their privileged position.

In the case of the two twentysomething Brooklyn hipsters in Kunzru's novel, connoisseurship of the blues is a ticket to a kind of personal cachet that neither feels in possession of on his own. Seth, socially awkward and still recovering from a vaguely described nervous breakdown after the death of his mother, worries that he's a parasitic presence in the life of his buddy Carter, heir to a fortune his family has built on their private prisons and security business.

Carter himself is uncomfortable with the privilege that his wealth conveys. He doesn't like to discuss money at all, though he's happy to use it to finance his and Seth's budding music business and to pursue a passion for collecting old blues records. "He listened exclusively to black music because, he said, it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people. He spoke as if 'white people' were the name of an army or a gang, some organization to which he didn't belong."

Seth, a devoted audiophile, takes long walks through the city, during which he makes surreptitious recordings. One day, Seth records a man in a park singing a haunting blues song, and Carter urges him to create a "recording," with crackles and hisses to make it sound old. Carter posts the resulting file online as a period recording by a singer whom he dubs Charlie Shaw, and collectors clamor to buy it. One in particular, with the handle JumpJim, insists that the man and the record really existed.

Carter celebrates this bizarre development as the ultimate imprimatur of authenticity: "These fuckers think this music was made in 1928, but actually we made it. We made it, fools! We made that shit last week! So who's the expert now? Who knows the tradition? We do! We own that shit!" Carter hopes to parlay the interest in the fake Charlie Shaw record into the purchase of other rare records from the mysterious JumpJim. Unfortunately, a disaster soon sidelines Carter — by far the more interesting of the duo. Seth and Carter's sister, a troubled artist on whom Seth has a hopeless crush, are thrown together as they attempt to solve the ghostly historical mystery surrounding the record and how it may be entwined with Carter's fate.

As he's done in some of his other novels, notably his rightly acclaimed Gods Without Men, Kunzru begins hopscotching through time and geography. He takes his characters and his readers on not one but two road trips through the American South and leaves his narrator, Seth, for firsthand accounts of JumpJim and, finally, the half-figmentary Charlie Shaw himself.

The trouble is that our primary guide through the kudzu of history that White Tears creates is Seth, a young man afflicted with self-loathing and social anxiety, the kind of storyteller who has to resort to college-essay tactics to tackle a big subject:

When did I lose touch with the future? I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting . . . Now I would say the future is behind me. It is, in any case, out of my reach. It would be easy to put the blame on Carter, on his melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss, but I bear my share of responsibility. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek "nostos" — homecoming — and "algos" pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.

Seth is so listless that he excites only a cerebral pity. He remains a cipher, dispossessed from the business he and Carter built by Carter's parents and older brother, and barely tolerated by Carter's sister. After a cameo by his father, his own family doesn't figure at all in the story. Seth says early on that he "made a run for it, away from human history and its dark places," and he's as good as his word. He has no context and spends a lot of the book adrift, seemingly so he can be a fly on the wall for Kunzru's project. Eventually, this function is literalized: He's simply a tool.

The character of Charlie Shaw isn't fully embodied either, though for different reasons. His short, shattered life seems like a carapace in which to fit the reflexive lock-him-up racism of a local policeman, the rages of a prison chain gang overseer, and the casual appropriation by record companies whose representatives traveled the South panning for musical gold but leaving the musicians themselves behind.

JumpJim is the most fully realized of Kunzru's narrators, though he gets a fraction of the airtime Seth does. The sections in which JumpJim describes his youthful road trip through the South in the 1950s with a veteran record collector and heroin addict named Chester Bly are among the book's most engaging. In one memorable scene, a patrolman in a small southern town stops the car in which they are traveling as they seek out rare records. Wary that they may be civil rights agitators, the trooper makes a veiled threat. Chester responds that he's a "proud American. I stand with the white man, one hundred percent."

Afterward, JumpJim reflects on the exchange: "I don't think Chester meant a word of it. No one could have loved that music so much and harbored a speck of racial prejudice. All the same I felt ashamed. It seemed wrong to have said what he said. For a moment I wished I really had driven along those bumpy roads to register people to vote, to tell them they ought to be free." This conflict is the dark heart of the book, but it seldom emerges with clarity in Seth's meandering narration.

Cultural appropriation is a natural subject for Kunzru, who's displayed an intense curiosity about an astonishingly diverse cast of characters, from the half-Indian, half-English protagonist of his debut novel, The Impressionist, to the lonely Indian computer coder in Silicon Valley in Transmission, to the middle- aged onetime English radical in My Revolutions, to the chorus of characters — nineteenth-century silver miners and ethnographers of native Americans, 1970s UFO cult members, Iraqi emigrants, a disconsolate British rock star, the parents of an autistic boy who goes missing in the desert — whose narratives together form his kaleidoscopic Gods Without Men.

Unfortunately, the characters in White Tears are missing the blood and heart that would bring this important story to life. There's a painstaking quality to the novel that's reminiscent of Carter and Seth's studious reproduction of that old record. An agenda of condemnation appears to have overtaken the curiosity that has allowed Kunzru to imaginatively inhabit so many different people. In arraying himself against his book's appropriators, racists, wealthy elites, and corporate opportunists, he has transmuted his considerable literary gifts into a weapon that seeks out its targets, again and again.

Sarah L. Courteau is an essayist and critic who has written for The New York Times, The Wilson Quarterly, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She is at work on a novel about a murder committed by four brothers in the rural Ozarks.

Reviewer: Sarah L. Courteau

The Barnes & Noble Review

White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing, some swallowing up the pages around them the way a single song—"A Change Is Gonna Come," say, or "A Day in the Life"—swallows up the side of an album. Kunzru is particularly eloquent and evocative when it comes to music's mysteries, the way music reverses time's flow…In the final quarter the story…gathers force, offering its strongest passages and revealing, in this Book of Secrets, the biggest secret of all, and one that often only a stranger's perspective recognizes: the sense of possibility that was not only a young black bluesman's in an unforgiving South but the Republic's, the sense of possibility that hovers in every song heard just out of earshot, just beyond that edge of perception that the author has defined.

The New York Times Book Review - Steve Erickson

★ 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.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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

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

MARCH 2017 - AudioFile

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews