White Tears

A Novel

By: Hari Kunzru

Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, Dominic Hoffman

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's Summary

From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.

Two 20-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.

©2017 Hari Kunzru (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

"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 review)

"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)

"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.... Hoppe, Campbell, and Hoffman perform this engrossing, convoluted tale with all its serious implications intact." ( AudioFile)

How the Blues Got There, Captain Jack

"White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there," said Son House, a Mississippi blues singer who made his start in the 1920s. The blues got there, it is generally acknowledged, via the adapted rhythms and methods of West African natives enslaved in the American South. One of the blues' most customary components came from the group work songs of the plantation slaves who used the African practice of "call and response," which bluesmen have most often transformed into a conversation between the singer and his guitar. It is no coincidence that the Mississippi delta region so rich in fertile soil for large plantations is the birthplace of a veritable Blues Who's Who, including Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf.

In White Tears, novelist Hari Kunzru cleverly and ambitiously bares the wounds from which the blues bled, journeying from Manhattan to the Mississippi delta and from the present to the late 1950s and again to the late 1920s. With sinister strains threaded throughout, his novel scrutinizes white exploitation of black culture, the forced labor of black convicts through convict leasing to white farms (which some call "slavery by another name"), and related issues of race, class, poverty and musical authenticity.

The novel begins in Manhattan with Seth and Carter, best college buddies rooming together after bonding over a mutual love of black music. Seth recalls how "Carter taught me to worship--it's not too strong a word--what he worshipped. He listened exclusively to black music because ... it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people." According to Carter's sister, he "feels guilty for being a rich boy. That's why his heroes are always poor or black."

As it happens, Carter lives off a trust funded by his family which owns a conglomerate of construction, energy and private prison businesses. So, when the pair decides to open a recording studio, Carter has little problem bankrolling it, with Seth, a sound engineering whiz, managing the business. The talents of these "audio craftsmen, artisans of analog" have thrust them to the mat of success with a contract to record a successful white hip hop artist.

Seth often adds a variety of sounds to his audio bank by strolling about Manhattan with his parabolic mic and recorder. One afternoon upon playing back the sounds he recorded of nothing in particular near chess players in Washington Square, Seth is shocked to hear a haunting voice singing a blues song:

Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own
Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own
Put my enemies all down in the ground
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
Wrote his name all down my back

Carter pounces upon hearing the recording, and they stay "up until six in the morning, cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words...." Carter cooks up a guitar track over which to lay the mystifying voice and asks Seth to "Make it dirty. Drown it in hiss. I want it to sound like a record that's been sitting under someone's porch for fifty years." Carter fakes a "scuffed and faded" recording label for a 1928 recording of what he labels "Charlie Shaw's Graveyard Blues," a "rarity" that he uploads to the internet. The collector trolls instantly trill. One going by the name "JumpJim" drills them about the song and pushes to know what is on side B, saying he has not heard Charlie Shaw's voice since 1959.

A suspicious hit and run leaves Carter comatose a third of the way into the novel and the buddy-centric thriller seems, in hindsight, like a bluesy vamp to the main numbers.

The story takes an ominous turn into the territory of noir mystery when Seth seeks out the collector to learn about his 1959 trip to Mississippi with an unscrupulous older collector who plucked Charlie Shaw's only recording from Shaw's voodoo-ish sister and of the ominous events leading to that man's shrieking end ablaze among his collection of authentic blues recordings.

Seth convinces Carter's sister to accompany him on a trek to the Mississippi delta to sleuth a possible link between the real Charlie Shaw, the counterfeit recording and the hit and run. This nightmare-like journey to the soul of the blues thrums with tension and a droning dread that calamity lurks around the corner. As they approach the delta, the menace intensifies and time starts to tilt.

In the novel's final, spectral phase, the past and present merge into a sort of discordant call and response. Time ultimately comes undone. Without giving too much away, readers learn of Captain Jack and how Charlie Shaw never made any more records when all he wanted was "to pass something on ... to reach forward, to obey the urge of life." Seth becomes alienated by circumstance and is shunned by Carter's family. The story pounds with the profane nature of a payback tinged with aspects of the supernatural and voodoo, and the novel ends with a shockingly unforgettable judder.

White Tears is a bold, formidable novel that is not for everyone. Yet, the venturesome reader will be rewarded as Kunzru explores the corrupted nature of "blaxploitation"; dredges the sordid past of the music from which "all ... American music derives its most distinctive characteristics" (James Weldon Johnson); pays tribute to the music's legacy infusing much of our culture today; and, vilifies the vinyl hipsters and their obsession over authenticity in the blues while they disregard the pain integral to the end product.

Great writing, incredibly long ending

I enjoyed the poetic and illustrative words building each sentence. I was gripped, until about 2/3rds through, the book was a painstaking commitment to finish.

Ham-fisted Yawn

The author takes interesting themes and gives us a story that is vapid and superficial. Boring rich white people doing pointless things without any real conflict to get in their way, instead turning on ridiculous plot twists to hammer at (white) appropriation and hipsters. The story is too unbelievable, and worse, confusing. I nearly gave up 2/3 through. I just kept thinking, who cares? Not worth the time.

Misrepresentation is worse than no representation

Kunzru completely misses the mark here, often warping African American fokelore to fit his story.

Fantastic!

Great, could not put it down! it's incredible, fantastic yet more real than any other book I recently read. it's a story of race, culture and life in New York City you never heard before.

Incredible

Was hooked from start till finish. Can’t remember the last book I enjoyed more than this one. Will definitely check out more from this Author

Riveting and disturbing

This isn't going to be an easy listen. You'll be scared and disturbed, first by the superbly crafted tension, then by a supernatural and nonlinear structure, send finallybby depictions of racial violence. But if you're serious about reconciling how the crimes of the past affect your seemingly innocent life here and now,you should piston to this book. It's unique and well-researched. You'll learn a lot about the Blues. You'll have a mirror to your white women's put up against you and if you let it, it'll make you question and break. This novel is about the ghosts of the past and a potential path to atonement for slavery and systemic racism.

Future Past Participle

I will have always been in debt to this novel. As it has and does continuously give words to a silent history echoing through history. Revealing what will and always has been haunting me. Bring momentary clarity to the everlasting fog of now.

Vague and Convoluted

I feel that I got the gist of what the author was going for but the execution was really, REALLY not something that worked for me. I was expecting a novel new take on a horror story (based on how it was classified on Goodreads) wrapped in a social narrative about race. What I got was a confusing mystery with a dash of racial tension? I guess? Since it's intentionally vague in vital parts of the story. That sort of strategy might work for another reader but definitely not for me.

it got weird

spoilers!!

the first half was a boring story about the friendship and music of Seth and Carter. then the second half went off the rails and not in a good way. Carter dies and Seth becomes haunted by the music and slips slowly into madness/possession by the music. I wouldn't've finished if I didn't have to read it for one of my book clubs.