Jill's Reviews > White Tears

What is the connection between the listener and the musician? Does it matter that one of you is alive and one is dead? And which is which?

In this brilliant new novel, Hari Kunzru explores these questions. The narrator, Seth, is a dweeby young man who is obsessed with recording sounds during his walks in New York City. One day he happens across an old chess player who is singing a haunting blues song that he can't get out of his mind. He brings the song to Carter, his bestie who comes from an obscenely rich family and has his own obsession with old blues 78s from the 1930s. Together, they "authenticize" the song, making it sound like it's the real deal from the birth of the blues, and "put it out there", driving collectors mad.In fact, they even name the blues singer: Charlie Shaw.

But did Charlie Shaw ever really exist? And if so, why is his ghost so unsettled and what unfinished business does he have? The novel veers from a paen to the blues to the mystery and ghost genres, as time becomes fluid and everything that's happening already happened. As the novel becomes more hallucinatory, the theme of cultural appropriation becomes clearer. One question says, "The anmes were traded by collectors, but no one seemed to know a thing about them. They were like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness...Things were hidden. Things got lost. Musicians got lost."

In an important way, the novel is about boundaries: the fluid boundary of time, the boundaries between musician and listener, the so-called living and the so-called dead, white and black, and the Side A and Side B of life (Side A is for the talented; Side B is just a joke for those who understand nothing). For a while, I admired the book enormously, but during the last 50 pages, the admiration turned into real love.