White Tears by Hari Kunzru - review

In 1962, Jean Rhys wrote a short story about a rootless Caribbean woman whose song is stolen and sung by a man at a west London party. “Let them play it wrong. That won’t make no difference to the song I heard,” she says in the last lines of Let Them Call it Jazz.

The “them” is white people and the song’s theft is the sin of cultural appropriation, which can be traced from Rhys to La La Land and now Hari Kunzru’s fabulous fifth novel. If Ryan Gosling’s love of olde worlde jazz in the Hollywood film was criticised for turning the genre into cute, white nostalgia, then there is a far more damning indictment in White Tears.

For the two present-day hipsters in this novel — a trustafarian with blond dreadlocks called Carter Wallace and his insipid best friend, Seth — the blues aesthetic is cleansed of the racial struggle that once accompanied it — it simply forms the heart of Carter’s high-end vinyl collection. Seth and Carter set up a New York studio specialising in remixed rare blues records and punt a self-righteous musical authenticity that they think the world has lost.

The story turns when Seth records a song by a faceless black busker, which they remix and put on the internet as an original record by the fictional “Charlie Shaw”. The prank rebounds after a bedraggled obsessive called JumpJim claims to have heard the record decades ago. There is, it turns out, more to this artistic theft than meets the eye.

We learn that the billionaire Wallace family built its wealth on black oppression and Carter’s records are its blood diamonds. What begins as benign satire of urban hipsterishness turns corners to become dark, brutal and brilliantly alarming. The story tightens its grip and then bares it teeth. All of Kunzru’s usual complicated cleverness is here — literary inventiveness, the battle for or against technology, postcolonial theory — but where it might have felt like hard work in novels like The Impressionist and Transmission, here it is blended with visceral horror, pacy storytelling and razor tautness.

White Tears is a state-of-the-nation novel that ties America’s pre-Civil Rights barbarism with a contemporary amnesia that parades as “post-racial America”.

Carter has the air of a decadent, immoral, latter-day Gatsby and Seth is his Nick Carraway-style sidekick. JumpJim, meanwhile, is sidekick to Chester Bly, a collector from an era directly involved in black exploitation — a journey they make to the South becomes an exercise in gathering the plunder of rare first editions from poor black families.

The obsessional passions of these collectors present a sinister picture of “old white dudes” with their stink of “record lust” and their rivalrous ownership of old black music. The B-side of Shaw’s record is key to the book’s mystery but remains elusive, a little like the promised arrival of Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play that would solve all matters and mysteries if revealed.

Stalked by ghosts of America’s past, Seth says: “It’s not fair to blame me for things that took place long before I was born … I am not to blame.”

His statement begs provocative questions: when and how does historical blame end? Can the racial politics of jazz and blues be separated from its aesthetic, and remixed away?

£11.99, Amazon, Buy it now