White Tears

"This is an astonishing novel. I’ll be honest, I’m not usually blown away by Hari Kunzru’s work. I’m always very impressed by it, by its learning, and its complication, and the themes of technology, and all the rest of it – but it usually leaves me cold. This didn’t. And you’re right in the sense that it is about cultural appropriation, and we’ve sort of felt it in the air this year with La La Land , which was criticised for its version of jazz that was nostalgic, and Ryan Gosling was the white man who ‘saved real jazz from being corrupted.’ And this book plays with that idea. It’s about two white American hipsters, one of whom is very wealthy, and they set up a studio that remixes rare blues records. They’ve got this self-righteous authenticity to their music. ‘This is what real jazz is. This is what we’re doing. We’re giving you the real thing, unadulterated’, and so on. But, basically, it’s a ghost story . One of them records a black homeless jazz musician and, as a sort of prank, they put this out, having remixed this homeless man’s voice, and the give him a name and say, ‘Here’s a new record.’ And someone pops up and says, ‘Oh, yes. I know this record well. I know this artist well. He was big in the 1950s.’ And of course, he wasn’t, because it’s a prank, and they’ve just made it up. But the prank has set off a series of events that lead to a haunting. So to pull this off, the story goes back to the past, and to the source of the music, which is pre-Civil Rights America, when jazz was saturated with issues around race and oppression – it’s such a heavy legacy. And here we have these two hipsters trying to strip the music of all its history, appropriate it for its aesthetic, just because it sounds so authentic, without really appreciating the weight, the oppression, the context in which it was made. But I don’t want to talk too much more about the story, because it is a ghost story, and it really must be read. Very much so. It’s a state-of-the-nation novel about an America that often tells itself it has moved on from centuries of white oppression of African-Americans, and Kunzru’s novel points to all the ways in which it hasn’t and can’t. You can’t clinically strip history from the music and enjoy it for its aesthetic alone. The novel says so much about history, culture, appropriation, and music. What I found about this novel was, as opposed to Kunzru’s former work, is that it has a sort of clarity. There’s a real narrative drive, too. Because it’s a ghost story, a lot happens, everything moves quite fast, and it has a fluidity. But then you get to a point – I think it’s about two-thirds of the way into the novel – where the register does change and it goes kind of murky so that you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. It gets convoluted at one point, and I admit to feeling rather disappointed by the ending because it’s such a fantastic story, and you’re thinking ‘How is this going to finish?’ But again it’s an imperfection that I don’t think matters because we’ve already got so much out of it all."