Perilous track
Hari Kunzru’s first novel, “The Impressionist,” followed a Zelig-like Indian man-on-themake whose peregrinations across 19th century India and England wittily satirized establishments in both lands. As a result of this well-received debut, Kunzru was cited in Granta magazine’s 2003 honor roll of Best Young British Novelists alongside the likes of Zadie Smith and Ali Smith. In Kunzru’s second, “Transmission,” a British Indian programmer migrates to the American El Dorados of Silicon Valley and Seattle in pursuit of a better life, if not gold. Once again, the author’s satirical instincts shone.
Yet if readers expected more books in the same vein, they hadn’t yet understood this writer’s own Zelig-like nature. With “My Revolutions,” which surveyed the present and past of a 1960s radical, Kunzru surprised some observers by substituting respect for his subject rather than derision. By his fourth novel, “Gods Without Men,” Kunzru’s fiction had morphed into something far stranger, as elements of the story strode boldly into sci-fi land.
“White Tears” is something else again, at once ingenious and odd, riveting and mysterious. Although it pursues themes underpinning his earlier work, among them the search for identity and transformation, Kunzru, now a resident of Brooklyn, is diving ever deeper into the heart of American culture, where the impact of race remains perennially hazardous.
What begins as an odd-couple buddy story quickly transmutes into a noir thriller and, finally, into spine-tingling surrealism. The thrill and pain of the blues, black America’s foundational music, propel this book from conventional start to eerie finish. Its white protagonists are fascinated by it, motivated by it, ultimately undone by it.
Carter Wallace is the alpha male in this bond between twentysomethings, a trust-fund millionaire with movie-star looks. Seth, who narrates most of the novel (and is not given a surname), is his socially awkward sidekick, virtually an orphan since his mother has died and he’s estranged from his father.
What brings them together at college, in upstate New York, is black music. Sporting blond dreadlocks, Carter is obsessed with 1920s acoustic blues, which he regards as the epitome of authenticity, the true voice of suffering and redemption. (Never mind the lack of authenticity inherent in his dreads.) Initially less of a true believer, Seth eventually buys into this faith.
Are they real friends? Seth puts the matter this way: “Carter had never had to yearn for anything . ... If he wanted it, he clicked and it came . ... [By virtue of our connection] I was one of the Lord’s anointed.”
After college, they settle in hipster heaven, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, and set up a recording studio built on Carter’s big bucks and Seth’s technical expertise. Their reputation for quality quickly soars. Meanwhile, Carter scours the Internet and local shops for vintage blues records. Then, on the verge of a lucrative recording contract with a white rapper, Carter falls down a rabbit hole. More precisely, it’s a dangerous abyss generated by his obsessive search for a record by an obscure Mississippi bluesman named Charlie Shaw, followed by his creation and marketing of a fake copy of it. After venturing into the South Bronx for precious vinyl, he ends up severely beaten and in a coma. His attackers and their motives remain unknown.
Facing the loss of his best pal, Seth latches on to Carter’s sister, Leonie, an aspiring East Village painter just as beautiful as her high-cheekboned, blue-eyed brother. But she’s a wary ally, suspecting, wrongly, that Seth was only after Carter’s money. As for Leonie’s brother, Cornelius, who’s been tapped to take over the Wallaces’ string of highly profitable private prisons, he’s not only unscrupulous but also ruthless.
Meanwhile, Kunzru establishes a parallel plot line involving an elderly former collector of vintage blues nicknamed JumpJim. This down-at-theheels Lower East Sider relates to Seth his tale of initiation into collecting by the 1950s’ most renowned collector of all, a newspaper copy editor named Chester Bly. In alternating chapters, he and Bly head toward Mississippi in that period that challenged segregation, while Seth and Leonie travel similar paths in the age of Black Lives Matter.
JumpJim’s observation echoes just what the reader begins to feel: “I was like a child edging close to a waterfall, wanting to feel the force of it.”
The waterfall lies just ahead. Soon Leonie is killed (more unknown assailants), Seth is beaten by Mississippi cops, and the Wallaces are paying off Seth to keep quiet and sever all ties with the family. Not even knowing whether his friend is still alive, Seth refuses and goes on the lam.
He’s not only afraid for his life, but also worried that he’s gone crazy. “I have a sense that I am no longer in charge of my life. … I am merely a man, sitting in a chair, listening to a record made long ago. The needle is traveling in a predetermined track . ... Sooner or later, it will hit the runout groove.”
Back in New York, Seth moves through a surreal landscape, riding old-fashioned trolleys while the World Trade Center looms in the distance. Charlie Shaw appears in the air as Wolfman Charlie, at once a smiling Sambo and a terrifying monster following Seth’s every move. In a final, bloody apocalypse, Seth seems to be channeling Charlie himself.
The final 70 pages or so make for a dizzying, disorienting ride, a la Pynchon or DeLillo. All this shape-shifting and genre-shifting requires an adventurous reader. But those willing to suspend disbelief will be richly rewarded.
“White Tears” is a brave, ambitious novel. While moving at breakneck speed, it manages to speak volumes about race and justice, power and enthrallment, cultural appropriation, friendship and the power of music to transport us to realms beyond words. It does so by honoring those “ghosts at the edge of American consciousness,” the bluesmen who sang and strummed their way toward some form of redemption and changed our popular culture forever.