“I’m not even going to start playing the authenticity game... I’m the least authentic person I know,” joked Hari Kunzru, reporting on the mid-Noughties poshing-up of Hackney, where he lived before settling in Brooklyn. The A-word preoccupies his fiction, awash with problems of passing and realness. In The Impressionist, his Raj-era debut of 2002, a mixed-race protagonist sprouts multiple aliases; in My Revolutions (2007), a hard-left 1970s militant turns suburban househusband, with doubt hanging over how radical he was to begin with.
His new novel concerns the occult consequences of a hoax perpetrated by two young record producers in New York. Having covertly taped a hooded black man singing the blues in a public square – they couldn’t see his face – Seth and Carter fuzz up the audio to resemble one of the sought-after inter-war pressings they’ve built their reputation on sampling. Posted online, it sends aficionados wild — not least a veteran collector haunted by the depths to which a drug-addicted confrère sank in search of rare vinyl in segregation-era Mississippi.
Kunzru spends the first quarter of the novel undermining the credibility of his central duo. Seth tells us he was a nobody until he met his dreadlocked partner-in-crime, whose playboy lifestyle at college was funded by the profits of his father’s logistics firm, riding high after 9/11 (hmm). Carter, we’re told, listens exclusively to black music, “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people”. “We knew we didn’t own it,” admits Seth, “a fact we tried to ignore... masking our disabling caucasity with a sort of professorial knowledge.”
What begins as dude-bro send-up soon spirals into a supernatural revenge fantasy keyed to America’s history of racism. When Carter is beaten up and left for dead while running a mysterious offstage errand in the Bronx, Seth feels that “whatever happened... had to do with the song, with the three minutes of darkness we had released into the world.” His bid to give this theory legs entails a cross-country road trip with Carter’s sister, Leonie, an insecure performance artist on whom he’s always had a crush (“take what you want,” she tells him in a motel).
When – without warning – the novel starts cutting between Seth’s first-person testimony and the twilight of the Jim Crow era, past and present merge in a phantasmagorical whirl centred on a pole-axing injustice suffered by a talented bluesman cruelly denied his break. But an air of cheap morality clings to how Kunzru pits this all-seeing historical perspective against his protagonists’ ignorance. Despite Seth and Carter’s sketched-in backstory of shared mental illness there’s a dispiriting sense that we’re being invited to do little more than watch some unpleasant characters get their just deserts; when Seth casually dismisses two “middle-aged women” as “lizards”, or when Carter gloats about a “retard” taken in by their scam, you aren’t inclined to cut them much slack.
And that’s before you learn the true villainy bankrolling their set-up – the basis by which Kunzru provocatively equates cultural appropriation with the ills of mass incarceration. While his gory finale made me wonder if he’d had Jonathan Coe’s comic classic What A Carve Up! on his nightstand, the bloodshed doesn’t bring catharsis so much as a sense that Kunzru is short-changing the intricacy of his subject. He himself noted in a recent interview that white collectors saved early blues records from “oblivion”; despite “problems with the white taste for the authentic”, there’s “still something symbiotic there... I’m always interested in grey areas.”
That’s far from how this novel reads. With the paranormal coup de grâce looming, Seth complains that “it’s not fair to blame me for things that took place long before I was even born... I want to say, what about /my/ rights?”. We hear only whining: for all the pyrotechnics, Kunzru has primed us – from his title onwards – to see Seth’s story as nothing other than a matter of black and white.
• White Tears by Hari Kunzru is published by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
