--- title: White Tears: Everyone Should Read Hari Kunzru's New Novel description: 'Part ghost story, part travelogue, White Tears is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul' canonical: https://time.com/4703313/white-tears-hari-kunzru-review/ author: Claire Howorth article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-03-16T10:21:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T03:52:12.075Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Book Review: Hari Kunzru's White Tears og:description: 'A drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul' og:url: https://time.com/4703313/white-tears-hari-kunzru-review/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt616afd98f39fb778/6988bea52dce0156eb9ecabf/170327091399.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2650 og:image:height: 1491 og:image:alt: hari-kunzru-white-tears og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Book Review: Hari Kunzru's White Tears twitter:description: 'A drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt616afd98f39fb778/6988bea52dce0156eb9ecabf/170327091399.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Book Review: Hari Kunzru's 'White Tears' Is Beautiful and Strange > Sponsored content. 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Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent.  by [Claire Howorth](https://time.com/author/claire-howorth/)  ## Claire Howorth Mar 16, 2017 10:21 AM UTC   by [Claire Howorth](https://time.com/author/claire-howorth/)  ## Claire Howorth Mar 16, 2017 10:21 AM UTC Any novel set in the music biz rightly aspires to stereophonic meaning, but the reverberations of [Hari Kunzru](http://www.harikunzru.com/)‘s _White Tears_ echo long after it’s done. Part ghost story, part travelogue, [_White Tears_](https://www.amazon.com/White-Tears-novel-Hari-Kunzru/dp/0451493699/?tag=timecom-20) is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul. Kunzru, the author of four previous novels, has nailed a specifically American style of bourgeois appropriation through his main characters, Seth and Carter, 20-something white guys whose friendship is staked on a fetish for music. Carter is the alpha by virtue of his bank account — richer than Croesus but mortified about it. Seth, the sidekick and narrator, becomes consumed by the fallout of their forged recording of an invented black musician. These kids are stupidly privileged, and they are not all right: even before they were born, they were complicit in sins of the past. _White Tears_ time-bends through Jim Crow-era Mississippi and riverbank chain gangs, around characters who are owed personal reparations for not only the fake (or is it real?) recording but for other past wrongs. “History is literally present in all that we do,” wrote [James Baldwin](http://time.com/4457112/james-baldwin-eddie-glaude/), whose traces are here in Kunzru’s pages. Crackling literary allusion is spliced throughout _White Tears_, slyly evoking works by Thomas Mann (Carter’s decidedly [Aryan](http://time.com/3524732/nazi-propaganda-and-the-hyping-of-aryan-culture/), vaguely incestuous family), [Ralph Ellison](http://time.com/4328189/gordon-parks-and-ralph-ellison-how-a-man-becomes-invisible/) (Seth’s persistent inability to make others notice him becomes an actual shift in skin color) and others. For all that and then some, _White Tears_ is a book that everyone should be reading right now. Near the end, Seth passively absorbs cable-news coverage of a [police shooting](http://time.com/3990374/see-the-protests-in-ferguson-on-the-anniversary-of-michael-browns-death/) — “Why would they kill him … His hands were up” — and an idea Kunzru floats chapters before booms back: radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s theory that sound never dies. 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