dune_huken 's review for:

White Tears by Hari Kunzru

4.0

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This book about awful rich white hipsters in Brooklyn (sound wearingly familiar?) becomes all the more impressive and confounding when you learn it’s written by an Indian-British man in his 40s, assuming a virtuosic and anthropological voice for a subculture that never seems to use its artistic platform for self-awareness. Instead of the Bushwick rich kid being the status quo for the universal American experience, Kunzru does something a lot weirder here, reaching well beyond class satire into psychedelic horror. As you make your way through a story about hipster DJs using blues music in their productions, the narrative quickly melts into magical realism and the supernatural, almost by way of Toni Morrison’s slavery ghost story in Beloved. What begins as a broad satire of hipster taste and cultural appropriation becomes a harrowing deposition on the soul of white America — cultural exploitation, in Kunzru’s mind, has much to do with the exploitation of black bodies throughout American history. A truly original, weird, and horrifying book.