"Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation."--Amazon.com
I can't decide if this book deserves one star or five, so I went for three. It's not a perfect novel, which isn't to say it isn't great. It reads like water while being complicated on the verge of convoluted. Hari Kunzro has written something extremely complex and thoroughly readable, but something is missing. My biggest issue with the novel is pacing. The beginning of the book is much more generous than the end-the extreme change that the book goes through in the last 50 pages is extremely intense. The main character Seth is meant to get lost for the reader, but his loss is so total you miss the character and cannot connect with him at all. It delves into race relations in the United States but it fails to make any revelations. Black suffering is still ornamental, as much as Kunzro tries to give it a real life and texture.
There could have been a solid book here in a quieter mode about the passion young people feel for music and the journey that takes. I thought this was going to be that book but I was wrong.
