The title might be taken as a provocation. In the compressed language of digital media, white tears, like first-world problems or man flu, are an ersatz version of the real thing. More plainly, the gripes and complaints of white people are, according to certain social codes, unearned and
inauthentic.

This zeitgeisty novel gives us two men who are preoccupied to the point of mania by the question of authenticity: young white New Yorkers obsessed with the blues.