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Contemporary Fiction Views: Publishing can be cruel, but writing itself is wonderful [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-05-30
June Hayward published her first novel with a small press and it was soon forgotten. Her agent and publisher are not enthusiastic about taking her calls. But her college friend is a literary superstar. Athena Liu's fiction, ever since their undergraduate days, has been lionized. She's a bestseller who wins prizes and is the subject of profiles in all the most buzzworthy venues. The two are out on the town to celebrate Athena's latest news, a Netflix deal.
In R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, narrator June both tells and shows how good Athena's work is, the shallowness of their friendship and, apparently, of Athena's personaity, and how jealous June is.
The pair leave a Georgetown watering hole to go to Athena's luxurious apartment. They decide they are hungry for homemade pancakes. In an audacious scene that is representative of the narrative style, Athena gets a pancake lodged in her throat and chokes to death in front of June. Athena did her writing on a manual typewriter, with nothing done digitally. Before the pancake incident, Athena showed June her latest work, a historical novel of Chinese laborers conscripted to serve the British fighting force in WWI France. (For an introduction to this part of history, see this Smithsonian article.)
After the paramedics take Athena's body away, June also leaves the apartment. With the only existing copy of Athena's last novel.
Yes, Dear Reader, June then rewrites the novel and has it published as her own work. The reader is swept up in the crazy world of top-name bestsellerdom, from the long process of getting a book ready for publication to the crucial business of creating pre-order buzz, from the dizzy social whirl of being seen as a peer by top literary names to social media trolls.
June has changed her name back to her birth first and middle name, Juniper Song, which sounds a bit less, well, plain white. Which is what she is. Athena was Chinese-American. When the veracity of June being the author of the now bestselling novel, The Last Front, is questioned, both her stealing Athena's work and appropriating the culture and history of a people not her own come into the conversation.
Throughout, June is defensive and defiant. She believes that in rewriting Athena's manuscript, she made the novel her own. One of the weaker parts of Yellowface is how June recognized the manuscript was brilliant, when she glanced at the first pages while drunk, yet it required reworking and rewriting. It doesn't help her defense that both she and her editing team built up the part of a white missionary's daughter to agree to a Chinese prisoner's request to give her a kiss on the cheek. But Kuang is masterful in her use of satire to bring the appropriation and white savior discussion into sharp focus.
However, June’s belief that she was entitled to steal from Athena is bolstered because Athena stole from everyone — from older people she interviewed, from her former boyfriend, even from June herself. This adds another layer to the notion that writers are thieves, vultures stealing from everything that happens around them.
More than once, Yellowface veers near the edge of teetering over with its to-the-limit venturesome plot and characters, but Kuang's bold story stays on track.
Kuang writes in her acknowledgements at the end of the novel that it is "a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry" -- and there are definitely horror story aspects to this novel.
But this novel also allows its unlikeable narrator to say some wonderful things about the power and joy of writing. This love of creating is what makes Yellowface a novel that is far more than a satirical look at high-stakes publishing and the unreality of social media.
When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.
And, earlier in the novel:
Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.
Kuang's fantasy novels have been nominated for the Nebula and Locus awards. Babel won the Nebula for best novel. In addition to writing, she is working on a PhD iin East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Whether Yellowface is an introduction to her writing or a continuation of enjoying her work, it is well worth discovering.
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