Rebecca F Kuang Yellowface - Review

 

It’s nearly impossible to buy a new novel in a bookshop; unless it’s a Fitzcarraldo edition you have to buy a more-or-less lurid and ludicrous package. The packaging around Yellowface starts as it means to go on: “Addictive” is the first word you see (top left), predictable because lazy critics are addicted to the word. Turn to the back cover and a graduate of Instincts of the Herd 101 at Glamour magazine gives us “The book that everyone is talking about”, not quite A-grade because “that” is redundant. It does the job of making you feel you could be the one sitting out the dance.

But step inside the back cover and a standard-issue glamorous author pic is paired with an unusual set of credentials: a Master’s degree from Cambridge, ditto from Oxford, and a Ph D in progress at Yale. Rebecca F. Kuang is more than clever; she’s serious.

In the novel, she creates as first-person narrator a white woman in her twenties who has some talent but not quite enough to bring her major success in the world of modern fiction. This does create one problem which I don’t think is fully resolved: her narrator, June Hayward aka (at her publisher’s urging) Juniper Song, will undermine the identity Kuang needs for her character if this fictional narrator writes too well or is too funny in her own right. The tricky task is then to engage the reader and make them laugh or think by exploiting the gap which we know exists between the very talented author-creator Kuang and the novel’s lesser ranked narrator Hayward/Song. In other words, the task is to create ironic distance because no one really wants to read flat prose created to make a narrator credible. It does not always come off: there are some flat passages (bottom p 181, too many “I”’s) and there are a couple of occasions when a tone-deaf DumbDown App takes over (perhaps at the publisher’s instigation):

“I get my first Royalties statement … I’ve earned out. This means that I’ve sold enough copies to cover my already sizeable advance and that from here on out I get to keep a percentage of all future sales” (p 93) In this passage DumbDown directly addresses the ignorant reader and does so again here:

“The paperback edition just came out, which generates a nice sales bump – paperbacks are cheaper, so they sell a bit better” (p 193). Well, I never would have guessed.

And at page 63 the narrator offers a Wikipedia paragraph on what “sensitivity readers” do. I find it simpler to characterise them as Sunday School teachers who have missed their vocation of telling cross-legged children that Jesus doesn’t like it if you fart.

The plot is simple enough: White American June’s Korean friend Athena Liu – a much more successful writer - chokes to death while they are getting drunk together leaving behind the typescript of a nearly-completed novel which June steals and plagiarises to create her own best-seller. The thoroughly-researched story-line of that novel concerns the many thousands of Chinese workers who were shipped to act as (more-or-less indentured) labourers on the Western Front in World War One. So weighty stuff.  June does have to fill in some missing bits and mug up the history to make herself credible as the supposed author. Jointly with her editor they delete or soften passages which might not go down well in Disapprove-of-Everything-America-Online. It is here that Kuang has a lot of fun and makes us laugh though there is sufficient (and clever) ambiguity to allow opposing sides to laugh at the same gags.  I began to think reading these passages that Kuang has a fully-fledged essayist inside her just waiting for opportunities.

I would still advise her to adopt my own lifestyle. I have a Nokia dumbphone never upgraded to a smartphone though the handset has had to be replaced a few times since 2000; I don’t always carry it. I use a desk computer for writing Blog posts like this and a laser printer so that I can do manual proofing sitting in an armchair.  Smartphones ruin lives; when their users are about to cross the street they feel a sudden compulsive urge to consult the screen.

One named reviewer whose take on Kuang’s gags is probably different to mine reads Yellowface as a “take on white privilege” which rather misses the irony that “Yellowface” white American narrator June is the creation of a Chinese-born author doing what I suppose for symmetry should be called a “Whiteface” job. But how can Ivy League-Kuang know what it’s like to be a less talented white woman?

Warning: The next paragraph reveals a further twist to the plot.

I enjoyed the book – and especially the earlier part -  though I did guess the first of the final two twists to the story as early as page 194 of the 319. June/Juniper is stuck for what to write next after both The Last Front and her subsequent Mother Witch are outed for thorough-going plagiarism of the late Athena Liu’s work. She gets anxious and depressed but then realises that the way out of the room is through the door of a full-on confession which turns into - you guessed it - Yellowface.