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.
