Book Review: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

 

Yellowface

by R.F. Kuang

Our thematic book club chose to read books for January with a one-word title. I happened on Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and had really enjoyed her book Babel so I opened up the description. Of course, as a writer myself I am drawn to anything that discusses the publishing world, so I downloaded the audio book from our Hoopla catalog.

I started the book on my ride home and was immediately sucked in. I listened to it every chance I got over the next few days.

June Heyward, is absolutely petty but sadly relatable in her initial jealousy of fellow Yale alum and author Athena Liu. Here is June, with her own first publishing contract from a publisher that paid her ten thousand dollars for her first book then folded, but her agent sells it to another publishing house for $20,000.00. (Sounds good to me!) But she is struggling with a lack of backing by her new publisher, as many authors do. Then her paperback release gets canceled. She finds herself deeply jealous of the meteoric rise to fame of her friend instead of taking it as inspiration and getting on with her next book.

Right off the bat, you get a sense of the narrator’s skewed perspective. She starts out telling us that Athena “has everything.” “Everything” though is apparently just in regard to her novels and publishing, because in the very next paragraph she says that Athena “has almost no friends.”

They aren’t so much friends as acquaintances with a shared interest in writing and publishing.

“…in recent years, I’ve developed another theory, which is that everyone else finds her as unbearable as I do.”

Then why, in the name of all that’s holy, are you spending so much time with her?!

This story can seem rather inevitable after a certain point but there are still a couple surprises and the author even gives us some situations to keep a little sympathy for June. For instance, there are some actions by Athena when they were at Yale that really make the reader wonder why June would even be friends with Athena? But June’s unreliability as a narrator makes that questionable too. You want to trust the narrator to at least tell you the truth, right? And June says other people didn’t like Athena, but then again, that’s what June says and can we trust June at all? (This is a dark and twisty path.)

June doesn’t exactly seem to be trying to ride Athena’s coattails. She never asks Athena to introduce her to her publisher, or editor, or agent. She just hangs out with her, taking advantage of free food and drinks.

When Athena dies horribly, choking on a half-cooked pancake, June does try to help her. Watching Athena die, unable to help her, other than trying to do the Heimlich and calling for help, sounds horrifying and traumatic. But then June steals Athena’s first draft of her latest book. Just slips it in her bag, along with some other docs, and sobs to the emergency workers then walks off with it. It’s wild. We don’t even see it happen, just hear about it afterward. Eventually, June starts editing and adding to Athena’s manuscript.

Okay, at that point, why not take it to Athena’s mother or publisher and say she wanted to finish this as a tribute to Athena? She could at least get credit that way, honestly. Instead, she turns it in as her own work. One of the most heinous things one writer can do to another.

Then there’s the cultural appropriation of using the name Juniper Song to make people wonder what her ancestry is. As I recall, this is the publisher’s idea and June pushes back on it but then gives in and totally rationalizes it. She even gets angry at people later in the book for making that assumption!  

June spends so much of the book justifying and rationalizing her actions that you end up just waiting for her to get her comeuppance.

Is what June achieves with the release of the book “success” or is it the illusion of success? Because it’s not her book. She edited it. She didn’t conceive of the story or write it. But then, did Athena? Or did Athena just transcribe stories of survivors then weave it together into a story that June finished?

In the end, the main actors in the story all seem to operate from a place of deep self-absorption. The blackmailer and the person who bring June down are not doing it out of loyalty to Athena, but because they want money or fame and are angry at June for themselves.

It’s a gripping story that confronts the worst aspects of publishing, including the required self-promotion on social media that feeds self-absorption.

Honestly, it makes you wonder if it’s all worth it or if I should just write the stories I want to write to amuse myself and put them in a drawer, never to see the light of day?

In the end, it’s a great story that keeps you glued to your seat and asks a number of questions but keeps the line moving. The authors way of describing things is detailed and nuanced. I highly recommend and am looking forward to her next book.