by R.F. Kuang ★★★★☆
In Yellowface, our narrator is June Heyward, a young white author struggling to make it in the business. After graduating from Yale and publishing her first novel to lackluster reviews, June spends her time tutoring high schoolers and ghost writing essays for the SAT while trying to come up with an idea for book #2. Meanwhile, she is constantly reminded of what could have been through run-ins with her former Yale classmate Athena Liu, an Asian American publishing darling and one whose star has been on a constant upward trajectory since graduation. June and Athena's friendship -- if you can even call it that -- is surface-level, and mostly involves the occasional drink or trip to a D.C. museum.
The novel opens with one such excursion, but this time the two start to truly connect. Whether it's a bit too much alcohol or just the right circumstances, for the first time in years June feels like she and Athena both let down their guards and share their true selves. Instead of ending the night when they leave the bar, Athena invites June back to her apartment, where they continue to bond. Athena shares that she just completed a novel about Chinese laborers in World War I that literally no one has read yet, and invites June to be her first alpha reader. Before long, they're making pancakes, which leads to a pancake-eating contest...which leads to Athena suddenly choking, and June trying to save her, and Athena Liu, only a few years removed from her Yale graduation, dying on her apartment floor. After dealing with paramedics and the authorities, June stumbles home and collapses on her bed. And next to her bed sits Athena's manuscript, tucked safely in June's handbag. What follows is June's rise -- through her editing and publication of Athena's work as her own -- and fall, as people begin to suspect that the work is not original.
The novel zips along at a pretty fast pace. June narrates the events with bits of commentary that suggests she's documenting them after the fact, things like "I know you won't believe me, but there was never a moment where I thought to myself, I'm going to take this and make it mine. It's not like I sat down and hatched up some evil plan to profit off my dead friend's work." As such, you know it's not going to end well for June, so it's a bit of waiting to see how she'll get caught and if everything will truly fall apart for her.
There is plenty of societal commentary in Yellowface, much of it tongue-in-cheek, on a variety of topics. The publishing industry gets raked over the coals pretty well, on everything from author tokenization to publishers being willing to allow a scandal if it means more sales. Cultural appropriation comes up, of course, and "what people should be allowed to write". Kuang ingeniously presents righteous outrage from Asian American authors in the book about a white woman writing from an Asian American perspective, while Kuang is deliberately and ironically doing the opposite (writing the point of view of a white author despite being Asian American). Kuang also tackles social media, both in how critical its role has become to publishing success, as well as its role in society and the trolling and mob mentality that it creates when someone is suspected of deliberate wrongdoing.
June is consistently trying to justify, both to herself and to the reader, why her actions were okay, and I kept trying to figure out where Kuang might be coming down on this. Some statements seemed like they were written specifically to make you roll your eyes at June and like her less; others made me think "hmm, maybe Kuang feels some sympathy for her." While June is essentially unlikable, Kuang does make an effort to create enough nuance that she's a somewhat sympathetic character that you may even root for at times. Athena's manuscript was not fully finished and it required a good amount of work to get into "publishing shape". As Kuang said in one interview, "...the final product isn't Athena's alone. It would have been fair for them to share credit." Also, while Athena dies in Chapter 1, we do get to learn more about her through June's memories and others recollecting stories about her, and it turns out that Athena might be even more unlikable than June. Whether Athena is brushing off aspiring Asian American writers who look up to her and want advice, or stealing personal stories from war veterans (or even June herself on one occasion in college) for her own gain, she has fewer sympathetic moments than June. By comparison, that made me dislike June a little less for stealing the manuscript of an even less likable person (who was also a thief, in a way, with no ethical loophole).
Another interesting twist: Kuang is just 27 years old, she's already on her fifth novel, and she's a rising star (and Asian American to boot) in the world of publishing. So...is she Athena Liu? While some might draw that conclusion, Kuang has said in interviews that her early days as a published author more closely mirrored June Heyward's. Nevertheless, given this is her first foray into something other than fantasy, it's a bold (and dare I say courageous?) choice to swing the pendulum so significantly from a genre that is generally the most heavily imagined to a litfic novel that seems to have a ton of her own lived experience represented in the characters and setting.
Kuang says in the acknowledgments that the novel "is, in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry." Yellowface was an interesting and troubling peek behind that curtain. and while I didn't fall in love with the book, it kept me entertained and it made me think about a number of topics. What more should one want from a good read, right? I enjoyed Kuang's writing and storytelling enough that I'll be going back to tackle Babel (and maybe even The Poppy War) at a later date.