Junie Hayward lives in the genteel poverty one might expect from a struggling professional writer. On one hand, she’s had some professional success in that she’s had a book traditionally published. On the other hand, the book didn’t sell very well, her agent and editors are indifferent to her, and she really pays the bills through a glorified tutoring job.
Her Yale classmate Athena Liu, meanwhile, is the literary establishment’s new darling. She’s wracking up an impressive reputation as a young author of note–her books are received with widespread critical acclaim, and she gets publicity that Junie couldn’t even begin to dream of. Junie resents Athena, but they also are each other’s only friend/frenemy in the DC area, so they still find themselves hanging out together–awkwardly and passive-aggressively–but hanging out together all the same.
Then one horrible night, Athena dies by accident, and Junie ends up impulsively stealing the latest manuscript from her dead “friend” and passing it off as her own. Junie knows what she’s doing is wrong, but in her mind, she’s honoring Athena’s legacy while also affirming her own greatness at writing since she revised it. The book, about Chinese laborers in Europe during WWI, is a big hit.
But as Junie experiences the fame and acclaim she so envied Athena over, she realizes it comes at a price. And to protect her initial lie, she has to craft even more lies, as Junie does everything from ambiguously cultivate the idea she’s Chinese American like Athena to spinning more made-up stories about her inspiration for the story. What should be a happy moment and the crowning achievement of her career quickly descends into paranoia that she will be caught.
R.F. Kuang has been on my radar for a few years now. I’ve profiled some of her books on this blog, though not read them. Yellowface is her first foray into satire. Her previous books (The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) are acclaimed dark fantasies. I really enjoyed Yellowface (thanks so much to Julie for ordering it after I requested it!), and it cements my interest in exploring Kuang’s other books.
Yellowface is a very pointed skewering of the publishing industry through the lens of a highly unreliable narrator, and it is probably funniest to people who have some firsthand familiarity with the academic and/or publishing worlds these characters inhabit. Some of the personalities profiled reminded me a lot of the creative writers I met in college. (If you’ve ever heard some of my stories about the creative writers I met in college, you’ll understand.)
Junie is not a likable protagonist–indeed, nobody in this novel comes out of it looking good–but she is a compelling narrator, by turns despicable and pathetic, if only because of the trainwreck-like quality of the story. Once you see how determined she is to double-down on her decisions, you can’t look away. In many ways, Yellowface reminds me a lot of the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me? , which also features a very lonely and quite unpleasant writer protagonist profiting off very nerdy crimes. Both stories have all the twists and turns you’d expect from a heist story–but with decidedly more bookish characters and crime. And Junie’s loneliness, which even leads her to reconsider whether she was wrong in her evaluation of her friendship with Athena, is quite palpable in Yellowface.
And that is perhaps the facet of this book that is the most relatable, even if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of the publishing world that Kuang is poking fun at. Indeed, in her acknowledgements, Kuang notes that her own publishing journey has been much more pleasant and less dramatic than what is depicted in the novel, and that more than anything, she sees it as a study of loneliness. It’s very much a uniquely 21st-century version of loneliness, powered by social media (particularly Twitter, um, X).
If you like sharp, funny, timely satire, definitely try Yellowface. It’s an engaging, amusing, and thought-provoking read.
Recommended for those who enjoy the work of Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, Alexandra Andrews’s Who is Maud Dixon?, and Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library.
*Also available as ebook and audiobook on Libby.
Are you an R.F. Kuang fan? Have you read Yellowface? What have you been reading lately? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information this item or to place it on hold.
Berryville Book Buzz 