Sordid tale of bone-deep envy

This is a pageturner where the criminal is giving her version of the story while trying to get away with the crime.

Yellowface, Rebecca F Kuang’s latest novel, is ostensibly about racial and cultural appropriation. But it covers more ground — taking in the absurd contortions authors are expected to do nowadays in promoting their work, the poisonous drip-drip of social media boost-and-bring-them-down drama, the endless discourse over who can tell what story, and the inevitable cancellation escalation. Snakes eating their own tails come to mind.

But even as she turns an unsparing eye on the burden on authors who have to be ever-present and market themselves as the product rather than their works, Kuang also shows what goes on inside the American publishing industry dominated by upper-class white elites who decide what (and whose) stories merit public attention and adulation. It’s a pretty depressing state of affairs and Kuang is at her best when she skewers these tastemakers who think that they know what’s going to tempt the reading audience.

The story begins with two friends out in town (Washington DC — in a welcome change, this tale of literary hoaxes and ambition doesn’t take place in New York) celebrating one of them, Athena Liu, winning a Netflix TV deal. The friend who’s her companion on these celebrations is June Hayward. Athena is a successful writer who’s had a meteoric rise to literary fame and fortune. June has one novel published into oblivion. They were both classmates at Yale which is where they first met, in an Introduction to Short Fiction course. June is the narrator of the story, and as it progresses, the reader does get an inkling that she might not be the completely reliable source one might expect. What happens within the first few pages is this: Athena Liu dies (not a spoiler — it’s the first line of the book) and June happens on an unfinished manuscript on Athena’s typewriter that she purloins. The book is about Chinese labour who were part of the British efforts in World War I. As June says: “It’s a running joke that every Serious Author at some point does a grand and ambitious war novel, and I suppose this one is Athena’s.”

No one else has read Athena’s manuscript. So it’s very easy for June to pass off the work as her own. But questions would arise why a white American author like June with no obvious interest in Sinology would write such a book. Here the complicity of the publishing eco-system comes into play, helping rebrand June Hayward as Juniper Song (a name that could pass off as one with Chinese roots) and the promotional materials that play on this deception are soon on a runaway train.

When the book is released, there is almost universal praise and acclaim. June gets access to industry rooms and literary panel discussions and a life that she never got with her first novel. However, there is a whisper of discontent that soon builds up and threatens to tear down June and reveal what she’d done — not just stealing a dead author’s work but willingly participating in a deceit that tried to alter the perception of her race.

There might be some readers who feel that Kuang has too many targets in her sight: over-ambitious writers, the publishing industry, the grandstanding social media critics. But it’s impossible in this day and age to write a story that is a satirical take on this industry without including all those elements. At times it’s clear even the reader is made to feel complicit — since June is narrating the story and we only have her view on events we find that she too demands our sympathy when things don’t entirely go her way before having to tell ourselves, come on, she’s a fraud.

Kuang’s writing is witty and sharp and Yellowface is the very definition of a page-turner. This is a sordid story of ambition and greed and bone-deep envy. It’s the literary hoax equivalent of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. The crime has been committed, and the criminal is giving their version of the story while trying to save their own skin and get away with their crime. We, the audience, wait with bated breath to see when all will be undone.