ishika's Reviews > Yellowface

2/5

i feel weird writing this review. for one, Yellowface isn’t out until next year. two, the book is very meta about twitter and book reviews—ratings on goodreads even make up several important plot points. i feel like me and the book are engaging in some inside joke.

i’ve decided not to include any quotes from the book and talk in general terms with minor details to avoid spoilers (not anything that’s not in the premise, anyway), but i’m still talking about how i felt about different parts of the book, including the middle and end, even though I won’t be talking about what happens in them. so if you want to go in blind, beware. i know this runs the risk of me describing something one way, but then you going and reading it and interpreting a different way, but until it actually comes out and i can drop the ‘extended’ (and hopefully more sophisticated) review, this will have to do.

yellowface is meant to be drama and dark satire. it’s a bit hilariously grim and grimly hilarious to anyone who’s ever needed to close booktwt and touch grass, but also interesting to anyone moderately familiar with books, writing or publishing. the prose isn’t babel, where i was stopping every page to savour the writing style, but it is fast-paced and fairly easy to get through. and i’m kind of torn about yellowface, but the worst part is that i can’t figure out whether it’s in a “this didn't work for me, personally” way, or a more objective “this is a Critique” way.

my problem with yellowface comes down to the fact that i cannot separate the narrative voice from rfk’s voice at all. a lot of the experiences of a certain character lines up very much with what i know is rfk’s own, and that is on purpose and not necessarily bad—she’s an author who’s always been very open about putting a lot of herself into her books and it’s one of the things that can add to their emotional depth. a lot of readers will likely proclaim the fact you can’t unsee the hand of the author in the writing is The Point. however, when the characters start to receive criticisms that are very similar to criticisms rfk has faced, but represented somewhat flatly, i cock my head a bit. see: problematic representation of Taiwanese indigenous people (a criticism in isolation that depnding on the book may be valid, but in yellowface is shown to be made by people who are just jealous of the author and don’t actually know what they’re talking about), privately-educated, rich western diaspora writing about traumatic histories of working classes from the homelands they’ve only visited a few times (a criticism in isolation that depending on the author may be valid, but in yellowface is made from the perspective of the racist white woman using it to justify her horrible actions), etc.

this may not bother other readers, but i can’t help but side-eye it. she gets around it by having these criticisms be made by mouthpieces—that’s another thing about yellowface, by the way. so many mouthpieces. i don’t think this is a book where readers will get very attached to the characters, not just because the mc is an unreliable narrator, but because yellowface is more of a book where characters are tools that represent different things and perspectives and are meant to be grimly watched, observed and laughed at from above. which is mostly fun, until you start to distinguish between rfk’s mouthpieces a bit: which ones she represents more flatly and more caricatured, and the one she gives more nuanced paragraphs to, from under which i think I can make out the haze of her opinions. and i’m not fond of them all the time.

as always, it’s certainly interesting, but the middle of the book is basically all twitter discourse. it had me wondering if i could just scroll through my timeline and get the same experience instead. it’s veryyy meta—sometimes fun, sometimes obnoxious. maybe it’s too ‘high concept’ for me, sorry, or maybe it's heavy-handed. and it makes my job writing this difficult, because how much can i attribute to the unreliable narrator, satirical style or rfk herself? where does one end and the other begin, if they do so at all?

(which was a big thing that irked me with tpw. people would make criticisms of rfk's narrative choices and plot points and the response would be ‘well, rin is an unreliable narrator!’ yes, but there is such thing as framing and context which are important things to consider when trying to figure out what an author actually is saying, intentionally or not. but anyways.)

speaking of slightly more well-written unreliable narrators, juniper song is… a character. more of an awful ball of jealous, racist, liberal misery who you get to follow the entertaining downward spiral of throughout the book than a person. at least, when she's not hindered by rfk's blunt writing style striking her on the head. the commentary and discussion yellowface wants to have about publishing and racism is genuinely interesting and important, but I enjoyed yellowface most when it doing less back-and-forth with its own themes and more about the fucked up relationship between athena liu and juniper song/june hayward/athena liu. ie, when it was more about actual people than rfk's comemntary. despite athena dying at the very start of the story, she haunts the narrative, sometimes through flashbacks, sometimes through other people’s experiences, sometimes literally. and the narrative is juniper. i love a good fucked up friendship/rivalry/impersonation?/whatever the fuck this is. there's a flashback where we find out about a fucked up thing athena did regarding a traumatic event juniper went through--something which in no way justifies the scale of what juniper does throughout the book, but muddies the waters and makes everyone involved seem like more flawed, three-dimensional people. keyword, people! and whenever that relationship had the spotlight, i couldn’t put yellowface down. it's insane the narrative spent more time on its self-indulgent satire than it does on its genuinely compelling emotional core.

which is why i was really loving the third act, in which a lot of my criticisms seemed to fall away and the mess of the premise was really coming to a head. i was reading it late at night and, even though it’s not a horror, i got actually creeped out by several parts. to be honest, if yellowface had stuck the landing, it could have been four stars.

and that’s my final problem with yellowface. it has a decent plot, interesting cast of characters, interesting themes and discussions, but my only feeling on the ending was, ‘…that’s it?’ i know i said i wouldn’t do quotes, but im making an exception for the bit where our narrator says, ‘I’ve written myself into a corner. The first two thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do i do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there’s no clear resolution?’ Which is very meta, because based off the ending, i feel that’s the position rfk was in at that exact point. i can somewhat tell she struggled with where to take the ending and i have more thoughts on why i felt underwhelmed by it, but i guess that’ll be for 2023, for when it's no doubt on all the 'Very Important Books of the Year' lists. for now, i can see myself rereading babel and parts of tpw, but i don’t see myself rereading yellowface.

(view spoiler)[ it's now 2023. in short, the ending is less a bang, and more of a whimper. rfk rules out a geoff-style ending for june, someone who disappears quietly from public memory after the scandal and becomes old news. she's too attached to athena's image. this is the right choice--june is too much of a villain-protagonist to get an unearned, 'soft' ending at the end of this. but then the 'crash-and-burn' ending needed to be a lot more to be satisfying for me. we get hallucinations, suicidal ideation, her isolating herself from her support network, all of this building and building and building--and then it goes...

nowhere.

oh, we get a fascinating final confrontation with candace, one of athena's fellow asian-american authors, who gets to deliver the most cutting, messy and brutal line of the book: "Who gives a fuck about Athena? Fuck Athena. We all hated that bitch. This is for me."

but what happens after?

we get a prediction from june, which is basically that the cycle of controvery and scandal that this whole book has shown us for however many hundreds of pages will just keep going, and going, and going, and maybe june will win (at least in her eyes). it's just such a nothing ending. sure, it's #commentary and a criticism of the publishing and media industry, but that does not make it satisfying. it's not an emotional resolution, and it's not even a more sophisticated commentary on the cyclical nature of scandal and how white people don’t face consequences than what the story has shown us already. we've seen the cycle and her getting away with it. the whole book so far has been the cycle and her getting away with it. i think it's a good example of what i've been saying, to be honest, about how yellowface is more about The Point than any story it's trying to tell. The ending is all about The Point, but is not an emotional resolution to anything developed or a conclusion to any charater arcs. just "and this will continue, because doesn't it always continue? isn't this ending so clever?" the worst part is that it teases you with the prospect of something more compelling: june plays with the idea of 'accidentally' killing candace and knowing she would get away with it because she's a white woman, a horrific mirror to the start of the book and a sign of june's complete downward spiral, because at least Athena's death was an actual accident (and would be a frankly brutal commitment to the “they always get away with it” message). in a different moment, it makes you wonder if june may even be the one who might die an accidental death and now candace is the one to continue this twisted cycle, a horribly circular but somewhat karmic ending. instead, the cycle continues... in the most uninspired way possible. the third act of yellowface feels like it's hurtling towards a great ending and then face-plants over the finish line at the last minute. despite being a protagonist who is more well-suited for a crash-and-burn ending than any other i've read, juniper song doesn't burn. she barely sizzles. and to me, that's disappointing. (hide spoiler)]

trigger warnings for this book: racism, c slur, suicidal ideation, sexual assault

edit 24/05/2023: unsurprisingly, some people on twitter cannot fucking read, so to clarify some things: 1) i am not white. i am asian, 2) I DO NOT CARE THAT JUNE WAS IRREDEEMABLE. I DID NOT WANT A REDEMPTION FOR A RACIST. my main problem was that i found the way yellowface handled its themes came at the cost of other aspects of the story when it should have been making them better. 3) "[insert criticism here] is literally the whole point of the story omgggg how could you miss the point so bad did you even pass english lit in school etc etc." personally, i do not enjoy 300 pages of on-the-nose commentary through uncompelling mouthpieces. i especially find it questionable when some of these mouthpieces flatly reflect criticisms the authors has actually received in regards to her previous work. if you do, more power to you! if what i disliked about the book is what you enjoyed about it, well, that's just how having an opinion works. i don't know what to tell you. i can definitely understand how someone who isn't as aware of some of the meta-commentary would have more enjoyment. but i find the response that i "missed the point" (to be honest, the writing constantly tries its best to be Desperately Sure You Are Not Missing The Point) that this book is about racism by some white readers when i'm intimately familiar with racism, both as it pertains to real life and in media, kind of... well. racist.

in a way, i guess this book is perfect for booktwitter. a lot of recognisable discourse where the Message and Themes are written out for you in big bold letters, constantly, all the time, throughout the story, just in case you missed it—that way, even your average reading-comprehension-starved twitter user can pick up on it—padded with enough relatable material about being chronically online and plenty of fictional ragebait to distract from a narrative that can’t get its teeth into its own premise and a third act that can’t deliver. target audience acquired.

in line with the theme of the book, i’m going to completely steal another reviewer’s words that i can’t stop thinking about. 'the problem with kuang is that, despite a reputation for in-depth research, she refuses to interrogate beyond her scope.' go read it. and i’d like to add to that: a lot of her most avid readers don’t have the appetite for anything beyond that, either. and take it incredibly personally when at the end of the meal, you’re still hungry.

and to be clear, this isn't a blanket response to everyone who disagrees with me (i've had interesting conversations with people who do)--just to some people who are determined to take the most uncharitable opinion possible of a frankly lukewarm review.

a book can be about an important subject matter and i can still feel it fell short of what it was trying to do. that is not me putting personal attack on the author, the author's identity, the subject matter itself, or any readers who enjoyed the book or their identities. i didn't even hate the book. i liked parts of it quite a bit. i just wanted more.