idiomatic's Reviews > Yellowface

lmao.

the frustration, as always, is that rf kuang is an intelligent and steady-handed writer. she is ahead of many of her peers in craft as much as sales: she writes a page-turner, she crafts a strong perspective, she is horror-writer good at making the reader feel gut-churning revulsion (whether or not she earns the strong emotion she likes to pull out is another question), and in this book she's capable of being funny. like here's a perfect paragraph, in which our pernicious white heroine works with her editor to chop and change the manuscript she stole:

The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.

like it's absolutely executing all of its tricks as it should: the blinkers of a close first person perspective, the legible different reality underneath. it's not subtle but when done in satire it's not AS hamhanded as kuang's dramatic instincts, per other books. readers who know chinese will scream, readers who don't will still feel their brain itch. the authorial hand is capable.

the author is capable... of more than she writes. the problem with kuang is that, despite a reputation for in-depth research, she refuses to interrogate beyond her scope. in previous books that meant that the sense of history was strong and the rest of the work of writing fiction—character work, plot, tone, anything reliant on the imagination—was comparatively weak. here there's no research to hold it up, just kuang's own posting habits and career success. the step down from jstor to twitter is a violent stumble.

kuang is an accomplished academic but a deeply incurious writer. that is on sharp display here, in a book that is meant to depict success and failure in the literary-commercial circuit—something that kuang knows little about. kuang is a genre writer who achieved crossover commercial success after blowing up on tiktok. her debut was promising and lauded but not uniquely vaunted; she received genre award noms (not wins) but her books blew up on tiktok after the fact and she launched an incredibly successful book this year in the genre space, off the back of her tiktok fame. everything she knows about succeeding she knows about inside her particular bubble, and also, because she has been succeeding since she was an undergrad baby, has been told—and genuinely believes—that she has hit the summit of success. this leaves her totally inequipped to write about what literary success looks like when engineered by the house. r.f. kuang has no belief that there is a form of publishing greatness beyond that which has been bestowed upon r.f. kuang, and a wilful desire not to google further.

the 'publishing details' on display are... well, they all exist IN publishing, curate a FORM of commercial success, and are familiar to kuang, but they don't match the book as described here (a lit-commercial wwii doorstopper, written by a chinese-american author and butchered into commercial sentimentality by a white author and editor, think the bulletproof success of american dirt even in the thick of its cancellation). mainstream literary successes don't come up through pitchwars. mainstream commercial novels don't come up in most book box deals because there is a form of literary success that is not reliant on superfans buying multiple copies apiece. there's a part where our heroine lists the major american literary awards her major literary-commercial war novel is up for and starts with: the goodreads choice awards. posting FROM this bad website: please be serious. it's fitting that the cover looks more like a designed arc than like a book.

there's a note in the babel prologue that i think about all the time with kuang's work, where she says that she was so dazzled by the sight of an oyster tower at a particular oxford party that she put it in the book even though oysters in victorian england were trash food for peasants—she didn't want to capture the dazzle or the waste so much as she wanted to write down her experience beat for beat, and could not conceive of an emotional reality that she did not personally live. this is an oyster tower book. this is embarrassing and technically inaccurate mimesis all the way down, solely interested in kuang's own interests. wow your heroines live in dc? and you lived in dc? they met at yale? you go to yale? omigod rebecca that's so crazy. there was a shorthand term back in the sporking days (i know, i hate my withered hag fingers for typing this too) on LIVEJOURNAL (HAG FINGERS) called 'pepper jack cheese' that was like "hermione ate a sandwich with pepper jack cheese (a/n: that's my favorite cheese!)", the phenomenon where the author would gigglingly and obviously insert a few of their real-life favorite things into the story. kuang's pepper jack cheese is whistlepig whiskey, name-dropped bafflingly twice as a signifier for the nicest possible whiskey, and also every single detail.

it is like. skin-crawlingly secondhand embarrassing to watch an author write their own life beat for beat and also be like 'everyone hated her because she was TOO pretty and TOO smart'. every critique that has ever been leveled against kuang goes into the mouth of her proxy's haters, including the pernicious and grasping white heroine. the belief that her haters are racist comes in a distant second to the belief that her haters are jealous—of her success, of her telegenic prettiness, of her comfortable life. maybe baby but look at the material: there's room for improvement. it is disappointing to watch someone technically skilled grind their intellectual curiosity down to a nub via posting and self-obsession, and it's humiliating to watch an oxbridge-ivy phd student say 'talk to the hand! and DON'T tell me to log off' for three hundo pages. is this the best she can do? does SHE think this is the best she can do? i'm worried that she does.