Athena Liu is a literary superstar - her sort-of-friend June Hayward is not. But after a girls’ night out goes wrong and Athena lies dead, June decides to swipe Athena’s latest manuscript - and pass it off as her own! Suddenly June’s life is transformed as she gets to experience the accolades that Athena did. But will her secret be kept… and is Athena somehow still alive?
Occasionally a really popular book will (somewhat) live up to the hype and such is the case with Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface. It’s not without its flaws and it has a dismal final act but it’s mostly a compelling and insightful look at modern publishing.
Told from the perspective of June, we see both sides of the publishing industry: what it’s like to have tried and failed and be completely unknown (June’s experience) vs the commercial and critical success that few achieve (Athena’s experience). Kuang is experiencing the latter and, even if the reader isn’t someone necessarily intrigued by the publishing industry in all of its permutations, the detail is made accessible and understandable and the escalating stakes adds to the story to draw everyone in.
The pacing is impeccable: Kuang establishes the premise swiftly so that we’re right into it by the end of the first chapter and things develop just as quickly from that point on. There’s nary a dull moment and it’s very entertaining. We learn about the different stages of publishing at the highest levels and the insidiousness of identity politics in our current era - hopefully one that will serve as a cautionary tale to future generations.
There were a few blips along the way: the sightings of “Athena” in real life read like corny moments in bad horror movies that try to go for jump scares (and were unfortunately indicative of where the novel was headed in the final act); it’s very unlikely that a random, completely unknown social media account could throw out wild accusations and have those accusations gain traction online in the way they did. I get why it had to happen - to move the story to the next level - but it still felt too contrived. And then later the way that June ensnares Athena’s ex was very unimaginative and cliched.
They were just blips though - the novel up to about the 75% mark is good enough to forgive those weaker moments. Until the last 80 pages/final quarter of the novel. The story is basically done at this point and Kuang retreads a lot of the questions she’s raised before about the concept of stealing in art without saying anything new. It’s a real slog to get through, especially compared to what went before - and it gets worse when Kuang fully embraces the hamminess of bad horror by attempting to make the reader think that Athena has somehow returned from the dead.
Without revealing anything here, the identity and the ending itself are both underwhelming and flat - a poor end to most of what preceded it. Kuang’s first remark in her Acknowledgments is that the novel was a horror story about loneliness but horror is a very difficult and nuanced genre to get right and Kuang completely failed to create anything resembling it here.
Similarly, while it was noticeable how both main characters led surprisingly solitary lives, the author doesn’t explore this at all, so to call it a story about loneliness is misleading, and/or shows that Kuang’s efforts weren’t effective. I would’ve preferred if she had gone deeper in that direction though, or even looked more at June’s feelings of guilt or satirise the publishing industry rather than going for the melodramatic horror angle, because it’s a story rooted in reality - the inclusion of a supernatural aspect always felt awkward and pointless.
Still, Yellowface was a decent novel and I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting for a book I picked up at the supermarket. It’s always worth reading widely because there are good books published at all points of the literary spectrum, and Yellowface is one of those few that break through to the mainstream that turn out to be pretty good reads too. Definitely curious to check out more from Rebecca F. Kuang in the future.
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