Yellowface
| Published | 2023-05-16 |
| Series | Standalone |
| Genre | Fiction, Thriller |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | William Morrow / HarperCollins |
| ISBN-10 | 0063250837 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0063250833 |
📝Honest Review
Summary:
June Hayward is a struggling white author who has watched her college friend Athena Liu become one of the most celebrated writers in America. When Athena dies suddenly in front of her June does something she cannot take back. She steals Athena's unpublished manuscript about Chinese laborers in World War One and publishes it as her own under a slightly ambiguous pen name. The book is a satire of the publishing industry and social media and race and who gets to tell whose stories and it is also genuinely one of the most readable and uncomfortable novels of 2023. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction that year and became a number one Sunday Times bestseller.
✅ What I Liked
June Hayward is one of the most uncomfortable narrators i have spent time with in recent fiction and i mean that as a genuine compliment. She is self-justifying and envious and capable of the kind of motivated reasoning that allows a person to do something genuinely terrible and still feel like the victim of circumstances. Kuang makes her believable rather than cartoonish which is the harder thing to do and the more important one. If June were simply evil the book would be easy to dismiss. Because she is recognisable in her smallness and her need the book becomes genuinely disturbing in a way that stays with you. The satire of publishing is also razor sharp and specific and Kuang clearly knows exactly what she is writing about because she has lived it. The way diversity and representation get weaponized as marketing language while the actual human beings those words are supposed to describe get managed and tokenized and quietly sidelined is captured here with a precision that no outsider could have managed.
❌ What Could Be Better
The book gets slightly breathless in the final third. Kuang is piling revelation onto revelation and the pacing becomes almost thriller-like in a way that works for readability but occasionally at the cost of the more uncomfortable slower psychological portrait the first half was building. I wanted to spend more time inside June's rationalizations and less time inside the plot machinery near the end. Some readers will also find June so irredeemable so quickly that it is hard to stay invested in her perspective for 336 pages and i understand that response even though it did not happen to me. And the satire is so pointed and so specific to the American publishing industry that readers outside that world may miss some of the sharpness of what Kuang is doing even while they enjoy the surface story.
June Hayward is a writer. She is not a very successful one. She went to Yale and she writes literary fiction and she has published one novel that nobody really noticed and she has been watching her college friend Athena Liu, who is Chinese American and brilliant and warm and successful, become exactly the kind of writer June always wanted to be. The envy June feels toward Athena is specific and complicated because June genuinely likes Athena and the two things coexist in her the way envy and affection often do in real friendships between people at different levels of success.
Then Athena dies. It is a freak accident in June's apartment and June is the only witness and in the immediate aftermath of shock and grief June finds herself holding Athena's unpublished manuscript. It is about Chinese laborers in the First World War and it is extraordinary and June takes it home. She tells herself she will figure out what to do with it. She does figure out what to do with it. She changes the name on the cover and publishes it as her own.
What happens next is the shape of the book. June becomes Juniper Song. She is not quite claiming to be Asian but she is not correcting anyone who assumes she might be. The book gets praised and she gets celebrated and for a while everything works the way she told herself it might. Then the internet starts asking questions.
Kuang writes the social media sections of this novel with the same precision she brings to everything else and this is where i think the book is doing its most interesting work. The pile-ons and the counter pile-ons and the way people perform their moral positions online and the speed at which a conversation that started about a real wrong gets hijacked by everyone who wants to make it about something slightly different. It is uncomfortably accurate to how these things actually go and i kept thinking of specific controversies i had followed online while reading it which i suspect was entirely the point.
The publishing industry satire is the sharpest sustained satirical writing i have read in years. Kuang has clearly absorbed every think piece and every industry conversation and every piece of diversity-speak that has circulated in literary circles over the last decade and she knows exactly how to take it apart. The way editors and publicists talk about Athena's work once June is attached to it and the way the marketing around diversity in fiction works and does not work and who benefits from it and who does not. All of it is observed with the cold accuracy of someone who has been on the receiving end of exactly the system she is describing.
June as a narrator is the central achievement. She explains herself constantly and her explanations are not entirely wrong which is what makes them so uncomfortable to read. She did not kill Athena. She did not force anyone to like the book. The manuscript was just sitting there. She was the one who recognized its quality. She worked hard on it. Every step of the way she has a reason and the reasons are not insane and they are still the reasons of someone doing something genuinely wrong. Kuang holds that tension for the whole book without resolving it into something simpler.
The final third accelerates in a way that i found slightly at odds with the more careful psychological portrait of the first two thirds. Things start happening in a more plot-driven way and while this keeps the pages turning it moves June into a more reactive mode when the book is most interesting when she is in a rationalizing mode. This is a small complaint about a book that does most of what it is trying to do extremely well.
Four and a half stars. One of the most genuinely uncomfortable reading experiences i have had in recent memory and one of the sharpest things written about race and publishing and who gets to claim what in contemporary fiction. Read it and then think about what it made you feel and whether June's logic ever landed with you even for a moment. If it did not you are probably not being entirely honest with yourself.
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