Rebecca F Kuang has followed her bestselling “dark academia” novel Babel with a zeitgeisty thriller set in the world of publishing that tells the tale of two young novelists in Washington DC. There’s Athena Liu, a critical and commercial darling who has just signed a deal with Netflix, and green-eyed frenemy Juniper Hayward, whose debut has already been forgotten, the paperback publication axed owing to poor sales. The novel starts with the pair toasting Athena’s success in her ritzy apartment after a night on the town; Juniper, our narrator, is choking down her resentment when, suddenly, Athena is literally – and fatally – choking on a homemade pancake…
It’s a freak accident whose sheer unbelievability sounds the keynote for a novel circling the slipperiness of truth, but most of all it gets the motor running on the novel’s plot, a brazen literary heist. Athena had just shown Juniper her secret new manuscript – an epic novel about the Chinese workers recruited by the British army in the first world war, drafted on a typewriter (“no Word backups, no Google Docs, no Scrivener”, which is to say, no plot holes here, OK?). In the subsequent blur of events, from 911 call to tear-stained Uber ride home, Juniper spirits away the stack of pages then just can’t help publishing it under her own name, rebranded as June Song (Song being her middle name, given by her hippy mother).
At first, the calculatedly fuzzy sobriquet wrongfoots anyone ready to accuse a non-Asian writer of cultural appropriation. And all Juniper’s dreams come true: the squillion-dollar advance, the critical kudos, a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Sure, there’s the small matter of Athena’s mother pledging her daughter’s research notebooks to a university archive (something she’s talked out of a little too conveniently), not to mention some grumbling from an Asian-American editorial assistant (less easily dismissed). But Juniper still basks in the glow of success – at least until Twitter raises its collective eyebrow and she’s mired in an ever-widening plagiarism scandal.
Sustaining the fraud in the eye of the storm requires ever more manic deception – and self-deception. After all, didn’t Juniper simply midwife a far-from-ready draft that might otherwise never have seen daylight? And in the first place, hadn’t Athena once strip-mined sensitive details of Juniper’s personal life for an early short story? And it’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days…
As the excuses pile up, Kuang convincingly keeps the ground shifting as to whether Juniper’s confession is just another con trick, as well as concealing the scale of her misdemeanours. As a tale of rivalrous friendship that morphs into lurid revenge melodrama and even a sort-of ghost story, Yellowface keeps us agog, narrowing its eyes all the while at an industry’s attitudes towards racial diversity. Still, it’s a thriller about the book trade – the appeal is niche – and you can sense Kuang’s uncertainty about what does and doesn’t need explaining. The reader who cares to know that the central characters became fast friends over a shared love of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (“‘It is the perfect campus tale,’ Athena said, articulating clearly every feeling I’d ever had about the novel”) isn’t, I suspect, a reader who needs to be told that paperbacks are cheaper than hardbacks, as Juniper at one point handily lets us know.
That said, I probably wolfed this down more avidly than anything I’ve read this year. It’s often wickedly funny: Juniper stakes her entire sense of self on the fallacy that she wrote Athena’s novel, yet also privately exults when critics find fault with it (she always knew Athena was a hack). But there’s deeper comedy, too. Juniper’s ill-gotten gains mean she can give up – wait for it – ghost-writing college application essays; and in one scene, she twigs that her agent is bullshitting her over the phone about Chinese politics because she’s reading the same Wikipedia entry as him at exactly the same time. Everyone’s bluffing, Kuang seems to say, and in its deepest implications Yellowface ultimately posits any creative act as a pilfering of one sort or another. Or have I just been Juniper-pilled and fallen for her sob story? It’s the knife edge on which this clever and entertaining send-up leaves you poised.
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is published by the Borough Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
