#Review - Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang

Yellowface
Rebecca F Huang
Borough Press, 25 May 2023 
Available as: HB, 319pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008532772

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have an advance e-copy of Yellowface via Netgalley to consider for review.

Yellowface is an enthralling thriller that explores online culture, the publishing world and the modern landscape of cultural debates about racism, privilege and appropriation. 

June Hayward is a mediocre US white writer who has struggled to get any marketing heft behind her recent debut novel. Her friend Athena Liu, who is of East Asian heritage, is in contrast seen as something of a literary darling. We will discover that the two women have history - through the book there's a progressive unveiling of their lives, their histories, their rivalry and most of all, the hidden places of their "friendship". For Athena, it is thought too late as the event that sets everything moving is her sudden and tragic death. This is witnessed by June - who takes the opportunity to steal the first draft of Athena's next book, a harrowing story of Chinese labourers working on the Western Front in the First World War. 

June feels she's owed something (exactly why, is one of those discoveries) but she also thinks she can improve the draft and she gradually persuades herself as she does so that it's a joint project, that she's honouring Athena by bringing her last novel to the world as it really should be. First, though, a few things need to change. There's an, actually quite funny, sequence where we begin to see the seeds of June's later downfall as she makes those "improvements" - for example, replacing Chinese names heedless of the cultural context or introducing incongruous elements to the story (and that's even before the publishers get their hands on it).

"June's book" is at first a great success, selling by the cartload and earning her unimagined wealth, but it can only be a matter of time before questions are asked, especially since she's been ambiguously repackaged as "Juniper Song". When it becomes clear that she's white, critiques begin to appear - followed by rumours about who really wrote the novel. The resulting online controversy is of course painfully redolent of several recent literary scandals - you can supply the names and details if you've spent any time hanging around book Twitter - and the moves and countermoves, the attempts at justification and positioning, the consequences, will be very familiar too. 

As things got worse and worse, I did have some sympathy for June. What she's done is of course indefensible, but it is also clear that she is very vulnerable - rather alone in the world, and suffering from poor mental health that leaves her ill equipped to cope with her situation: rather she retreats to bed and scrolls in horror through the online rage, unable to turn away. Through all of this, she does though come across as very naive. It's not only that she should have realised that what she was doing was wrong, and how things were likely to go, but she has a complete inability to read the room, as it were. For example, pressed by her publisher for a further work to publish, to demonstrate that she can write for herself and so underpin her credibility as the author of The Last Front, she's out of ideas. Despite the obvious pitfalls, she treks off to Washington's Chinatown and plops herself down in a Chinese restaurant to interrogate the staff about their ideas (after all she's already accumulated so much background on China and Chinese people, she might as well put it to good use, right?)

It's as though June is incapable of learning from what has happened - and indeed she compounds the situation, leading to situations which were actually quite painful to read: relationships destroyed, reputations ruined. But through all this, it's not, in the end, those aspects which get through to June. No, what begins to nag at her is the sense that Athena isn't gone, that she might be trying to get in touch... and of course she's not happy. This is where June really begins to go off the rails, and where the thriller element of the book comes to the fore...

Yellowface is an engaging, entertaining book that dramatises the kind of notorious public debate that seems to be occurring more and more often. In portraying things from the inside, there's room for a degree of nuance - for example Kuang is able to show how despite her celebrity, things were far from rosy for Athena, her heritage pigeonholing her in the eyes of her publishers and dictating her material even when she might want to write about something else. (They're more able to accommodate June, as a white woman, writing about Chinese themes than they do Athena wanting to broaden her range). 

If you were thinking that, as there's almost a script for this sort of controversy the book might seem too predictable, then be reassured, Kuang keeps the surprises coming, both rooting what happens in June's, and Athena's, earlier relationship and also in June's current, rather scatty, network of family and friends. The fact that June is rather a heedless person, acting without thinking, produces some positively toe-curling situations (as when she takes it upon herself to mentor an upcoming American-Asian writer), the more so because at times she seems utterly unaware of herself and of how she might be seen by others. (At others, though, she certainly does know what she's about - I think there might be a touch of unreliable narrator in places with the text we read reflecting her self-justications and rationalisations).

A thought provoking and, to me, often eye-opening book with I'd strongly recommend. (Though I have spotted that this one seems to polarise opinion - for an excellent, but more negative, view, see Reader at Work blog here).

For more information about Yellowface, see the publisher's website here.