Book Review: Yellowface by RF Kuang

By Simon Demetriou

If someone ever says to you, ‘I swear, it was never as psychopathic as it sounds’, you can be immediately certain of two things: one, it absolutely was that psychopathic; two, you either just heard or are about to hear something interesting. In RF Kuang’s satirical horror story on isolation and jealousy in the publishing industry, her narrator’s denial of psychopathy comes early on in a tale that just gets crazier and more gripping as the novel progresses.

June Hayward is a young writer whose failed debut novel is, as far as she’s concerned, proof that she is victim of a publishing industry so obsessed with diversity that a white woman from Philadelphia is doomed to failure regardless of talent. Fuelling this self-pity is June’s friendship with Athena Liu, ‘a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color’ who, in June’s words, ‘has been chosen by the Powers That Be’. Athena is a literary star who, at the start of the novel, is celebrating her Netflix deal while June drinks ‘to dull the bitch in me that wishes she were dead’. When the celebrations actually do take a hilariously fatal turn, June finds herself with a dead friend and a dead friend’s manuscript.

No prizes for guessing what happens next. June never spots the irony that the novel she steals from Athena turns her into the publishing star she always dreamed of. But June’s not all wrong.

The key to Kuang’s success in Yellowface is that she brilliantly depicts a world in which everybody is insufferable, and yet nobody is fully to blame. Athena is disgustingly pretentious and sneeringly dismissive of other Asian American writers; agents and publishers care only about sales and marketing; one of June’s new author friends states that ‘I look for the gaps in history, the stuff no one else is talking about. That’s why I wrote an epic fantasy romance about a businessman and a Mongolian huntress’; and the Hollywood bros discussing optioning June’s stolen novel come out with, ‘What the fuck is Dunkirk? Who knows. We went to see Tom Hardy.’

In a world where these are the winners, it’s the world that’s to blame, not the individuals. And as June spirals into terror and disgrace at the hands of Twitter haters who pretend to care about authenticity and equality to further their own ambitions, we’re left feeling a little sorry for this woman and her compulsive awfulness. It takes conviction in one’s message and in one’s talent to put out a book that cuts as close to home as this (Kuang is, after all, an Asian American, ivy-league-and-Oxbridge educated publishing superstar barely midway through her twenties). That conviction is more than deserved.