Yellowface - February 2024 Book Club Reading

[Falselogic]

Yellowface is a 2023 novel written by R. F. Kuang. The book was described as a satire of racial diversity in the publishing industry as well as a metafiction about social media. Yellowface is Kuang's first venture into literary fiction.

Rebecca F. Kuang is an American fantasy novelist. Her first novel, The Poppy War, was released in 2018, followed by the sequels The Dragon Republic in 2019 and The Burning God in 2020. Kuang released a stand-alone novel, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, in 2022. Yellowface is her latest work. Kuang holds graduate degrees in Sinology from Magdalene College, Cambridge and from University College, Oxford, and is currently studying at Yale University.

 

[Falselogic]

The wait list for this one is quite long! I hope I can get it before the month ends.

 

[Olli]

I'm planning on getting to this soon. It's one from my list, and it was recommended to me by my spouse. In somewhat related news, if you're not following the Hugos drama, R. F. Kuang's latest novel Babel was disqualified from the competition based on unspecified reasons: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/...uang-and-xiran-jay-zhao-from-hugo-awards-2023

 

[lincolnic]

Oh hey, I've been out of book club action for a few months but I'm ready to dive back in with this one!

...and there are 256 holds on 201 copies at the library. Now I'm the 257th! I, uh, may not get to read it before the end of the month.

 

[Violentvixen]

I put a hold on this as soon as you published the list for the year and just got it so should start soon.

 

[John]

I'm going to have to buy this one, our library system has 5 copies, with 787 people in line.

 

[Kirin]

In somewhat related news, if you're not following the Hugos drama, R. F. Kuang's latest novel Babel was disqualified from the competition based on unspecified reasons: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/...uang-and-xiran-jay-zhao-from-hugo-awards-2023

Well that sure is, as the kids say, extremely sus.

 

[John]

This book is great at delayed schadenfreude. I’m 1/4 through, and can’t wait for the protagonist to get her comeuppance. Fun envisioning an alternate reality where physical book publishing was still a popular part of the cultural zeitgeist.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I'm not currently reading this book, but somebody recently gave me their copy of Babel and I'm a little ways into that. Which is a funny coincidence, but doesn't really add a lot to this conversation!

Ok I'll just see myself out

 

[Falselogic]

For a hot second I had the chance to skip the line on libby to check this book out but I was not fast enough...

 

[Violentvixen]

Probably a third of the way through and wow yeah the small, bad, yet so justifiable-to-her decisions of the protagonist that pile up are intense. The tone of the book is more casual and matter-of-fact than I expected but there's still such a strong undertone of guilt at the same time. The protagonist just thinks she saw Athena's ghost so I'm curious if that's going to turn out to be something or just a hallucination.

 

[Olli]

I'm about two-thirds of the way through. The book spends a significant portion describing being mobbed on Twitter and consequently in person in a way that seems very realistic and made me feel bad for the protagonist despite it being earned to a degree. And now that I wrote that last spoilered part, it's really interesting to think about how much of the hate is justified? At least at this point, little of it is backed by facts, aside maybe the accusations of cultural appropriation, although even that is debatable. Is June being racist? Absolutely, in some small but significant ways, but on a scale from 0 to 10?

 

[Violentvixen]

Finished it, hell of a ride. I thought it got a little too deep into describing Twitter drama minutae by the end and I ended up skimming a number of pages until things started actually happening again. But lots of really interesting things to discuss and unpack here.

The protagonist just thinks she saw Athena's ghost so I'm curious if that's going to turn out to be something or just a hallucination.

I guess this is just related to the accusation of another character that the protagonist thinks all Asian women look the same? That didn't quite work for me because she does notice the photoshopped differences in photos and a few other things that don't seem consistent with this accusation? Or maybe it's the combination of that and the guilt, but this seemed odd.

 

[Falselogic]

I just got my hands on a mobi version of the book, I can share if others are interested an an ebook version of the book...

 

[Olli]

Oh, I finished this too a few days ago! What a great book. Compared to my previous comments, Juniper's undeniable ||racism does get underlined more and more towards the end, especially in the climactic scene, you know the one||. I liked that ||Athena's character grew in retrospect, despite her passing away in the beginning. She wasn't the untouchable saint the beginning of the book made her out to be, at least given Juniper's potentially unreliable point of view - she shamelessly lifted Juniper's assault story, talked shit about Juniper behind her back, and so on. I wonder what Athena and June's relationship was about - we don't get to see Athena's real motivations, just some contradictory glances||.

Would June have fared better if she hadn't chosen to ||publish her second book with the name Song||? Possibly, even if ||this wouldn't have prevented Athena's ex from starting the harassment campaign; it might have been less effective without the accusations of yellowface||. She definitely could have ||credited Athena for the line in her second book, and even turned that into a positive sentiment||.

 

[Falselogic]

I finally got my copy of this on Thursday and I almost read the entire thing in a single sitting. Sort of a lot to shotgun. Mixed feelings. I'm trying to figure out if June is supposed to be an anti-hero or not? I'm trying to figure out if the writing in this book is also supposed to be a satire or not? Are the characters supposed to be believable? I think June fails as an anti-hero mostly because, like the other characters in this book, she mostly seems to be as cliche as her writing. (If you interpreted this book to be her pseudo-bio, as I did.) No one seems real. No one has lives. There is vague talk of money but nothing ever concrete. Vague talk of lawsuits and court but nothing every comes of it.

If this is satire piled on satire than bravo. A real world manifestation of Everett's My Pafology from Erasure. But, then if that was the case I can understand why no one would be highlighting that fact...

 

[Olli]

I don't think June was supposed to be an antihero. If you need to put her in a box, I think she's more like a straight-up villain, although she sees herself as a victim (to the cruel whims of the publishing industry, to the internet mob, etc.). Since it's her narrative, it's questionable if her merits, such as her substantial edits to Athena's original manuscript or her third novel, are even real - she's proven herself to be very capable of literary deceit, after all. How much can you trust an admitted liar?