Yellowface is a book by Rebecca F Kuang, which is about a writer stealing another writer’s story and passing it off as their own.
As such, this is the third book - along with The Plot and Last Resort - I have read with this premise. It is probably the best one, covering as it does such full-fat topics as: intense professional jealousy of peers; culture war stuff; the batshittery of the publishing world; the batshittery of the internet.
I mean, if you were thinking about writing a novel and want to be thoroughly put off the idea then read this book. Everything about publishing is a nightmare and everyone in this novel is awful: the woman who has the idea for the book, the woman who steals the idea for the book, the agents, editors, publishers, marketing people, GoodReads trolls, Twitter trolls, culture war trolls. It is a very, very bleak view of a world that Kuang - who is already a successful sci-fi and fantasy writer - will know extremely well.
It reads like a monumental bitch-a-thon, a really intense bit of scream-therapy about every crappy cog in the overall crap-machine publishing industry that Kuang noticed during her career and can’t keep it to herself even one second longer.
But, you don’t have to be interested in publishing to enjoy this, as it is also, (like The Plot), a pacy thriller, with unseen forces machinating against our “hero” (?), a faintly Scooby-Do “ghost”, internet sleuthing, a cackling baddie, secret recordings, a Sherlock Holmes-style tussle with a nemesis, psychological decline and so on. Kuang isn’t too grand to use clichés like, “It’s utterly damning”, “My limbs feel like lead” and at times I thought “this is a bit naff for someone so classy,” but that is just me nit-picking and most likely a bit jealous.
Yellowface is totally gripping and so who cares if it occasionally veers off from literary? Truly literary books are often sludgy and unreadable anyway.
Save this for when you’ve got some time to read because once you’ve started it you won’t be able to stop.
How about you? Have you read any good books recently? Please leave a comment in the handy box below.
Strange how the same things crop up repeatedly in books that all come out at about the same time. Pilfering a recently expired author's script and passing it off as your own is a subplot in Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety too. I know you don't read Kate Atkinson any more, Esther, after what she said about redheads. If it helps, I can't think of a single nice thing she has to say about Chinese people in any of her novels and a handful of decidedly not-nice things but hey, I still read everything she puts out.
Anyway, Yellowface. I feel I don't know so very much about publishing still but it's probably a good bit more than your average reader. I can certainly vouch for how real some of the maddest bits are and still felt my jaw drop at other even madder bits. I started reading it brimming with gluckschmerz and all geared up not to like it but hats were eaten and teeth ground into stumps. It is bloody good and a proper page turner.
“Wfh” today.... new patio furniture arrived and have compulsively listened to 14 chapters of Yellowface whilst intermittently refreshing outlook and breaking in the new cushions. It’s great! Was supposed to be for summer holiday where I won’t be able to physically read a book (the rental has a v deep pool with no fencing and my smallest is only 3)