Book Review: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Book #84 of 2023:

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

A scathing dark satire of race, the internet, and the contemporary publishing landscape. Our protagonist is a great antihero in the tradition of Tom Ripley or Shakespeare’s Iago who secretly resents a more successful friend — only in this case, she never acts against her in life. But when the other writer dies suddenly in her apartment with no other witnesses, June seizes the unpublished manuscript of her next novel and begins working on it, ultimately passing the finished story off as entirely her own and watching it become a runaway bestseller. Complicating matters further, the book is about the Chinese laborers who were impressed into service in World War I, opening the white woman up to criticism that she didn’t have the right to authentically address that subject, even before rumors start circulating that the late Athena Liu may have been the true author after all. (Critics also pounce on the fact that June’s publishers have released the volume under her middle name Song rather than her last name Hayward, as though aiming for a more ambiguous presentation of her ethnicity.)

It’s a sharp character study and less of a suspense thriller than I expected, although the big secret definitely looms over events as a Chekhov’s gun just waiting to fire and take down the unscrupulous thief. But she also repeatedly makes things worse for herself via her subsequent actions, as though her tragic flaw is her unconscious inability to ever simply rest on her stolen laurels (in addition to her positively staggering amounts of unexamined racism and accordingly ironclad conviction that she couldn’t possibly be a bigot). And though I cited Othello above, the Shakespearean figures June truly resembles are MacBeth and his wife, as she becomes guiltily haunted — both metaphorically and at least psychologically, if not quite literally — by the ghost of the dead woman. She sees the face of her personal Banquo in crowds, and is tormented by anonymous abusers hiding behind her name and appearance online.

A lot of this text focuses on the drama of Twitter, where self-righteous call-out threads can swiftly tank a person’s reputation, and although I tend to believe such ‘cancel culture’ campaigns are generally well-intentioned and do more good than harm, author R. F. Kuang emphasizes the escalating secondary threats and unavoidable trauma of becoming the internet’s main character of the day. She also adds the important detail that no one in the digital panopticon is safe from being targeted themselves — Athena gets posthumously critiqued for her own ethical missteps at one point — and the even more damning observation that all the kerfuffle is largely ignored by the wider public, who if anything merely register that a canceled individual is newsworthy and proceed to buy more of her books.

This aspect feels very of-the-moment, and I honestly don’t know how well it will age! In a future where blue checks and Substacks and whatnot have joined the virtual graveyard, will this section of the plot still resonate with readers? I really couldn’t say, but I think it’s a meaningful reflection of our current era as it stands.

I’ll likewise maintain my agnosticism over whether we’re meant to see Athena as a self-insert for Kuang, whose personal biography she suspiciously mirrors. I know that’s been a sticking point for other reviewers, but I feel more invested in the emerging portrait of the antiheroine who survives her, and in the conflicting emotions of whether to root more for or against the plagiarist whilst being so firmly situated inside her perspective. It’s a masterful balancing act, and while I don’t love this novel overall as much as the author’s earlier work Babel: an Arcane History, it’s still a timely and chillingly immersive tale.

[Content warning for panic attacks and rape.]

★★★★☆

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