Success finally smiles on June Hayward! After a first novel that went unnoticed, she signs THE book of the literary rentrée. The one whose manuscript the publishing houses fought over, the one the media are talking about even before its publication, the one that climbs to the top of the charts without getting dizzy.
But there’s one catch. Just one. She’s not the author.
So it opens, then rolls and tumbles YellowfaceRebecca F. Kuang’s fifth novel, about which Stephen King wrote: “Impossible to put down. Difficult to recover from.” Clear commentary. Clean. Precise. And true. The Chinese-American novelist therefore abandons here the fantasy who made him known for delivering a deliciously cruel satire of the publishing world, a biting metafiction which deals with plagiarism, cultural appropriation, and the cold war waged by overheated minds on social networks.
June, to get back to her, has indeed stolen her friend Athena Liu, a rising star of literature, who has just died before her astonished eyes, following an accident that could have been described as ridiculous if it had not had a fatal outcome. Oh, June tries to save her friend and calls for help. But they arrive too late. Too late for Athena. Too late to prevent June from slipping the manuscript of the Last front in his bag.
An unreliable narrator, both to the reader and to herself, June tries to convince us/herself that Athena’s text was, in fact, only a draft of a novel. Barely more than a simple idea thrown on paper. It was several hundred pages long, but that’s a detail. To make it a bestseller, June sweated blood and water. Research, cuts, structural reworks, additions. Then, weeks of revision and editing work. Because she finds a publisher. Easily. Thanks to her agent… rather bowled over by what she sent him and which is nothing like what she had produced before.
And for good reason. The Last Front tells a little-known part of history: that of the 140,000 Chinese recruited by the British army and sent to the front during the First World War. A subject that stuck to the corpus of the Chinese-American Athena Liu. Much less to that of June Hayward. Understand that many will quickly balk. And that June will have to struggle like a devil in yellow water. We know the blackface. Here is a case of yellowface.
But be careful before nailing June alone to the pillory. Rebecca F. Kuang, with a pen as light as it is vitriolic and which moves at a lively and unbound pace, makes use of every arrow. The literary world and commercial publishing, editors and agents, the cogs of promotion, authors and critics, the sensibilities that we ignore in private in order to better slit our wrists in public: everything and everyone gets it for their cold. Without exception. Yellowface is a novel that is both enjoyable and uncomfortable. A novel that is as funny as it is fierce. A novel that makes you laugh instantly and think for a long time.