WRITERS BEHAVING BADLY

How Nasty Can Book Publishing Get?

What the hit novel ‘Yellowface’ gets right — and wrong — about authors, editors, and publishers who play dirty

What’s the easiest way to succeed as an author?

A half dozen recent novels say: Steal.

Lift someone’s plot, ideas, or — why not? — an entire book.

It works — until you get caught, or the internet trolls come after you, or your life is threatened by a crazed psychopath who knows what you did and wants you to pay for it. Big time.

Novels about authors who try to soar on stolen wings have boomed in the past few years. Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot has a teacher who steals a student’s plot. Alexandra Andrews’ Who Is Maud Dixon? involves a conniving editorial assistant. Chris Power’s Lonely Man centers on a blocked writer who steals a friend’s story.

Those are only some of the best-known examples of the trend, and there are enough others that by now the writers-behaving-badly subgenre may look tired, if not clichéd, to editors.

If you want to make a splash, you need to give the subject a fresh coat of paint. Let’s say, a yellow one.

That kind of thinking may help to explain the blockbuster success of Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface, a potboiler about a sordid underside of book publishing: racial tokenism or worse. Since its publication in May, the novel has been a №1 New York Times bestseller and selection of Reese’s Book Club. It’s had its cover emblazoned on T-shirts and tote bags, and it includes a brief mention of Medium.

Yet Yellowface is a strange book: a largely humorless farce billed as a “satire” and a supposedly inside look at an industry that its author seems to understand too poorly to skewer convincingly.

It’s a deeply cynical story about a business that gives you much to be cynical about but still misses the mark, serving up caricatures or composites instead of believable industry figures. Its anti-heroine defies the advice would-be authors hear regularly from editors, literary agents, and writing teachers: You need a likeable main character.

June Hayward is an insecure 27-year-old white writer whose first novel tanked and who’s been scraping by in Washington, D.C., while the publishing world has made a superstar of Athena Liu, a Chinese-American friend with whom she went to Yale.

Athena’s freakish accidental death, at June’s side, changes everything.

June steals, edits, and sells and a draft of her friend’s next novel, The Last Front, which involves Chinese laborers exploited by the British in World War I. She rebrands herself as Juniper Song at the urging of her manipulative publishing firm, which hopes the new name will be mistaken for Chinese and make her book look more “authentic.”

The Last Front becomes a bestseller, and June pays a scalper’s price for her success even as it makes her rich. A high-profile critic calls the book a “white redemption” narrative. Trolls abuse her on Twitter.

Most ominously, someone called @AthenaLiusGhost seems to know what June has done. The storyline is similar enough to one in Korelitz’s more elegant The Plot that anyone who’s read it may see what’s coming and stop reading there.

For anyone who sticks with the book, Yellowface gets some things right about the industry.

Hollywood people do fawn over your book and then ghost you for weeks. Publishing does crawl: “Gatekeepers sit on manuscripts for months, and meetings happen behind closed doors while you’re dying from anticipation on the outside.” Likes and follows didn’t translate into sales on the old Twitter (a lot of them were coming from the author’s “team”).

Kuang also adroitly evokes social media scorn (“Will white people ever stop whiting?”) and the sanctimony and self-importance of people who begin their speechifying at readings and panels with comments like, “I just think it’s very important that …” or “Someone has to say it.”

But Yellowface has an oddly dated air for a book about fashionable topics like “the white gaze,” “cultural appropriation,” and “the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob.”

As her stolen novel takes off, June recalls the podcasts and blog interviews she did for her first book. She hoped her publisher would reward her efforts:

“But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters.”

There is — or used to be — a lot of truth to that view: For decades publishers have anointed authors with Himalayan advances they’ve tried to recoup with correspondingly extravagant marketing and publicity campaigns.

But cracks in that system began to emerge with the advent of self-publishing and Colleen Hoover, America’s bestselling novelist. No publisher “chose” Hoover. Her TikTok fans did.

Yellowface seems stuck in the pre-Hoover era. Nobody’s on Substack, TikTok gets brief mentions, Twitter isn’t yet X, and June quotes an interview she gave on Book Riot, which could vanish like Gawker if the digital winds shift.

A heroine who sounds like a female Tucker Carlson

June’s politics, too, eventually clash with those of most Americans under 40, nearly two-thirds of whom believe that “increasing racial/ethnic diversity is good for society,” Pew Research studies show.

As her plight deepens, June rants about the “rigged” game of publishing until she sounds like a 27-year-old female Tucker Carlson railing against the “woke.” She casts herself as a victim of people “who think that, just because they’re ‘oppressed’ and ‘marginalized,’ they can do or say whatever they want”:

“That the world should put them on a pedestal and shower them with opportunities. That reverse racism is okay. That they can bully, harass, and humiliate people like me, just because I’m white, just because that counts as punching up, because in this day and age, women like me are the last acceptable targets.”

Nothing in June’s life persuasively explains such bitterness. Yellowface feints at a context by mentioning a college sexual trauma and a few facts about her widowed mother: Mom wishes she’d become an accountant and favors her sister.

Yes, publishing can be “vicious” and its power players “vultures,” as June says. But if she’s a victim, she also a victimizer, and countless authors have faced the same nastiness without becoming hoaxers.

Kuang’s characters in any case have so little depth that you can’t feel their pain. They “cackle,” “chuckle,” and “giggle.” They say things like “I feel like I’m submerged underwater” that make you want to ask: “As opposed to submerged above water?”

In a scathing review in the Washington Post, the journalist Zoe Hu writes:

“The literary agents in ‘Yellowface’ are so lacking in specificity as to be interchangeable, but not in a redemptively parodic way.”

Another aspect of the novel is even more surprising, given that HarperCollins has been recognizing high-quality work since a forerunner of the firm brought out Moby-Dick.

Yellowface teems with clichés and banalities: about life, writing, and publishing. It reheats supposed industry truisms that are untrue, half true, or misleading, such as: “all the editors and publicists are overworked and underpaid” (true on the lower rungs but less true the higher you go). No observation about writing seems too obvious to omit, including, “Writing is such a solitary activity.” Why didn’t someone tell J.D. Salinger about that?

As artless as Yellowface is, no one should begrudge the windfall that has come to Kuang, who was born in China and grew up in Texas.

Second Wave feminists liked to say, paraphrasing Rep. Bella Abzug: Equality isn’t when a female Einstein is promoted to assistant professor. Equality is when a mediocre woman can rise as fast as a mediocre man.

For generations, book publishers have overpromoted mediocre white male authors while Asian-American women had to be Amy Tan or Maxine Hong Kingston to command attention.

Kuang has none of Tan’s or Kingston’s talent. That she succeeded without it is — by what passes for “logic” in book publishing — a sign of progress.

@JaniceHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist on the Gulf Coast. She has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews or other articles have appeared in major media that include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon.

You might like my review of another book about a literary theft:

And here’s my advice what to do instead of stealing a plot when your writing hits a snag: