Two novels about publishing, Percival Everett’s Erasure and R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, and what happens when the industry cannot tell a joke from a product
The Author Wrote a Terrible Book on Purpose and They Gave It a Prize
I review books for money, in a small way. This means that every few months I am sent a novel about a novelist, and I groan, because writers writing about writing is the surest sign that somebody has run out of things to say. This week I taught two that are the exception. Both are about publishing. Both are comedies. And both made a room of twenty-year-olds, most of whom hope to work in the trade, go rather pale. I enjoyed that more than I should.
The First: A Joke That Got Away
The older is Erasure, by the American novelist Percival Everett. It came out in 2001 to respectful notices and modest sales. Twenty-odd years later it was turned into a film that won an Academy Award for its screenplay, and its author, after three decades of being called a writer’s writer, became one of the most garlanded novelists alive, with the big American prizes going to his retelling of a classic river adventure from the point of view of the enslaved man on the raft.
The hero of Erasure is a novelist with a jazz musician’s name. He is Black, middle-class, the son and brother of doctors. He writes difficult, brainy books: reworkings of Greek tragedy, experiments in theory. They do not sell. His agent keeps passing on the same message from publishers. The work is admirable, but it is not Black enough.
Meanwhile a first novel by another writer is the sensation of the season. It is set in a ghetto, written in a thick, misspelt dialect, full of violence, absent fathers and teenage mothers. Its author, he learns, once spent a couple of days visiting relatives in Harlem. Reviewers call it raw and authentic. It is on every table in every shop.
In a fury, over a few days, he writes his own. He gives it every cliche he can think of. He makes the prose as crude and the plot as lurid as he is able. He invents an author for it, with a prison record. He means it as an insult: a thing so obviously fraudulent that the people he sends it to will be shamed.
They are not shamed. They offer a fortune. A film producer bids. He tries to sabotage it by insisting the title be changed to a single obscenity; they agree with enthusiasm. It is published, hailed as a searing work of truth, and becomes a bestseller. And then he is asked to sit on the jury of the country’s leading book award, and finds his own hoax on the shortlist, and his fellow judges, all white, overruling him to give it the prize.
Why I Teach It
Everett prints the fake novel in full, in the middle of the real one. Sixty or seventy pages. That is the audacious stroke. The reader has to wade through it, and has to notice, with some discomfort, that it is quite readable. It moves. You want to know what happens. The thing was written to be bad and is, in the terms the market understands, good.
That is the trap. The hero thinks he is exposing the industry. He is feeding it. His contempt is exactly what it wanted from him, as long as it came in the right packaging. And as the money arrives and his family life falls apart, he begins to lose track of where he ends and the convict begins.
The lesson I draw for my students is about what happens to a satire when it leaves the house. He wrote a send-up. It was received as the real thing, because the audience had no interest in telling the difference. I work for a comic newspaper, The London Prat, and we keep a guide for readers on precisely this, how to tell satire from real news. The novel is four hundred pages on what happens when nobody consults one. An ironic text that meets a reader with a motive for taking it straight will be taken straight.
The Second: A Theft
The other book is recent: Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang, published in 2023, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The author is a Chinese American writer, born in Guangzhou and raised in Texas, a scholar of Chinese literature by training, who made her name with historical fantasy and wrote this, she has said, in a few months of fury during the pandemic.
The narrator is a young white novelist whose career has stalled. Her friend from university, a Chinese American writer, is everything she is not: beautiful, acclaimed, rich, signed to a television deal. One evening, celebrating that deal in the friend’s flat, the friend chokes to death on a pancake. The narrator calls the ambulance. Then she takes from the desk the only copy of an unpublished manuscript, a novel about the Chinese labourers recruited to serve behind the Western Front in the First World War.
She finishes it. She tells herself she is honouring her friend. She submits it as her own. Her publisher, delighted, suggests she use her middle name as a surname, which happens to sound vaguely East Asian, and chooses an author photograph in which she looks a little ambiguous. It is a huge hit. And then people online begin to ask questions.
The Narrator
What makes it more than a thriller is the voice. The whole book is told by the thief, and she is appalling and completely convincing. She is never short of a justification. She did the hard work of editing. Her friend was not a nice person. Nobody owns history. Why should she be barred from a subject because of who she is? She is the real victim, of envy, of a mob.
The clever thing is that some of what she says is true. The dead friend really was a magpie who took other people’s stories. The online pile-ons really are cruel and stupid. The industry really did treat its one Asian star as a slot to be filled. Kuang gives nobody a clean pair of hands, including the kind of reader who enjoys watching a white woman get her comeuppance. One of my students said it was the first novel that had made her feel accused by both sides at once.
It is also savage about the business. A student who interned at a publishing house last summer said quietly that she had sat in those meetings.
Side by Side
I teach them together because they are the same story from opposite ends, twenty-two years apart. In one, a Black writer is told he is not being himself correctly and manufactures the self the market wants. In the other, a white writer manufactures a self she is not entitled to because the market rewards it. In both, the villain is not really a person. It is an appetite: a wish, on the part of publishers and of readers like me, for other people’s pain, delivered with a guarantee that it is genuine.
And both ask a question I cannot answer for my students. Who may write what? Everett’s reply seems to be: anyone, anything, and the demand for authenticity is a cage. Kuang’s is more divided: the theft is plainly wrong, and the policing is ugly too. I put the two positions on the board and left them there.
My Own Trade
I asked my editor at the Prat what she made of a hoax that is taken for the real thing. She said it is the oldest hazard we have, and pointed me to the house essay, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not. Its rule is that the reader must be let in on it; the label is part of the work. The hero of Erasure sends his joke out under a false name, with no label, to people who profit from misreading it. By our rules he has not written a satire. He has committed a fraud with satirical intent, and the book is about how little the intent matters.
My piece this week: a publisher, it reports, has paid a record sum for a manuscript that its author describes as deliberately the worst thing she could write. The publisher said the work was unflinching. The author said it was a joke. The publisher said that was exactly the kind of bold authorial voice it was looking for, and asked whether she had any trauma. A prize jury is understood to be moved.
It goes in Bohiney and on the English satirical news page, clearly labelled. Both novels are easy to find, and the prize history is on the Booker Prizes site for one of the authors. I shall be reviewing a novel about a novelist next week. I have not opened it. More of my work is over here.