Yellowface
by R. F. Kuang
Harper Collins, 2023

The Late Americans
by Brandon Taylor
Penguin, 2023

So many failed artists there must be in America buying and reading these two novels about failed artists, making R. F. Kuang and Brandon Taylor successful authors at a very early age. Why didn’t I think of this audience when I began writing commercially unsuccessful fiction at 50? I just didn’t know what a large market failed artists were. It’s a good thing they are for Kuang and Taylor because it’s difficult to imagine readers who are not artists, failed or otherwise, having much interest in either Yellowface or The Late Americans though both have been receiving very positive reviews. By whom, you might ask? Possibly by failed novelists and poets who became reviewers—or by successful artists supplementing their earnings because even those who succeed are not always well-paid.

The reasons for the artist characters’ failures are less interesting than possible reasons for the authors’ success. Kuang identifies as a Chinese-born American. Taylor is a Black American. Kuang takes on frontally—full face – the relation between minority appeal and commercial success. The protagonist and narrator of Yellowface is a young white woman named June Hayward whose first novel failed to sell. When her wildly successful Chinese friend dies, June steals her manuscript about Chinese workers in World War I and, with some revisions, publishes it under the name Juniper Song. Her publisher knows Juniper is white, but does everything it can to imply she’s not because of the perceived hot market for minority writers, particularly Asians.

Juniper turned down the possibility of a “sensitivity reader” who might have discovered evidence of her “appropriation” in the manuscript. This was a mistake because when Chinese critics and intellectuals read the novel, investigations begin and Juniper is outed. This is only a partial spoiler because she also uses a first paragraph of her dead friend’s to lead off a second novel, at which point Yellowface becomes either a narrative of paranoia or a clever story of detection.

One might first think Yellowface is a novel primarily criticizing white appropriation of Chinese culture, but the stealing of the manuscript takes care of that issue. In a Guardian interview, Kuang deplores the pigeon-holing of and the marketing of minority writers as minority writers—even though those publishers’ tactics may well have been partly responsible for the success of her first three fantasy novels and may also have given her the security to now criticize commercial publishers. For those failed writers who have not been packaged by a large commercial publisher, Kuang has lots of details. But Yellowface suggests its inside information about agents and editing and advertising won’t be much help to beginning novelists who cannot contribute minority identity to the package.

Would Yellowface have been as popular as it is if it had really been written—not just narrated by—the white Juniper? Doubtful. So there is an interesting kink in the novel’s publication: a critique of minority exploitation published by an author and company that highlight in various ways the author’s racial background.

Kuang makes clear in her breezy and often clichéd narration that Juniper is a mediocre writer—but her appropriated novel becomes successful partly because of its unique historical material. Taylor’s The Late Americans has no such advantage. The novel is set in the present in University of Iowa graduate programs for would-be artists. Years before Taylor’s first novel was published in 2020, he wrote about the importance of opening up publishing to minority voices. So into that hoary sub-genre the college novel, Taylor inducts many characters who are Black. Quite a few are also gay. But Taylor makes it difficult to care about their under-represented voices because The Late Americans resembles a collection of linked stories, a non-commercial form that diminishes readers’ engagement with necessarily somewhat underdeveloped characters. Every artist faces rejection. Taylor’s publishing strategy seems to be abjection, narrowing his audience, flattening his characters, employing an uncongenial form. And yet here he is a success.

Kuang had the appeal of Juniper’s success before it collapsed. Can the audience of failed artists really want to read about Taylor’s bunch of sad-sack artists who don’t come close to launching a career, who have come along, he suggests, too late in American culture to have any reasonable chance of success, who are victims of capitalism in all its manifestations?

Maybe I was initially mistaken about the presumed audiences of Kuang and Taylor. Perhaps these books have been made popular by a large white audience that takes some pleasure in reading about artists who fail, particularly those artists who seem to be relying on racial identity.

Or I could be mistaken yet again. Perhaps the books are being positively reviewed because of their intrinsic artfulness. This I very much doubt because Yellowface sounds as if it were typed over a summer, and The Late Americans, while better crafted sentence to sentence, has so many thinly developed characters that the reader needs, as at ballparks before electronic scoreboards, a program to keep the players straight.

Kuang’s characters are social/cultural players, gameing the media system of public opinion. Taylor’s players are more like athletes. As some of his blog posts at Sweater Weather state, Taylor is interested in bodies, in embodiment, more than in the psychology that might move bodies around. The poets with whom the book opens are abstract, intellectual, theory-spouters. Taylor has more empathy for dancers and for musicians who use their bodies for their art. He writes with sustained precision about anyone, artist or not, who does physical labor--working in a slaughterhouse, cooking, delivering food. He also writes frequently and very frankly about men who have gay sex at the drop of a hat or pants—often in unusual settings such as a vacant lot, a pickup truck, a bathroom. These forceful and sometimes forced sexual acts are bodies being bodies, but they don’t seem to offer much pleasure to the participants or improve the bodies’ chances for artistic success or provide much pleasure to readers. Perhaps Taylor has his students switch positions and partners so often in the university hothouse because they recognize that careers after their training are unlikely.

Given what Taylor writes about Iowa, where he was a student in the prestigious Writer’s Workshop, he seems like Melville’s Ishmael who survived to tell the tale of a catastrophe. Taylor’s title may suggest not just belated but dead. Taylor, though, has a lively career going: the novel Real Life, the stories Filthy Animals, and now The Late Americans, all published in the last three years. His characters are often graduate students, a wider subset of the failed than artists. Perhaps former graduate students, not just frustrated artists, are the niche audience making Taylor successful. “Yes, yes,” the postgraduates—Black or white, gay or cishet—can say while reading, “we never stood a chance. That’s why we’re in Law School.”

There’s so much speculation here about the reception of these two novels because neither strikes me as being inventive or artful or profound. Kuang can be comical. Taylor is sometimes lyrical. Maybe—and this is the saddest speculation of them all--the novels’ limitations are the ultimate reason for their popularity: mediocre fiction for a media-debased audience, whatever their race or sexual orientation. Maybe the “late Americans” are those readers, now an endangered minority of their own, who demand at least some attempt at literary mastery. Not just inside knowledge of exploitive institutions such as publishing and the university, but interest in and knowledge of complex and subtle humans. Kuang has just her tunnel-vision Juniper. Taylor has a crew of active bodies.

Juniper has an almost sexual obsession with fame. Here is Taylor describing one of his characters:

He wanted—though perhaps want was not the right word for it because want implied something conscious, something of awareness which was not present, and so it was maybe better to say that Fyodor felt, somewhere, deep and central to his body, a compulsion—to touch Timo.

Great fiction has been and can be written about compulsion—but not by collecting, as Taylor does, a bunch of characters who have the same compulsion. While establishing the presence of Blacks and gays and gay Blacks as a visible minority, Taylor sacrifices depth for breadth, eschews psychology for biology, and, in a way, plays into the racial and sexual stereotypes you might think that he would hate.

So, like Yellowface, The Late Americans has a kink. If James Patterson is right about publishers’ rejections of his new novel about sympathetic Black characters—rejections because he is white—then no white writer could get a novel such as The Late Americans published, not in the age of heightened sensitivity and suspected appropriation. But this Black writer can be successful despite often dehumanizing his characters of color—unless, of course, he’s actually liberating them from lately dead humanist assumptions (in both literature and life) about what is distinctively human.

And those many other reviewers against which this piece is written? I’m still trying to figure them out, why those benighted or gullible souls praised novels as undistinguished as Yellowface and The Late Americans.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels and Harpooning Donald Trump (essays).