I’m going to admit something that might be taken the wrong way. I didn’t like Yellowface.

Now, I don’t like most books with a villain protagonist, but that’s just down to me wanting to punch them in the face and being unable to do so. That isn’t the case here. I don’t dislike the novel based on the grounds that it’s satire, either, even though I rarely enjoy the emotional experience of reading satire.

To introduce the plot: June Hayward and Athena Liu are old friends who graduated from Yale in the same year, ran in the same circles, and started in professional publishing at the same time. Athena rocketed to literary stardom; June’s debut book floundered. June has just finished reading Athena’s hot-off-the-press new manuscript, during a relaxed night at Athena’s apartment, when Athena dies in a freak accident. June tries to save her, reports the death – and takes Athena’s manuscript home with her. As she works through her own shock, she starts tinkering with Athena’s manuscript, eventually becoming so invested in the novel that she sends it to her own agent and passes it off as her own work.

The work is greeted with red-hot interest from successive parties: her agent, a new publishing house, and the public and literary critics alike – especially after June rebrands herself with the new penname of Juniper Song. But it’s easy to fall from lofty heights, especially in the age of social media, and June soon finds her new position threatened. The resultant fear, paranoia and rage into which June spirals form the gut-churning climax of the novel, which ends on an questioning note regarding the embedded racism in a profit-crazed publishing industry.

So far, so good. And make no mistake, this is a good novel. It’s a smart, snappy thriller, with the pacing, easy prose, and suspense that the genre requires. But I can’t help being left with a quandary in not understanding who June is. 

I can imagine a counterpoint here that I’m not supposed to understand June. It’d be something like: “She’s the worst!” That’s hard to argue. This is a woman who steals the manuscript of her deceased friend. Underneath her veneer of liberal credentials, she’s nauseatingly racist. She bullies, lies, steals – and goes crazy. Let’s not forget that part. So why should I understand her?

Well, because she’s the protagonist of a work of literature. That is to say: Yellowface is Kuang’s debut into literary fiction proper, and out of the specialized realms of grimdark military and historical fantasy, which she explored in The Poppy War and Babel. As such, this novel is not supposed to be straightforward, anything that can be reduced to dichotomies like black and white, good and evil. Yellowface was meant to inspire a conversation where, author and audience alike, are free to “imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you.” But it’s impossible to empathise with Kuang’s most recent protagonist. Not, sadly, because of her bigotry, her prejudice, or her villainous actions. The truth is that it’s impossible to empathise with June Hayward, because Kuang hasn’t empathised with her. Not enough, anyway, to turn June Hayward into a character, rather than a cipher. What do I mean by that? I mean that while June is presented a character, she doesn’t read like one. Rather, she reads like a portrait, a mimetic representation of white fragilities, fears, and resentments.

I read Yellowface in a little under three hours. Credit where it’s due: I couldn’t put it down. Sick to my stomach, I was still mesmerised by the plot unfolding with all the speed and terror of an avalanche, fascinated with the rotten beliefs floating to the surface in June’s mind. Above all, I was hooked by my own curiosity to see where Kuang was taking me.

I shut the book after the final page, and then my problems emerged. The resolution seemed…awkward. Rushed, you might say. Had Kuang suddenly realised, midway through her last chapter, that she only had about twelve pages left? Was she forced to wrap the novel up, there and then, with the leeway she had left? It certainly felt that way. But I’m new to thrillers, as a genre. I’m probably biased.

My second, much bigger, problem came afterwards as I was still mulling the book over. As I’m sure I was meant to do so; if as the author says, “Reading about racism should not be a feel-good experience,” it should hardly be a forgettable experience either. But after about twenty minutes, my mulling no longer revolved around the racism revealed in the novel.

What lingered in my mind most was this: I couldn’t get a handle on June. Who was this woman?

I had surface answers from Kuang. June was raised in Philadelphia. She’s distant from her mother and sister, who live boring and financially stable lives. Her father is deceased. She worked at a job coaching prospective college students through the admissions process, post-graduation. She’s struggling with her writing career after the flop of her debut novel; on the verge of being left behind in a dog-eat-dog industry. June is never understood by her family, and never deemed interesting enough by an audience.

Again, so far, so good. But all of this is surface information about a character. It tells us about their circumstances; it doesn’t tell us about their core. A character lives not just in personality – in quirks, mannerisms, and their situation – but in who they are. In what they see in the world and in themselves. It’s commonly cited as writing wisdom that a character should be “three-dimensional”, but let’s unpack that aphorism, here and now.

One part is background. Where does this character come from? What has shaped them? When and where do they live, and what has their life been like? What they want is another part. “Make your character want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.” I can’t vouch that it was Vonnegut who said that, but I can vouch for that being good advice, and the second dimension of who a character is. What they are willing to do to gain the glass of water – or other desire – is the third line that makes up their character in the story.

But there’s another aspect of making a character 3D, not so commonly cited, and it’s this: a good character should contain qualities good, bad, and ugly. That’s because human beings contain good, bad, and ugly. June has the bad, the ugly – and none of the good. And that problem is the Achilles’ heel of Yellowface. Not June’s status as a villain, or a “bad person”; as in, someone whose actions are morally repugnant. The problem of her character is that she written to be nothing but bad. It makes her profoundly unconvincing, and undermines the effectiveness of Yellowface as a novel, because our entire experience of the story is through June’s first-person narration.

These were the questions which floated in my mind, after I put down the book: Who was that woman? Who was she? Did she have any life outside of her obsession with how others viewed her? Did she have any convictions or moral stances? Did she have any ideas about the universe, any theories about life? Did she have anything whatsoever about her as a person that was intriguing, endearing, or compelling?

I couldn’t come up with a single thing. And that lack, that yawning void, is my problem with Yellowface. A good villain needs something to them, something that we find admirable or compelling, something we recognize as a positive part of human nature. Humbert Humbert has his elegant, persuasive voice; Lady Macbeth has ferocious intelligence to go with her murderous ambition. The trait isn’t limited to the villains of classical literature, either. How much fun would it be to watch The Lion King without Scar’s theatricality?

June has none of that. She has no strength of will, no pet theories about the universe. What she has instead is the entire full-colour spectrum of petty faults: resentfulness, a sense of entitlement to success. Bitterness, prejudice, defensiveness. Impulsivity, ego – and pride.

That last quality of hers was the kicker, for me. During a professional slump, June’s agent suggests to her that she take on some IP work, as an interm project. June’s response is to sneer internally at the suggestion that she take on “hack work”, even as a temporary measure. That same moment, I put down the book. Partly out of disgust – but also out of a spurt of sheer confusion, which interrupted my suspension of disbelief. June’s motivation had been established as desiring professional success, no matter what. To chase her goal, she was willing to stoop to thievery– but not to take on a humble but simple project? One which would preserve her professional relationships and competitiveness in the industry, a time that she needed that more than ever?

There’s an obvious counterargument to be made here. What do you expect? Do you think someone who thinks they should have had it all is going to do something they see as lowering? And my answer is: no, not really. I understand that June has a sense of what is her due, and a chip on her shoulder about being denied it. That’s not a problem. My problem here is that in giving June every vice she might conceivably have, and zero virtues – not even the pragmatism required to take a temporary dip in prestige – Kuang has created a cut-out, not a character.

It is to Kuang’s credit that she still makes Yellowface work. It’s an addictive read, careening through its plot at a breakneck speed, and almost intoxicating in its drama. As a thriller, it’s great. It’s also a compelling, confronting, unapologetically angry portrait of racism, from the inside; it certainly has the power to educate white readers about racism. As an indictment of racism in the publishing industry, it works. But Kuang has also positioned it as a work of literary fiction, a piece which talks about the complexities of writing “outside our lanes.” That is, outside our own lived experiences. And there, it falls short of its potential, because its protagonist is not alive. She may not be dead, like Athena, but June Hayward is not a living character either; and with both of them dead, Yellowface illustrates prejudices, not people.