A Review of Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful (Tordotcom, 2021)
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’ve sort of hit the wall with writing and work, so what better to do than read more books. Next up on my ever-growing list of books to catch up on was Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful, which I absolutely adored. Vo is already the author of two novellas that also came out of Tor that are a duology. I haven’t had the chance to read those yet, but I definitely intend to. Let’s let the official marketing description get this 1920s party started: “Immigrant. Socialite. Magician. Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.”
Vo took advantage of the fact that The Great Gatsby has moved back into the public domain, and she was able to integrate many direct quotations from the American literary masterpiece, but she entirely reworks the classic story from the perspective of one of the minor characters. I never found Jordan Baker that interesting, so Vo’s retelling from Jordan’s perspective was a real treat. The novel’s reconsideration of the storyline not only from her vantage point but also by reworking her identity and background gives this text a real fresh take on a story every English student only knows too well. Perhaps, my favorite aspect of this text is that it gives us pause to reconsider what we think we understand from the original text. That is, we assume we know the story but because interiority is really only offered via Nick Carraway, from what I recall, many other characters and context become obscured. Such is the case with Jordan Baker, who comes off as part of the spoiled set of East Egg blue bloods that are so easy to dismiss as too insular and self-centered. To be sure, there’s much about Jordan that is self-centered, but you absolutely get the sense that some of her approach to life is conditioned by her defenses, built up as a Vietnamese adoptee and as someone who never gets unconditional access to certain ways of life. In this way, Vo’s work is perhaps its most inventive, reminding us that minorities were of course trying to find their way in the 1920s and that they cannot be just shunted into the margins not only of stories but of history. It is in this sense that Vo’s work absolutely soars, both in its political heft and its aesthetic re-envisionment. I’ll be sure to teach this work in the future, one that stands very tall next to the other brilliant modernist re-envisioning known popularly as Monique Truong’s Book of Salt.
Buy the Book Here
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ljiang28
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lina Jiang
I’ve sort of hit the wall with writing and work, so what better to do than read more books. Next up on my ever-growing list of books to catch up on was Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful, which I absolutely adored. Vo is already the author of two novellas that also came out of Tor that are a duology. I haven’t had the chance to read those yet, but I definitely intend to. Let’s let the official marketing description get this 1920s party started: “Immigrant. Socialite. Magician. Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.”
Vo took advantage of the fact that The Great Gatsby has moved back into the public domain, and she was able to integrate many direct quotations from the American literary masterpiece, but she entirely reworks the classic story from the perspective of one of the minor characters. I never found Jordan Baker that interesting, so Vo’s retelling from Jordan’s perspective was a real treat. The novel’s reconsideration of the storyline not only from her vantage point but also by reworking her identity and background gives this text a real fresh take on a story every English student only knows too well. Perhaps, my favorite aspect of this text is that it gives us pause to reconsider what we think we understand from the original text. That is, we assume we know the story but because interiority is really only offered via Nick Carraway, from what I recall, many other characters and context become obscured. Such is the case with Jordan Baker, who comes off as part of the spoiled set of East Egg blue bloods that are so easy to dismiss as too insular and self-centered. To be sure, there’s much about Jordan that is self-centered, but you absolutely get the sense that some of her approach to life is conditioned by her defenses, built up as a Vietnamese adoptee and as someone who never gets unconditional access to certain ways of life. In this way, Vo’s work is perhaps its most inventive, reminding us that minorities were of course trying to find their way in the 1920s and that they cannot be just shunted into the margins not only of stories but of history. It is in this sense that Vo’s work absolutely soars, both in its political heft and its aesthetic re-envisionment. I’ll be sure to teach this work in the future, one that stands very tall next to the other brilliant modernist re-envisioning known popularly as Monique Truong’s Book of Salt.
Buy the Book Here
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