Everybody is a sexy baby
In Taylor Swift’s song “Anti-Hero,” she sings “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” But you know what? I think here in America, we never ever tire of rooting for the assholes.
Why am I talking about anti-heroes? It struck me that I’ve recently devoured two novels of amoral disconnected young women. Initially I was going to write about how the morally bankrupt heroines in both novels said something interesting about feminism. And maybe they do, but why limit myself to just women? Everywhere you turn, you see our culture canonize people whose behavior is irretrievably self-serving. We celebrate the Kardashians for being unabashedly self-obsessed and superficial, we joke about how untethered from social responsibility all the tech billionaires are, and who is once again the leading candidate in the GOP? A man whose brand is malignant narcissism.
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
My first example of a degenerate heroine is The Guest by Emma Cline. It’s a story about a hooker with a heart of battery acid. If she’s not technically a hooker, she’s hooker-adjacent for sure. Alex (no relation) is a hustler who numbs out on the painkillers she sneaks from her financier boyfriend. He’s no prince himself. When she embarrasses him at a party, he tasks his personal assistant to dump Alex for him, then drop her at the train station to return to NYC.
But Alex can’t go back to NYC because a) she’s flat broke, and b) there’s a guy named Dom in Manhattan blowing up her phone, after her for what she’s stolen from him. So she decides to linger in the Hamptons, convinced that all her ex-boyfriend needs is a few days to cool down. She’ll coast until his big Labor Day party then show up at his door, to what she envisions will be his open and forgiving embrace.
This is the set up for what becomes equal parts a dark hustler’s travelogue and a satire of the ultra-rich world of the Hamptons.
As the book chronicles her five days of charming, conning, and lying her way into the homes and beds of various Hamptons denizens, I was thrilled at her shameless audacity. It’s a transfixing high-wire act. It’s also an unvarnished look at that privileged enclave beyond the 10-foot hedges from the perspective of the staff and hangers-on—the personal assistants, nannies, food service employees, neglected offspring, and prop girlfriends.
Her situation is almost animal in its desperation. But I was equally fascinated by the minor characters; the sacrifices of devoted staff who sign on to serve at the highest level, and the kids whose lives have been sacrificed through no choice of their own.
Cline writes with a cool Didion-esque detachment, but I actually enjoyed it immensely. It’s like eating caramel M&Ms, which I also enjoy immensely. Delicious in the moment but I don’t feel so great when I’m done.
First of all, the ending of this novel is quite terrible. I can’t decide if it was simple laziness or a literary symbol of how nothing will ever change, least of all our damaged drug-addled heroine. It doesn’t work. It’s as if the editor said “Pencils down!” so Emma Cline turned in her manuscript unfinished.
Second of all, the main character is a sad, cynical, damaged woman. She offers her body whenever she feels like it could advance her situation, she steals whenever the opportunity presents itself, and lies more than she tells the truth. There is no redemption or vengeance to her crimes, either. Like I said, thumbs up, but it leaves a nasty aftertaste. (Something caramel M&Ms never do.)
My second entry in the “amoral girl” book festival is Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Kuang is a hyper-intelligent hyper-prolific award-winning sci-fi fantasy writer and it seems the writer who dies in the first chapter is loosely autobiographical. Yellowface is about Athena Liu, a successful hyper-intelligent award-winning Asian writer and her Anglo college friend Juniper Song Hayward. The two have a complicate
d yet shallow friendship based more on obligation (Athena’s) and jealous fascination (June’s) than actual fondness. When a freak accident kills Athena while the two of them are alone together, June steals Liu’s unpublished manuscript and passes it off as her own.
It’s a crazy premise that Kuang employs to throw eggs at the publishing industry and cultural appropriation. Some swipes are sort of broad, like how June’s editor suggests dropping her last name as a “fresh start” since her first novel was a flop. That her new name definitely sounds Asian is purely coincidence. Other digs are more incisive, like how insular and clubby the industry is, and how so much of a writer’s success—the quest for awards, the professional jealousies, the marketing events—takes them far away from the very mindset that enables them to write.
Considering I knew the crime and the culprit from the first chapter, it’s amazing how engaged I was in the story. Kuang has written a truly entertaining thriller about a writer sweating out her own guilt and paranoia. As the story progresses, she’s also desperately trying to figure out who is haunting her with proof that she stole the book. Is it actually the ghost of Athena Liu?
This book is more fun than The Guest, and definitely has a better ending. Even if you’re not particularly engaged with the publishing industry I think it’s a crowd-pleasing send-up of all the stuff we love to send up—jealousy, ego, casual bigotry, the right’s embrace of anyone who is deemed un-PC, and the highly cringe extremism of the left’s social justice warriors.
Like in The Guest, our protagonist is an absolute reprobate. In Yellowface she’s cartoonishly enslaved by her weaker inclinations and she’s perpetually angry at someone or the world in general. Kuang nails so much of the cultural commentary, and the story itself is a thrill ride, but June Song is a paper doll of a villain.
I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser
Maybe she’s not a paper doll. Maybe she’s a modern American. Maybe it’s corny and passé to be decent, and anyone who doesn’t take advantage of every angle, no matter how morally questionable it might be, is a chump. I’m probably making too much of this. It’s just two light literary novels I read. It’s not like these books are a referendum on the population. But I do think it’s interesting that in the reviews I’ve read about both books, no one is bringing up how tediously degenerate the main characters are. Oddly, in both novels their crimes sort of go unpunished as well.
I wonder if some of this is a reaction to the extreme conservatism so prevalent in much of the land. “You take away our bodily rights? We’ll embrace sex workers as a legitimate career path.” Or maybe it’s a reaction to the cancel culture oppression of the “PC police” and the social justice warriors? “I’m taking a private jet across the country just to attend one meeting, then I’ll tweet some homophobic rants and claim the poor are poor because they’re lazy and don’t work as hard as me. Go ahead and cancel me, snowflakes.”
Or maybe presenting awful people as our story’s heroines is just the only way to get attention in this ADHD overheated1 world of ours. Maybe you need to really razzle dazzle us, and nothing says “ho hum, not so razzly dazzly” like a working moral compass.