R.F. Kuang on Yellowface, Moving On, and Playing with Voice

People keep asking me what it’s been like switching from writing fantasy to writing literary fiction, as if there is such a big difference between the two. Part of me rankles at this question because I have always rankled at the suggestion that fantasy is somehow not literary, that the presence of magic and dragons somehow undermines any artistic value a work might have. (I will never be able to make sense of that kind of genre snobbery when writers like Kazuo Ishiguro and Susanna Clarke exist.) The other part of me is simply confused by this question, as it’s often implied that I’ve switched to literary fiction because I’ve outgrown fantasy, that I had my fun and now I’m ready to move on to the mainstream genres. 

The answer is anything but. I wrote Yellowface because I love playing around with literary forms – that’s it. After five years of working on the Poppy Wars trilogy – five years living with the same characters, hearing their voices echoing in my head – I realized that the only way I could sustain a writing career was if I let myself do something wildly different with each project. I left the fast-paced, brutal voice of modern epic fantasy for the over-stuffed, run-on sentences of Dickens and Thackeray, and then I left the Victorians for the snarky, vicious voice of the contemporary psychological thriller. John Banville thought to himself “John Banville, you slut,” when he abruptly switched styles and tried out writing a mystery novel, and I feel the same. 

I love experimenting; I love trying out new voices. I love reading broadly across genres and absorbing what I can learn from different authors’ techniques, like a swordsman roaming the land, finding new styles to incorporate into his form. I find that the process of writing a novel changes you. You have to become someone worthy of the project. Some of my favorite authors wrote the same kind of novel over and over again throughout their lifetimes. I love their oeuvre, but I can’t do that; it would feel like creative death. 

With Yellowface, I fell in love with the absurd and the deranged. Moving on from the precisely modulated sentences in Babel, I learned to depict a narrator who attacks the world with paranoid myths and ridiculous insults. Think of your nastiest friend at the bar, three shots in, complaining about someone she doesn’t like. Why is it that those folks always come up with the cleverest insults? Babel is a slow burn; Yellowface is a trainwreck. Babel is a carefully tuned clock ticking steadily to doomsday; Yellowface is vanilla cupcakes smashed against the carpet. 

All that being said, I find that at the heart of things I’m still grappling with the same questions. I think a lot about power; who has it, how it transfers, how it’s disguised, what it takes to make someone give it up. In these past few years I’ve been interested in problems of complicity, selfishness, and passive forms of power. I’m curious about the power held by those who have immense advantages, but pretend not to see it. I’m interested particularly in what the political philosopher Olufemi Taiwo calls “elite capture” – that is, elite hijacking of resources meant for redistributive ends by those already in power. In Babel, Robin finds himself in a cushy position at Oxford and thinks that because he’s personally made it, he can turn a blind eye to the brutal coercions of colonialism across the world. In Yellowface, our wily and deranged protagonist adopts the language of social justice – representation, diversity, marginalization – then spins it into a narrative that supports her own grift. One book is a ponderous Dickensian bildungsroman; the other a zippy absurdist thriller imitating the language of the Internet. They’re both about elite capture. 

I write compulsively; I can’t help it. Maybe I’ll write a rom-com next. Maybe a murder mystery. Maybe a grand sweeping historical epic! I’m dipping my toes back into fantasy at least once more – Katabasis, set alternately in Cambridge and Hell, is the interpersonally focused counterpart to the structural, historicist project of Babel. But after that – who knows? The world is so big, and there are so many rabbit-holes to jump down. Thanks for jumping with me.