R.F. Kuang’s books are plagued by the same flaws.

Depending on where you hang out on the internet, the novelist R.F. Kuang is either an inescapable juggernaut (BookTok, YouTube, Reddit) or a relative unknown—her most celebrated book, 2022’s Babel, rated nothing more than the top slot in a roundup by the New York Times Book Review’s science fiction and fantasy columnist. Since its publication, however, Babel has become a sensation, hitting the No. 1 spot on the NYT bestseller list and winning the Nebula Award for best novel. Kuang followed it up with a cannily timed realist novel, Yellowface, a satire of racial attitudes in book publishing, an industry that loves nothing so much as a good bout of self-castigation. Now, with the publication of her sixth novel, Katabasis, Kuang has arrived in every sense, with a profile in the New Yorker—published under the print headline “The Achiever”—written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning staffer Hua Hsu.

These are not the limits of Kuang’s precocious accomplishments. Her debut, 2018’s The Poppy War—written when the author was in her late teens, and the first book in a trilogy—was nominated for several awards and included on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best fantasy novels. A debate champion in high school and a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Kuang won a Marshall scholarship to Cambridge University and earned a postgraduate degree in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford. She’s currently working on a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale. At 29, Kuang has already finished a draft of her seventh novel.

By R.F. Kuang. HarperCollins.

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Nevertheless, few contemporary novelists have proved so consistently preoccupied with the pitfalls of achievement, with meritocracies, what they demand, and whether they are worth it. The Poppy War is an epic fantasy that reimagines Mao Zedong as a teenage girl with magical powers fighting a series of wars for independence in a country loosely based on 20th-century China, but its opening scene is an exam. The students, whose fates will be determined by the results, are ordered to strip and be searched for cheating materials before they sit down to a 12-hour test during which bathroom breaks must be taken with a bucket at the back of the room. The military school the examinees hope to get into is even more grueling than this cost of admission.

Katabasis, Kuang’s latest, is an unusual fusion of academic satire and allegory, but it’s also obsessed with the toll of superhuman diligence and the overvaluing of rank and laurels. The novel’s main character, Alice Law, studies “magick” at an alternative version of Cambridge. Like many graduate students, she takes a perverse pride in her ability to suffer for her work, perpetually running short on sleep, food, and anything else involving an actual life in her single-minded focus on her career. “How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas,” Kuang writes of her heroine. Such austerity backfires, however, when Alice’s illustrious graduate adviser, Jacob Grimes, asks her to do some basic magickal grunt work for an upcoming spell and the exhausted Alice flubs it, causing his death. She resolves to travel to Hell to retrieve him because she cannot imagine going on without his endorsement, “the golden recommendation letter that opened every door.” Yes, the price of admission to the underworld is half of her lifespan, but as far as Alice is concerned, it’s worth it: “She would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything.”

It’s a funny premise, as is the novel’s central conceit: that Hell is a campus in which the shades of once living humans must advance through a series of tiers until they are deemed ready for reincarnation. Like all journey-to-Hell narratives—the novel’s title comes from the Ancient Greek name for such stories—Katabasis presents each layer of the underworld as a metaphor for the particular sin that relegates a shade to that level. Pride, for example, manifests as a library full of squabbling scholars, each charged with crafting an oral defense of their theory of “the meaning of the good.” The shades confined there include those guilty of claiming to be a Communist without having read Das Kapital, editors who rejected submissions that didn’t cite their own work, and those prone to reminding people that “Dartmouth is in the Ivy League.” The effect is less Dante than Lewis Carroll (Alice’s name is no coincidence) or The Phantom Tollbooth, partly because the stakes are low: The Christian concept of eternal damnation doesn’t figure in Kuang’s syncretic cosmology, which features underworld entities from Greek and Chinese mythology. The shades of her Hell are prisoners of their own folly, which makes them not so different from the living.

Alice’s companion on her travels is Peter Murdoch, her onetime friend and, more recently, her rival for professor Grimes’ favor. It is obvious from the start that this floppy-haired English boy is intended to be Alice’s love interest, but initially she resents him and tries to prevent him from joining her on her quest. She believes he is preternaturally gifted and has lived a charmed life: “When Peter erred it was cute. She had herself once spent all of dinner in the bathroom hyperventilating through her fingers because she’d knocked a bread basket onto the floor.” Anyone remotely familiar with romance tropes can see where this is going.

As amusing as Katabasis can be, this apparent bid to earn the novel an #enemiestolovers hashtag on TikTok points to a nagging problem with Kuang’s fiction, which is that it seldom feels as if it were written for grown-ups. In Babel, a foursome of Oxford undergraduates enjoy a blissful, yearlong idyll noshing scones among the dreaming spires before they comprehend the colonial mission of the university’s magical college and stage a rebellion. Although the novel has been praised for its political insight, reading it is like being lectured to for hours about things you already know by an indignant 19-year-old who has just taken their first real history class. If you are also 19 and completely unaware of the depredations of the British Empire, perhaps that won’t seem so tiresome. But if not, not.

It doesn’t help that although Babel is set in the 1830s, the novel’s characters all speak like the characters in contemporary YA fiction, a genre that Kuang’s work operates both within and above. Its chapters come adorned with quotes from intimidating-sounding authors like Horace or Dryden that summon a miasma of erudition cloaking the often undercooked elements of the book. As more than one critic has pointed out, the novel’s magic system and its analogy to real-world history don’t make much sense.

But Kuang’s abiding weakness as a novelist lies with character. This problem is particularly evident in Babel. The magic of Babel’s Oxford is generated by pairing words from different languages, and it requires speakers deeply acquainted with both tongues. One character in the novel was taken too young from China and couldn’t sufficiently hold on to his native language to be trained in this discipline. But the book’s main character, Robin, leaves Canton at 9, old enough that he still dreams in Chinese. Presumably, too, Robin would have memories of Canton, of his childhood there, his friends, the adults he knew, the places he lived, and the things he learned in the city. These treasured memories would be as much a part of him as the language his British patrons seek to exploit, and would serve as a counterpart to their attempts to indoctrinate him into England’s colonial project. Yet Babel never mentions anything of Robin’s past beyond his late mother’s complaint that her brother squandered the family fortune on opium. Even his beloved mother is nameless, faceless, a mourned phantom without distinguishable features. What China itself means to Robin is a mystery. The other two characters recruited by Oxford for their bilingualism—a Haitian girl and an Indian boy—are just as thinly drawn.

To her credit, Kuang seems to be trying to remedy these flaws. In Katabasis, she has dialed down the didacticism and given Alice a bit more of a backstory, though whatever drives Alice’s paradoxically vainglorious self-abnegation in search of academic success remains unexplored. Alice is incoherent in other ways, as Kuang struggles to reconcile her main character’s motivations with the demands of plot. The first explanation the novel offers for Alice’s quest—she believes she needs Grimes’ recommendation to get the plum academic appointment she longs for—turns out to be not her real reason, or not entirely. That Alice harbors another motivation of a very different emotional import is a secret the novel’s ostensibly omniscient narrator withholds from the reader until later in the story—although that’s not what omniscient narrators do. (An unreliable omniscient narrator is a paradox worthy of the paradox-driven magick system of Katabasis.) The flashbacks Kuang uses to juice the novel’s suspense are just as confusing. One moment, Alice vituperates her former mentor as a monster, and the next, she worships him and excuses him everything. Similarly, a traumatic incident witnessed by Peter seems pivotal and yet never gets mentioned again.

Too often, Kuang’s fiction feels engineered to appeal to judges more amorphous than Oxbridge dons, but in their own way just as exacting: the hordes of self-styled critics, fans, and moral arbiters of social media. The heaping portions of political lecturing, popular tropes, and dark academia aesthetics in her novels feel like imperatives learned from a screen. Yellowface may be Kuang’s most fully realized novel yet because it’s so frankly constructed out of the Twitter beefs, scandals, and outrage spirals of the early 2020s that are its subject. This, it seems, is a milieu Kuang once knew intimately, and Yellowface shows how its narrator—a frustrated white literary novelist who steals and rewrites a manuscript by a dead Asian American writer, then passes it off as her own—feeds off the nastiness of online culture to justify her own ruthlessness. Kuang perfectly captures the diction of Tumblr scolds (“Will white people ever stop whiting?,” etc.) and the catty comforts of group texting (“Since when did we start calling psychotic breakdowns visual art lmao this girl needs help”). Her target is an easy one, but her shots are rarely cheap.

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It’s true, as Zoe Hu smartly pointed out in a review for the Washington Post, that Yellowface is not entirely plausible. No one so thoroughly marinated in social media would make the dumb, self-incriminating mistakes that Kuang’s narrator does. But satire doesn’t need to be wholly believable, only observant. Satire traffics in caricature, which is what Kuang’s characters already are. On the heels of Yellowface, Katabasis suggests that this is where Kuang’s talent lies. The first third of Katabasis works splendidly because its punches land and because it doesn’t reach for depths it can’t sound. Kuang isn’t afraid to make Alice as unlikable—and, to be honest, as relatable—as one of Martin Amis’ most scabrous creations.

But when the novel goes astray in long passages on the torments of Alice’s conscience and other, less coherent agonies that resemble passages from a teenager’s diary; when Kuang flaunts her familiarity with philosophers and logical thought problems to no great furtherance of the story; and when she delivers the pat romantic ending that her worst readers expect of her, Katabasis never regains its footing. Should she ever stop caring so much what the authorities—official and self-appointed—think, Kuang might someday even write a novel that remains true to her own idiosyncratic gifts. That would be an achievement indeed.

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