{"id":26278,"date":"2025-08-27T10:31:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/26278\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T10:31:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:31:15","slug":"r-f-kuangs-books-are-plagued-by-the-same-flaws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/26278\/","title":{"rendered":"R.F. Kuang\u2019s books are plagued by the same flaws."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2014her most celebrated book, 2022\u2019s\u00a0Babel,\u00a0rated nothing more than the top slot in a roundup<\/a> by the New York Times Book Review\u2019s science fiction and fantasy columnist.\u00a0Since 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,\u00a0Yellowface,\u00a0a 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,\u00a0Katabasis,\u00a0Kuang has arrived in every sense, with\u00a0a profile in the New Yorker<\/a>\u2014published under the print headline \u201cThe Achiever\u201d\u2014written by the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning staffer Hua Hsu.<\/p>\n

These are not the limits of Kuang\u2019s precocious accomplishments. Her debut, 2018\u2019s\u00a0The Poppy War\u2014written when the author was in her late teens, and the first book in a trilogy\u2014was nominated for several awards and included on\u00a0Time\u00a0magazine\u2019s list of the 100 best fantasy novels<\/a>. A debate champion in high school and a graduate of Georgetown University\u2019s School of Foreign Service, Kuang won a Marshall scholarship to Cambridge University and earned a postgraduate degree in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford. She\u2019s currently working on a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale.\u00a0At 29, Kuang has already finished a draft of her seventh novel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Katabasis<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n By R.F. Kuang. HarperCollins.\n <\/p>\n

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\n Thank you for your support.\n <\/p>\n

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.\u00a0The Poppy War\u00a0is 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.<\/p>\n

Katabasis, Kuang\u2019s latest, is an unusual fusion of academic satire and allegory, but it\u2019s also obsessed with the toll of superhuman diligence and the overvaluing of rank and laurels. The novel\u2019s main character, Alice Law, studies \u201cmagick\u201d 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.\u00a0\u201cHow good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether\u2014when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas,\u201d Kuang writes of her heroine. Such austerity backfires, however, when Alice\u2019s 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,\u00a0\u201cthe golden recommendation letter that opened every door.\u201d Yes, the price of admission to the underworld is half of her lifespan, but as far as Alice is concerned, it\u2019s worth it:\u00a0\u201cShe would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a funny premise, as is the novel\u2019s 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\u2014the novel\u2019s title comes from the Ancient Greek name for such stories\u2014Katabasis\u00a0presents each layer of the underworld as a metaphor for the particular\u00a0sin 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\u00a0\u201cthe meaning of the good.\u201d The shades confined there include those guilty of claiming to be a Communist without having read\u00a0Das Kapital, editors who rejected submissions that didn\u2019t cite their own work, and those prone to reminding people that\u00a0\u201cDartmouth is in the Ivy League.\u201d The effect is less Dante than Lewis Carroll (Alice\u2019s name is no coincidence) or\u00a0The Phantom Tollbooth,\u00a0partly because the stakes are low: The Christian concept of eternal damnation doesn\u2019t figure in Kuang\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s companion on her travels is Peter Murdoch, her onetime friend and, more recently, her rival for professor Grimes\u2019\u00a0favor. It is obvious from the start that this floppy-haired English boy is intended to be Alice\u2019s 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:\u00a0\u201cWhen Peter erred it was cute. She had herself once spent all of dinner in the bathroom hyperventilating through her fingers because she\u2019d knocked a bread basket onto the floor.\u201d Anyone remotely familiar with romance tropes can see where this is going.<\/p>\n

As amusing as\u00a0Katabasis\u00a0can be, this apparent bid to earn the novel an #enemiestolovers hashtag on TikTok points to a nagging problem with Kuang\u2019s fiction, which is that it seldom feels as if it were written for grown-ups. In\u00a0Babel,\u00a0a foursome of Oxford undergraduates enjoy a blissful, yearlong idyll noshing scones among the dreaming spires before they comprehend the colonial mission of the university\u2019s 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\u2019t seem so tiresome. But if not, not.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that although\u00a0Babel\u00a0is set in the 1830s, the novel\u2019s characters all speak like the characters in contemporary YA fiction, a genre that Kuang\u2019s 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\u00a0more<\/a>\u00a0than<\/a>\u00a0one<\/a>\u00a0critic has pointed out, the novel\u2019s magic system and its analogy to real-world history don\u2019t make much sense.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Imogen West-Knights
\n It\u2019s Hard to Imagine a Book More Damning About the British Royal Family Than This
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But Kuang\u2019s abiding weakness as a novelist lies with character. This problem is particularly evident in\u00a0Babel.\u00a0The magic of\u00a0Babel\u2019s 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\u2019t sufficiently hold on to his native language to be trained in this discipline. But the book\u2019s 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\u2019s colonial project. Yet\u00a0Babel\u00a0never mentions anything of Robin\u2019s past beyond his late mother\u2019s 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\u2014a Haitian girl and an Indian boy\u2014are\u00a0just as thinly drawn.<\/p>\n

To her credit, Kuang seems to be trying to remedy these flaws. In\u00a0Katabasis,\u00a0she has dialed down the didacticism and given Alice a bit more of a backstory, though whatever drives Alice\u2019s 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\u2019s motivations with the demands of plot. The first explanation the novel offers for Alice\u2019s quest\u2014she believes she needs Grimes\u2019\u00a0recommendation to get the plum academic appointment she longs for\u2014turns 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\u2019s ostensibly omniscient narrator withholds from the reader until later in the story\u2014although that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Too often, Kuang\u2019s 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.\u00a0Yellowface\u00a0may be Kuang\u2019s most fully realized novel yet because it\u2019s 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\u00a0Yellowface\u00a0shows how its narrator\u2014a frustrated white literary novelist who steals and rewrites a manuscript by a dead Asian American writer, then passes it off as her own\u2014feeds off the nastiness of online culture to justify her own ruthlessness. Kuang perfectly captures the diction of Tumblr scolds (\u201cWill white people ever stop whiting?,\u201d etc.) and the catty comforts of group texting (\u201cSince when did we start calling psychotic breakdowns visual art lmao this girl needs help\u201d). Her target is an easy one, but her shots are rarely cheap.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    She\u2019s One of Our Most Popular Novelists. But There\u2019s a Consistent Problem With Her Books.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    It\u2019s Hard to Imagine a Book More Damning About the British Royal Family Than This
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n <\/p>\n

    Everyone Thought They Knew the Amanda Knox Story in 2007. But a New Show Proves We Had No Idea.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  4. \n <\/p>\n

    Two of Our Greatest Filmmakers Stopped Making Movies Together. It Has Not Gone Well.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It\u2019s true, as\u00a0Zoe Hu smartly pointed out in a review for the Washington Post<\/a>, that\u00a0Yellowface\u00a0is not entirely plausible. No one so thoroughly marinated in social media would make the dumb, self-incriminating mistakes that Kuang\u2019s narrator does. But satire doesn\u2019t need to be wholly believable, only observant. Satire traffics in caricature, which is what Kuang\u2019s characters already are. On the heels of\u00a0Yellowface, Katabasis suggests that this is where Kuang\u2019s talent lies. The first third of\u00a0Katabasis\u00a0works splendidly because its punches land and because it doesn\u2019t reach for depths it can\u2019t sound. Kuang isn\u2019t afraid to make Alice as unlikable\u2014and, to be honest, as relatable\u2014as one of Martin Amis\u2019\u00a0most scabrous creations.<\/p>\n

    But when the novel goes astray in long passages on the torments of Alice\u2019s conscience and other, less coherent agonies that resemble passages from a teenager\u2019s 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,\u00a0Katabasis\u00a0never regains its footing. Should she ever stop caring so much what the authorities\u2014official and self-appointed\u2014think, Kuang might someday even write a novel that remains true to her own idiosyncratic gifts. That would be an achievement indeed.<\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Depending on where you hang out on the internet, the novelist R.F. Kuang is either an inescapable juggernaut…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,18,117,21588,19,17,2865],"class_list":{"0":"post-26278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-fantasy","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-slate-book-review"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}