Reviews

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

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monazaneefer's review against another edition

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
Format: Audible

I wouldn't be surprised if this reduces to 2 at some point. It's not as though it was a bad story but, like Agnes Grey, it was just meh.

It all started when the protagonist, and by proxy, the author, brought out her views on race and cancel culture which I found to be so banal. Up until then, I did like the book but even then it felt underwhelming and after the protagonist's views, my interest did wane a bit to the point that I DNFed it until I realised I couldn't return the credit on audible. So I listened to the remainder with neutrality and till the end, my opinion stayed the same. The whole book was underwhelming; the observations were either trite or too brief. Barely anything I read here was THAT thought-provoking.

It did bring me similar vibes to The Idiot (meandering, observation-wrought) but I think the latter has the edge due to its wit as well as intriguing and fresh observations that were developed. It's this underdevelopment that makes everything in this book feel random - as though the author dipped her toes into multiple things too quickly. The only cohesive elements in But The Girl were Sylvia Plath and art, but the latter was SO uninspiring.

However, I am glad I read this. The whole race/cancel culture mention in the book made me annoyed but driven enough to write my version of a campus novel...only time will tell whether that'll come into fruition.

Yet, with time (I am writing this about 6 days after I finished reading this), what stands out to me are the The Idiot-vibes and an urge to respond to what I wish this book could've been - which, all in all, is good enough for me to not want to drop this down to 2 stars.

carriebee's review

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5.0

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu opens with its main character Girl traveling from Australia to Scotland for an artist residency. In the backdrop is the recent disappearance of MAS370. People assume Girl knows about it because of her Malaysian parents. She plans to work on her Sylvia Plath dissertation and write a postcolonial novel, which is more challenging than it seems. Out in the world and away from her close-knit family for the first time, Girl explores questions of her identity and all of its complex facets: Australian/Malaysian, daughter, woman, friend, academic, creator. Girl negotiates a world where the complexities of her identity can’t be shed and begins to own all the pieces that make her who she is.

The writing alone made this an instant favorite. I marked what feels like a million passages; I love so many of the sentences and the way Yu frames the things she is writing about. While there is dialogue and interactions with others, we spend a lot of time in Girl’s head and her observations are so astute and at times there is dry, witty, laugh-out-loud humor.

There is so much here I want to write about and also feel I can’t adequately address. I want to mention Plath but also point out this is only one part of the many things that make this novel great. I love how Yu used Plath in a way that enhances explorations of race, how it plays out in academia and in how we read and interpret literature. The way Girl sees herself in Plath’s work and recognizes and discusses how someone that looks like her is represented is brilliant. Girl appreciates how Plath puts often hidden things out in the open. The novel definitely offers a different lens for Plath and the challenges modern readers have with oppressive aspects of backlist work. I was consistently in awe of the way Yu’s writing offered perspectives I hadn’t had before. There is a brutal and refreshing honesty in this book’s pages we don’t often see and I absolutely love.

One of my favorite books of the year so far. Highly recommended.

Thank you @unnamedpress for the #gifted ARC

archytas's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

The pacing of this novel is languid, but the prose cracks like a whip. It is a “postcolonial novel” but one which challenges the concept and also somehow centers Sylvia Plath. It is, in short, a study in contrasts and boy is it good.
Which is not to say it is completely enjoyable. Yu’s protagonist drifts through much of the book, unsure of what she wants and increasingly distressed by her own inertia, which is often frustrating to read. Yu captures here almost perfectly many experiences with residencies, where the enforced isolation results less in focus and more in introspection. This is, of course, partly the point. It also enables Yu to take Girl (Yu hints at, but never provides, a ‘real’ name here, in an exercise that seems designed for us to engage with her entirely through her own sense of self and not ours) through mental musings which unpeel the racialised expectations of contemporary literary, artistic and academic cultures. While being funny. The whip smart dialogue is one of the greatest pleasures of the book, but it also offers sharp insight:

“Much later on Ma told me that when I was young, I thought I was white. I didn’t want to be white or anything like that. I just thought that was what I was because I knew I was real. I knew I was real and not made up because sometimes I tested it. Sometimes I bit my lip till blood came out and when the saltine pain came, I knew that I was non-fiction.”

“Her bright light, her warmth and openness were not really her at all, but the carefully constructed house on a hill she lived in. And being porous to the pain of those outside this house would destroy the beautiful architecture of her life because it would be an admission.”

“I was overburdened by the overdetermining of my identity.”

And the surprisingly poignant “These mass emails were becoming more and more personal in tone, now all of them started with my name and told me how much they cared for me, which was why I should buy their new product or read their recently published article. It was a lonely time to be alive.”

Yu also uses this to critique the form of the novel she is writing. I’m not always a fan of this, it can be deployed cheaply as if arch knowing can avoid pitfalls, but here it also provides context for what Yu is prioritising. For example:

“That was the problem with always identifying with the protagonist of a coming-of-age novel, no one else but you ever got to come of age. You got to be an actual person and everyone else was just a symbol of a particular type of person or pathway.”

Yu, in this most definate coming-of-age novel, tries not to make her other characters too archetypal, even as she burns to show us the relentlessness of the way others, especially white people, think of the world as different to the way it is. Two leading academics, for example, make cracks about how lucky they are to be successful in postcolonial studies despite being White, all while Girl looks around at a clearly majority White field. As a public school graduate, I recognised the frustration of the “my parents had to sacrifice hard for private school” narrative which often feels tone deaf to the reality of families where public school uniforms were barely affordable. Yu captures the sense of a world in which diversity is hot in a way that means posed racial harmony, but not in a way which shifts power at all, or even allocates space for those diverse voices. She manages this without making the novel harsh. There is no cringe here (well, only a tiny bit). Instead, Yu centers around the family of Girl, whose thoughts keep getting distracted by trying to understand their lives, their perspectives, and in this way, to take space for what matters, not what is demanded.