Four years ago, towards the end of the first year of this newsletter, I wrote a post titled “Fugitive women”, about two books whose central characters were on the run from serious accusations of past wrongdoing: Lisa Lutz’s The Passenger and Laura Lippman’s Sunburn. Earlier this year, I read later novels by both these authors and thought I’d write another joint post about their books. However, rereading Lippman’s Dream Girl (2021) at the end of last week, I wondered if Rebecca F Kuang’s Yelloface (2023) wouldn’t pair better with it than Lutz’s The Accomplice (2021). Dream Girl and Yellowface have certain thematic resemblances, as the earlier books from Lutz and Lippman had to each other. Kuang’s novel is broadly about cultural appropriation, or perhaps the exclusion of certain racial groups from publication, as well as the more blatant theft of one author’s work by another, while the NPR review of Dream Girl implies that it has “something to do with one character stealing the story of another character and passing it off as their own”.

This is true, finally, but the identities of the plagiarist and true author, and the particular work appropriated, are not those we have been led to expect, and the “thief” is a character for whom we can’t help having particular sympathy. Dream Girl’s Gerry Anderson is plausibly suspected of having stolen the story of an unidentified woman. It turns out, however, that he has done nothing of the sort, though he is guilty of something much worse. Stolen intellectual property is not central to Lippman’s novel as it is to Kuang’s, but there are some resemblances between the two books. In both the relationship between an author and his or her agent plays an important role. (For example, each novel features a discussion between author and agent about the possibility of a film production company taking an option on one of the author’s works.)

Over a literary career lasting almost 40 years, Gerry Anderson has written 7 novels, some of them bestsellers. The middle one, Dream Girl, is his biggest success. In it, he convincingly portrayed the interiority of a female character, Aubrey, something he had not managed to achieve in any of his first three novels. It’s also an achievement he hasn’t repeated. Two young women whom he’d taught in a creative writing workshop eight years earlier, come back into Gerry’s life. One, Victoria, successfully applies to become his assistant; the other, Aileen, acts as his night nurse when he is immobilized by a sudden and terrifying domestic accident. He doesn’t recognize or remember either of his former students and (at least according to Aileen) Victoria is particularly put out by that.

Gerry has been receiving anonymous phone calls. The caller is a woman whose voice isn’t familiar to him, but she claims to be the original of Aubrey, the real person on whose true story the Dream Girl’s is based. Gerry doesn’t know what to make of this: he knows that there was no “original”: Aubrey is completely invented. The lover he has been attempting to discard, Margot, is threatening to disclose his “secret” unless he provides somewhere for her to live. Again, Gerry is bewildered. He doesn’t have any particularly damaging secret that he’s aware of.

Eventually, after Margot and one other person have been murdered, Aileen (or Leenie as he knew her when she was his creative writing student) explains the first mystery:

“We realized that you don’t see women unless you’re attracted to them, that it was such a joke that you’d gotten all this praise about some ‘dream girl’ who changed a man’s life, that there was no way Aubrey was really your creation because she was too real, and you didn’t know anything about real women. There’s always been this rumor that you stole some woman’s life, maybe even stole her literal story. We decided to gaslight you.” (p. 244)

Berating himself for not having recognized Victoria’s (Tori’s) “mousy squeak”, Gerry thinks that his problem may be not so much one of seeing women as “that he didn’t hear women” (p. 245). And if he’s not hearing women, a large part of the reason is that he’s not listening, most of the time.

Before taking up with Margot, Gerry had been married three times. His first and third marriages ended when he slept with someone else. Significantly, it was he who ended the marriages, not the betrayed wife. Although Gerry loves sex, he hates adultery. As a college student in 1978, he is unreservedly in favour of the former:

Gerry had been with only three women, but the first time he entered one, he couldn’t believe how amazing it was, how literature, which he held in such high esteem, had failed to inform him fully of the wonders of sex … And he knew, because of his father, that he had to guard himself against becoming obsessive about this particular joy, that he must never hurt another person in his pursuit of this pleasure. (pp. 142–3)

(The choice of vocabulary in this passage — “the first time he entered one” — implies that Gerry is more preoccupied with the sensation or the experience itself than with his sexual partner.) He’s horrified at the prospect of turning out like his father, who had maintained a second, bigamous marriage for many years. Gerry didn’t love either his second wife or his third. Indeed, he agreed with the second, Gretchen, who initiated the break-up and to whom he hadn’t been unfaithful, that he didn’t like her. Yet he didn’t want to split from her. He should never have divorced his first wife, Lucy, whom he met when they were both MFA students at Johns Hopkins.

She was the acknowledged star of their class. She was so talented and full of promise that she was capable of being without envy, which astonished Gerry. She had been publishing her stories in the best literary journals since she was an undergraduate, yet here he was, with an offer for his first novel, a good one, from one of the top houses, and there was no doubt that she felt only joy. (p. 39)

But if Lucy is gloriously free of envy of her husband’s literary success, she compensates for that, in Gerry’s view, by being rabidly jealous of his attraction to other women. But this is a crucial instance of Gerry’s failure to pay attention to what Lucy is actually telling him. She pesters him about imaginary “affairs he wasn’t having” and Gerry concludes that she was “so determined not to be envious of Gerry’s professional success … that she became crazed with jealousy of other women” (p. 61).

Finally, finding that Gerry isn’t picking up on her hints, Lucy tells him that he can have sex with whomever he likes, but Lucy always has to be in the room. It becomes apparent that by being “in the room”, Lucy doesn’t just mean watching: she wants to join in. Gerry is appalled by his own enjoyment of the experience. Early on in their relationship, he has decided that what he likes best about Lucy is that, “beneath her ladylike looks” (p. 40), she is wild where sex is concerned. Now it seems that she’s wilder than he can cope with. He soon sleeps with a colleague, a woman in whom he’s not really “interested” (p. 182), without Lucy being present, and so ends the marriage. That’s his first big mistake. His biggest mistake, though, is to have sex with a woman he has met in a hotel bar, again bringing his current marriage to an end.

It turns out that Margot really had known a highly discreditable secret about Gerry, but her attempt to blackmail him got nowhere because he didn’t yet know it himself. When Gerry’s mother was dying, he reluctantly sold his New York apartment and moved back to Baltimore, buying a $1.75 million duplex apartment on the top two floors of a building on the former site of a grain silo. The two floors are connected by a floating staircase. Gerry seriously injured himself falling down this staircase, and is confined to bed for the “present-day” part of the novel’s action.

Margot held on in his former New York apartment even after he had sold it, and opened mail that had been addressed to him there. That’s how she learned his secret before he knew it himself. Kim, the woman he’d slept with in a hotel towards the end of his third marriage, had written to him, accusing him of having raped her. When a confrontation is arranged between Kim and the bedridden Gerry, he is outraged at her accusation. Kim had engaged him in conversation in the hotel bar, had been reading The Master and Margarita (known to be “one of his cherished favourites”, p. 208). She had obviously engineered their meeting, and had happily gone to his hotel room after several drinks. After it became clear that he intended to have sex with her, Kim had produced a condom, saying she would “like that better” (p. 211) if he wore it. (Gerry, still deep in his third marriage, of course wasn’t carrying one.)

Gerry can’t imagine how a young woman could behave like Kim had if she hadn’t wanted to have sex with him. But, to his dismay, it turns out that she had compelling reasons both to want to speak to him and not to have sex with him. And she had said “no” twice, if not very forcefully. Gerry had missed her refusal — not listening again.

Gerry is a successful author who teaches creative writing, so it’s not surprising that the book contains many references to other writers and books. Though there are many more references to authors from William Congreve to Jim Thompson by way of Eudora Welty and Josephine Tey, the principal model for the story is Stephen King’s Misery. In the Author’s Note at the end, Lippman writes:

This is a book about what goes on inside a writer’s mind and it is, by my lights, my first work of horror. (p. 327)

Much of the horror probably lies in the demonstration that rape could make so little impression on the rapist, a man who had long since resolved not to injure the women he had (or wanted to have) sex with. After the novel’s climactic events, Kim wonders:

How could the worst thing that ever happened to her not be one of his pivotal memories? (p. 323)

Before moving on from Dream Girl, I wanted to mention some of Gerry’s comments on other literary figures:

The crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whom Gerry respected about as much as as he could respect any genre writer, had famously said to cut out the parts that readers skip. Gerry hated that glib aphorism. If anything, writers should be committed to putting in more passages that readers were likely to skip. (p. 94)

And this, from 1999, just after Gerry has been in a bar watching, but not meeting or speaking to, the woman who will inspire the character Aubrey:

Fuck the maximalists, the Tom Wolfe imitators, the worst of whom was Tom Wolfe these days. (p. 317)

Having reread Yellowface earlier this week, immediately after Dream Girl, I find that I’m not ready to discuss it in any depth. I have various ideas as to what I might like to say about it, but most of those ideas haven’t crystallized. So I’ll just deal with two aspects of the book now.

The narrator, June, steals the just-finished manuscript draft of a new novel by her sort-of friend Athena Liu, when Athena dies suddenly, having choked on a pancake. Once June has edited the draft and filled in a few gaps, she passes the manuscript off as her own and it proves to be a bestseller. Athena’s previous books have been hits, June’s sole publication hasn’t.

Stolen manuscripts are a fairly popular plot device, particularly in films. As a device it tends to be implausible, since it depends on there being no backup of the manuscript and no living person apart from the thief who knows what its contents are. In this case, the theft is possible because Athena wrote her draft on a typewriter and had just completed it before her sudden death. She hadn’t told anybody except June about it and hadn’t had time to copy it onto her computer. Fortunately such a combination of circumstances doesn’t happpen very often. I think it’s fair to say that, except in the case of a willing ghost-writer, situations where an author passes somebody else’s work off as her own are very rare.

In this case, there’s a complicating factor. Athena was Chinese-American, June is white. With her publishers’ encouragement, June publishes the book under the name “Juniper Song” (the two first names given by her mother, a hippie at the time of June’s birth), initially giving many readers the impression that the supposed author has a Chinese background, as the genuine author had.

This raises important ethical questions about cultural appropriation and the possibility that June is taking a place in the publisher’s list that might otherwise have been occupied by an actual Chinese-American. Or, rather, it would do so, if June weren’t already totally in the wrong because of her plagiarism. Her conduct is indefensible from the start, so her masquerade as a member of an ethnic minority seems oddly inconsequential. I couldn’t help feeling that the plot would be more compelling if, instead of an almost complete manuscript, June had taken, or been handed, a bundle of Athena’s preliminary notes, or an outline of ideas.

The novel’s climactic confrontation takes place between June and Candice Lee, a Korean-American who had been an editorial assistant at June’s publishers and had been present at the discussion about June’s author-name. She had attempted to ensure that the book had a sensitivity-read before it was published. Goaded by Candice to explain why she stole Athena’s book, June reveals a streak of racism that, to my European ear at least, hadn’t been evident before. (The “they” in the first paragraph below refers to publishers.)

“But it’s true, isn’t it? Athena had it made. You people — I mean, diverse people — you’re all they want — ”

“Oh my God.” Candice presses a palm against her forehead. “You really are insane. Do all white people talk like this?” (p. 307)

It seems to me that, if June has been racist all along, we should have seen some indication of that before we got within 8 pages of the end. Perhaps it was indicated and I missed it. I’ve never been to the United States and I know nothing about the US publishing industry. While racism exists pretty well everywhere, I believe that it takes a particular form in the US from elsewhere, largely because of the history of slavery. My views on racism were formed in the late 1970s, the time of Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and developed when I lived in London between 1988 and 2005. I’m well aware that it’s a mistake to try to apply views formed in that context to American society.

There’s quite a bit more that I could write about Yellowface. There’s a good chance that I might not return to it, but anything’s possible. I’ll write separately about Lisa Lutz’s The Accomplice before too long.

Editions: Dream Girl Faber paperback 2022; emphasis original, ellipses added;
YellowfaceThe Borough Press, 2024.