Nick laughed, and I wondered if if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
page 152, The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
Table of Contents
Preamble
I think the timing of me reading this book is immaculate. The Chosen and the Beautiful takes place over the course of a sweltering hot summer and over here in Toronto we are fast approaching the cooler temperatures of autumn with the last gasps of summer heat passing us by.
As such Nghi Vo’s debut novel is appropriately the last book of the summer for me. I have read Nghi Vo’s work before, more specifically the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune. In that review’s conclusion I mentioned that I was interested in reading her longer length works and this book was already in my to-be-read pile so I placed a hold for it and here we are.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
The Chosen and the Beautiful is an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. More specifically, the story is told from the perspective of Jordan Baker, who in this adaptation is a queer Vietnamese immigrant adopted into a white family. Like with James I have not read the source material and nor do I plan to. So I will refrain from making direct comparisons to the source material.
The adaptation also applies a touch of magical realism to the story. We get folks drinking demon’s blood (“demoniac”) as a stimulant. We have ghosts in haunted houses, some mentions of mages and magic. The main character Jordan can do a specific kind of magic involving paper. There is a lot of mention of the selling of souls. I am not normally a huge fan of magical realism but in this case all of it adds to the vibes of the story.
The vibes in this book are immaculate. Socialite parties, smoky speakeasies, hot lazy summer days, the extravagant indulgences of the kind of people who are more worried about what dress they are going to be wearing at the next big party than anything else. Nghi Vo does an excellent job with vibe setting in this book and I enjoyed that aspect of it.
What I enjoyed less was the rest of the story. I found that I kept losing interest in the primary narrative of the book which revolves around Gatsby and Daisy and their toxic relationship. Nghi Vo tried to sprinkle in themes of queerness, racism, gender, and the immigrant experience but I found the exploration of said themes to be rather shallow.
I think perhaps the author was restricted by the framework by the story she adapted. While Jordan Baker is very much a intriguing character with her own interests and ambitions, I still found that the Gatsby/Daisy plot overwhelms her story to the point where she feels like more of a passenger in her own story rather than the driver.
I kept thinking what the story would be like if it fully revolved around Jordan Baker and her experiences. What if the The Chosen and the Beautiful was fully about Jordan exploring love, sexuality and her identity in 1920s America? I was thinking it could be more of a tragedy along the lines of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room instead of The Great Gatsby. Hell, it doesn’t need to be a tragedy at all, it could be a hedonistic trip through Jazz Age America where Jordan. Jordan as a hedonistic queer witch. Now that is a story I would like to see.
Conclusions
The Chosen and the Beautiful was mostly just vibes. The vibes were immaculate but at the end of it just vibes isn’t enough for me to enjoy the story. So I came away from this book with a big ol’ “meh”. I don’t regret reading it but it was not something I enjoyed. I don’t think this puts any sort of mark against Nghi Vo who I still think is a fantastic writer who was limited by fact that this is adaptation of a classic novel.
I hope to return to Vo’s other writing in the future at the some point.
Going into September, you may notice a slowdown in reviews as I will be on vacation at the end of September and as such I am planning on slowing down my reading pace for that time period so I can focus on enjoying other things for a bit. I may still read four books next month but the reviews of some of them will almost certainly be delayed till October.
That’s all from me this time around. See y’all in the next one.
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