Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Title: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Author: Nghi Vo

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Alcohol use, drunk driving, death (mentions), ghosts, blood (mentions), blood consumption (mentions), smoking, heterosexual sexual content (explicit), homosexual sexual content (mentions), gun violence (mentions), infidelity, racism/xenophobia, car accidents, domestic abuse

Back Cover:

Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society–she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.

But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.

Review:

This is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker – but a Jordan Baker who is a Vietnamese adoptee and unapologetically bisexual, set in a just slightly off-kilter version of Jazz Age New York where the elite drink demon blood whiskey, electricity is more strange than magical lights, and good friends can spend an afternoon floating around the ceilings of the house.

I do not like The Great Gatsby. I read it at age 14 in the worst English class I’ve ever taken, found it boring and didn’t understand any of what the analysis in class said it was about, and decided that it wasn’t necessarily a bad book but had no business being as popular as it was. However, my husband adores it, and the fact that he’s been pestering me to give it another chance and this book’s premise of a queer Vietnamese Jordan Baker convinced me to give this book a shot.

And overall, I’m glad I did. From what I remember of the original Great Gatsby, The Chosen and the Beautiful holds pretty closely to the major plot points – excepting differences in perspective, since this one is told by Jordan Baker. I liked the background of Jordan growing up as a Vietnamese adoptee in turn-of-the-century Kentucky, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism and exclusion she experienced for being Vietnamese despite also being a daughter of a rich and prestigous family, and how she coped – weaponizing her “exotic” beauty, unapologetically embracing her sexual desires for both men and women, and donning emotional armor so as not to care what anyone else may say or think about her.

There are some themes of racism and xenophobia in this book, but up until the end they’re mostly undercurrents. For most of the book, i’ts mostly about wealth and decadence and love and magic and how Jay Gatsby’s inability to let go of a past love causes the deaths of three people and deeply wounds the woman he loved. Which, if my memory serves, is pretty spot-on to the original book, except for the magic.

Even though this is a new book (released less than two months ago), it reads like an older book, very similar in style to the original Great Gatsby. And I think that’s why I didn’t like it as much as I should have considering how many things this book has I do like (like magic as a metaphor for cultural identity, queer girls, and love interests who may or may not have sold their souls to demons). The Chosen and the Beautiful was far too faithful to The Great Gatsby for what it was trying to be. It didn’t reimagine anything besides Jordan Baker herself, instead taking the entirety of The Great Gatsby and painting a varnish of magic and queerness on it that is very careful to not obscure too much of the original.

This book wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much more. It isn’t so much a reimagining as it is a boringly faithful retelling with just enough imagination to appeal to people who like fantasy but not The Great Gatsby (like me). I liked it enough to finish it, but I’m mostly disappointed because I think this could have been so much more. Or maybe you just have to like the original book to fully appreciate this one.