The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo

[sophia_sol]

The Great Gatsby entered public domain this year, and of course there are immediately people doing things with it, because it is enormously famous. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a retelling of the novel from the character Jordan Baker's perspective, with bonus magic, and also Jordan is bisexual and Vietnamese.

And somehow this book is exactly that. I don't know what I was expecting but.... it fits so tidily into exactly what the premise would imply, and I think I thought that Vo would go somewhere interestingly unexpected with it?

But it is in fact a straightforward retelling of the events of the original, following remarkably close, including all of the expected scenes. Oh, it's definitely a more enjoyable book to me than the original, extremely queer and much more interested in complexities of identity and where people come from. But it is still at its heart a retelling of The Great Gatsby, updated.

The addition of magic and demons doesn't do much for me either tbh. It seems to be added solely to highlight the themes that were/are already present in the story -- and it doesn't strike me that it actually adds much of anything? Those themes were already clearly legible without it!

Idk, I guess my overall issue with the book is that it seems to have been written from a place of love for the original canon. Yes it's criticising the original in some ways, but it comes across to me like criticising a thing you love. And I emphatically do not love The Great Gatsby!

Is this book good at doing the thing it's doing? Absolutely! But it's not quite the thing I hoped it would be doing.

Comments

[yuuago]

Huh! Kind of tempted to check this out now, just to see if I end up feeling the same. I find it's a weirdly interesting experience when something manages exactly what it's trying to do and I still come out of it not crazy about it.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah it was disconcerting! I had trouble figuring out how I felt about it for a while because I was like....I should like this!!

[cahn]

Oh interesting! I'm personally actually quite fond of Great Gatsby (it's actually sort of odd to me that I like it, as I don't like either any other Fitzgerald or any other American writer from that era at all, but somehow Gatsby managed to be the exception) but on the other hand I kind of... feel like if I wanted a straightforward retelling with bisexual Vietnamese character I'd go find some fanfic? I sort of feel like published books should go a little further, like you say.

[sophia_sol]

Huh, I feel like you might like this book then, actually? If you liked the original? Because tbh I think the biggest issue I had with this book is that it isn't mad enough at The Great Gatsby!

Honestly I think fanfic is a lot more likely to go wild with its retelling, so it didn't really feel like fanfic to me, it felt like Literature. It was engaging with the original in a way that didn't quite jive with the fannish way of engaging with canon, I feel.

[aurumcalendula]

Now I'm wondering if part of why this worked more for me is because my memory of The Great Gatsby is kinda vague.

[sophia_sol]

Lol quite possibly! I'm glad you liked it!

[lirazel]

This is one I'm not sure I'll get around to checking out, but I really appreciate hearing people's thoughts about it.

[sophia_sol]

Very fair! Glad I can add to your collection of other people's thoughts! Tbh I haven't actually seen anyone else's reactions yet; do you know of other reviews that I might find interesting to read?

[lirazel]

Are you friends with chestnut_pod? (You should be, if you aren't!) Check this out.

[sophia_sol]

Oh! yes I am friends with them, it's just been long enough since their review went up that I totally forgot about it! Thanks for linking, it's a great review to reread now that I've actually read the book

[chestnut_pod]

Seems that we did indeed have much the same view — though perhaps I liked it rather better than you did! I really enjoyed the magic for being vivid and dreamy and cool, and wished that it had a, you know, purpose. Oh well! It seems that Vo’s novel career is well and truly launched (I am always mad when TDC review-bombs their own books — ethics??— but in this case…) and I look forward to the next, non-Gatsby, thing.

[sophia_sol]

I definitely liked the magic, it was really cool! I just wanted it to have a reason to exist other than to back up already-extant themes, because as it is, it felt like a devaluing of the magic as its own thing. (perhaps this is just me having issues with magic realism as a genre though! :P)

I'm definitely looking forward to Vo's next things though. She's a writer with a lot of skill and a lot of promise and I want to read whatever else she puts out into the world!

[glitteryv]

I'm abt 2 months away from being able to read this book (per the long queue at my local library) and I have to admit that I'm STILL on the fence abt whether to read it or no.

OTOH, the queerness and POC protag are the strongest selling points for me. OTOH, however, I am on the NOPETUS side when it comes to The Great Gatsby. Have read it, didn't enjoy it.

Anyhoo, thank you for your review of it. Here's hoping I hate it less than I did the original, LOL.

[sophia_sol]

I think it's worth a read tbh! It is still, inevitably, the Great Gatsby, but the change in perspective to a queer poc narrator is definitely one that makes the book at least a reasonably enjoyable read imo, instead of just making me fumingly mad yet also bored like the original did!

[whimsyful]

My overall impression of the book is pretty similar to yours. I had a really good time reading it because Vo's prose was gorgeous and Jordan's voice was great, but it stuck so close to the plot of the original Gatsby that I was a little disappointed it didn't go weirder or more different. I'm still turning over my reaction because I can't really point to a single definitive weakness, and this was sold as a queer Asian Gatsby retelling and it definitely was that. Maybe if I loved the original I would also have loved this more, but I found Gatsby terrific on a technical level while leaving me emotionally cold, which is also essentially the reaction I had to this retelling.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, exactly, on everything you say!