The Chosen and the Beautiful
Nghi Vo
I am not a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. (See my one-star review.) Why then did I choose to read Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful? Well, I admire Vo's writing, particularly her Singing Hills cycle and other short works, such as On the Fox Roads. I had, not quite faith, but at least hope, that her magic could make this famous novel, which never worked for me, into something that did.
And she does! The Chosen and the Beautiful is told in the first person by Jordan Baker. Jordan is a not unimportant character in The Great Gatsby, but here she is more central and far more interesting than anyone in Gatsby ever was.
Jordan is a Bad Girl. She's a pretty, rich girl who smokes and drinks and loves men and women. In fact, I was reminded as I read of the love poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay doesn't write of eternal love. In her poems love is a fleeting thing. Not casual -- never that -- but she expects it to end, and although she laments when it does, one feels transience is part of what makes love valuable. Indeed, it seems to me as if the forever love that Jay and Daisy want feel to Jordan like a kind of doomed perversity.
Jordan is the adopted daughter of Edith Baker, a former missionary in French Indochina (Vietnam). When she was forced by events to leave the mission and return to the USA, Edith stole the infant Jordan. Jordan is thus an ethnically Vietnamese woman in the USA in a time when bigotry against Asians was overt and strong.
The Chosen and the Beautiful is set in a world in which there is magic. Vo writes
In the world of The Chosen and the Beautiful, magic is a force not unlike electricity. In the 1920s, electricity ran the cities, holding back the night. At the same time, it was a toy for those who could afford it. Vast swathes of the country lived as they had always lived in darkness and in the cold, and so magic in Jordan Baker’s world is power and privilege.
But Jordan has her own magic, inherited from her Vietnamese ancestors, based on the ancient art of paper cutting.
The Chosen and the Beautiful is an explicitly sexy and magical version of The Great Gatsby. It's an improvement.
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