THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL
by Nghi Vo
Tordotcom. 336 pages, $26.
IT WAS INEVITABLE that when the copyright for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic The Great Gatsby expired, the floodgates for adaption and reinvention would open. And what better author to broach that possibility than Nghi Vo, author of the highly acclaimed novel The Chosen and The Beautiful, which came out last May?
This time the story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures. As Jordan navigates the scene of the Roaring Twenties as an acclaimed golfer alongside her companion, Daisy Buchanan, she contends with the ambiguous position she’s in, privileged with the life her adoptive family has given her yet still an outsider all the same. Like the original character, Baker is more than just a “beautiful little fool,” the feminine archetype so famously embodied by Fitzgerald’s leading lady. In Vo’s book, the nouveau Jordan maintains the same charming and biting wit of her predecessor but possesses a new energy of her own, an unflinching and uncompromising character who refuses to tone down anything about herself, whether it be her own cultural background or her steely, vulnerable, and elegant nature.
As a writer, Vo takes the original merits of The Great Gatsby and infuses the novel with a modern sensibility that takes the setting beyond what Fitzgerald’s limited perspective could bring. Through Jordan’s cutting gaze, we see the xenophobia— briefly touched on and brushed away in the original novel—put under a harsher spotlight, highlighting the racial tensions that individuals like Jordan, despite their privileges, aren’t shielded from. Fitzgerald’s glittering metropolis is further torn down, and class is put under a stronger magnifying class. Vo notes that for men like Gatsby, “there would always be a human price for his luxury.” What’s more, Vo takes the queer undertones that were suggested in the original and brings them into the light, amping up the flirtatious suggestions between Gatsby and Nick and infusing a bi or pansexual sensibility into Jordan.
As befits the author of When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, The Chosen and The Beautiful is enriched with the fantastic, crossing genre barriers between historical fiction and fantasy. Throughout the book, Vo toys with magic, sprinkling in demonic elixirs, paper tigers, and floating socialites in a way that adds to the decadence of this novel and heightens the human elements of danger and romance.
As more modern writers come forward to rewrite this American classic, de- and re-constructing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ideas surrounding the American Dream, Nghi Vo’s book sets a high bar for future projects of this kind. Complete with lyrical prose, beautiful imagery, intriguing magical systems, and an eye for history, The Chosen and The Beautiful is a novel with something for a wide variety of readers.
____________________________________________________
