Wow! No wonder Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, BUT THE GIRL, has been picked up by a number of international publishers. It really is a must read.
BUT THE GIRL is everything one would wish in a novel – heart, soul, wit and intelligence – a story within a range of stories with characters who create a crucial dramatic necessity.
The narrator of BUT THE GIRL is Girl, Australian born Malaysian, a Sylvia Plath tragic who receives a scholarship to travel to London for a week to be ‘enriched by culture’ and then to Arbroath, Scotland for a month long artist residency before returning to London to present her work at a postcolonial literature conference.
At the residency, Girl encounters Clementine and a fractious relationship ensues. Clementine is a painter who persuades Girl to sit for her, the result is something akin to a palimpsest portrait of Plath.
Art and letters mingle, disciplines attract and detract, cross fertilise and contaminate, the contradictions adding to the complexity.
One such complexity that enriches BUT THE GIRL is the relationship with language. Girl confides she had a sadomasochist fascination with English “it hurt me and gave me acute pleasure. But I also wanted to be the one that hurt it back, to teach it new tricks, to stand over it, to win its favour, to know it better than it knew me, to mangle it and deform it, and remake it into my own image”.
Girl also considers women to be better judges of beauty than men. “Only other women could admire the lovely indent of wrist, the contour of a neck, the round drop of an earlobe, the musical movements of a woman’s long fingertips. Men famously loved to look at women but they got too much credit for their looking. Men saw the wrong things, couldn’t discern intricate differences, were too easily fixated on their own point of view”.
The function of books – the study of the human, the cultivation of empathy- is on dazzling display in BUT THE GIRL. The crucial dramatic necessity running through this novel is stunning and seductive and readers should easily and readily succumb to its assemblage of words, the sensational blend of scholarship and soul searching, its immersion into identity and ideas.
Continuously readable, continuously surprising, BUT THE GIRL is one of the great debuts of the year.
BUT THE GIRL by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is published in Australia by Hamish Hamilton an imprint of Penguin Books.