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Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo

Published 9 Aug 2021 by Gin Jenny

tldr: Wow.

When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author in I don’t know how long. BRACE YOURSELF; and know in advance that I am not even slightly sorry.)

Now there is The Chosen and the Beautiful. As I launch into what isn’t so much a review as it is a praise hymn, I feel that I should first specify that I quite like The Great Gatsby. I liked it when I read it in high school, despite having little to no interest in any of the other writers from this era that we had to read in school. (I liked some of Ezra Pound’s poetry, but it turns out that he is, unfortunately, a fascist.) More recently when I was doing my project of rereading books I owned by white men to see if they still worked for me (three did not; two did, ish), I still liked The Great Gatsby. It’s true that my interest in rich whites dicking each other around is limited, but what can I say? Fitzgerald is a good writer! So that’s my background vis-a-vis The Great Gatsby, of which The Chosen and the Beautiful is a queer, immigrant, fantasy retelling.

Having read The Chosen and the Beautiful, I do not see any reason that I would ever need to read The Great Gatsby again.

Honestly? I don’t see a reason that anyone will ever need to read The Great Gatsby again, except as a companion piece if you are trying to understand and analyze The Chosen and the Beautiful more fully. The Chosen and the Beautiful so monumentally captures the spirit of Gatsby (not surprising, given that we too are survivors of forever-war and worldwide plague) while attending to its failings that it truly feels not like an homage, but like a successor. If original-flavor The Great Gatsby was the book the world needed then, The Chosen and the Beautiful is the version we need now.

It centers Jordan Baker (remember her? Nick’s louche tennis-playing love interest?), who in this telling is a queer Vietnamese American adoptee conditionally accepted into the ranks of the rich and gorgeous. She’s friends with Daisy, makes friends with Nick, and is recruited by Gatsby to help forward his cause with Daisy — a thing Jordan is not particularly inclined to do. Like Nick in the original Gatsby, but perhaps even more so because she’s more of an outsider, Jordan observes everything around her, making her own judgments and trying to preserve her own sense that she can easily extricate herself from this world she loves and despises. As Daisy and Gatsby stagger through their doomed summer love affair, Jordan is making discoveries of her own, about her magic, her heritage, and the path that brought her to America in the first place.

If I started quoting every piece of beautiful writing in The Chosen and the Beautiful, we’d be here all day, so I will just kick it to this tweet instead:

In addition to being a near-perfect prose stylist, no offense to other writers, Nghi Vo has also included an amount of magic that is exactly correct. I am qualified to determine this because I:

  1. have read a number of books with magic in;
  2. am judgmental about all sorts of things, not just amounts of magic in books; and
  3. absolutely definitely don’t have any kind of hidden agenda about making Nghi Vo the most powerful and respected writer in all the land

Demons exist in this world, and Gatsby has very probably sold his soul to one in exchange for the chance to win back Daisy Fay. At his parties, they sip demoniac (made from demon’s blood) as well as champagne. Perhaps more viscerally, Jordan has a talent that seems to come from her Vietnamese family, though her adoption into a white family has ensured that she was never taught its parameters or how best to use it. No part of this book isn’t perfect, but the perfectest part is the magic-related revelation at the very end of the book. Like everything else, it’s wry and understated; but the implications of what it means for [Redacted] are devastating, and the implications for Jordan herself will slam into you like a freight train.

The Chosen and the Beautiful shines in every possible way. It doesn’t just excel as a retelling in its own right; it also illuminated for me what I want out of all retellings. I want them to tell me something new about the old story — something magical and special and important, something I hadn’t thought about before. Nghi Vo is telling us something new about The Great Gatsby on every page. tldr: Wow.

Note: I received an electronic ARC of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. If publishers could cause me to love books this much simply by providing me with an ARC, I would presume that like Gatsby they had done a deal with a nefarious power. So I am pretty sure the book’s just very fucking good.

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