But the Girl (Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, Vintage)

Set in the ‘undecided and hazy spring’ when MAS370 disappeared, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel But the Girl transports us to London, where an Australian narrator of Chinese Malaysian provenance, known only as Girl, is en route to a month-long artist residency in Scotland. The way Girl moves through the world in this discombobulating time gives the story its loose narrative structure, though much takes place in her interiority, which is not to say (as I would of works of Ottessa Moshfegh’s ilk) that nothing happens. As Girl oscillates between writing her thesis on Sylvia Plath, a postcolonial novel—a ‘theoretical, distant and impressive’ term for an immigrant novel—and neither of those two things, we journey into the recesses of her mind and memories. Utilising the meta structure of a novel-in-a-novel and punctuated with the singsong cadence of Manglish, But The Girl unfolds at a languorous pace, yet the urgency of the ideas and themes explored propel it forward. Yu writes about the legacy of being a second-generation immigrant, racism, intergenerational trauma, the reclamation of English as a subject of colonisation, and the pitfalls of academia with biting incisiveness and gallows humour. Yu’s background as a poet comes to the fore in her evocative descriptions, and the book is rich with astute observations and lyricism. But The Girl will appeal to readers of André Dao, Claire Kohda and Carmen Maria Machado.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews