the chosen and the beautiful book review

For him, it was all a wreck and a run, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.” Here, Vo offers Jordan’s careful eye on Gatsby that adds depth to Fitzgerald’s tragic hero: “I could see that for him, the world was always ending. Vo also writes him as a queer character, naturally finding a place in the Cendrillon. Gatsby is from West Egg, made of “new money,” looked down on by East Egg’s wealthy families – an outcast. Vo’s Cendrillon allows queer characters to take up space and amplifies the theme of social belonging and outcasts already in Fitzgerald’s novel. She describes herself as the “most elegant kind of vagabond” who doesn’t care too much about having a home, but names the Cendrillon as one-a place where she finds queer people like her. In the beautiful opening lines, she and Daisy are airborne thanks to a magical charm, floating around Daisy’s mansion like “puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam.”Īs an Asian, Jordan can never really settle into the social circles that a true Baker would, but Jordan is not the type of girl who settles, anyway. Jordan’s character is literally displaced from the very first page, even before we learn how she became a Baker in America. To revisit the canon through Vo’s reimaginings is to also revisit American history, made more complete with the immigrant and queer experience in additional settings like Chinatown and a fictional queer bar called the Cendrillon. Toklas’ Indochinese chef in Paris in The Alice B. De-centering Western literary giants and challenging them, Vo’s queer, Vietnamese Jordan Baker recalls the way Monique Truong brought forward the queer and Vietnamese character Binh in The Book of Salt from a footnote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. In Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, side character Jordan Baker becomes the main character, adopted-or, more accurately, kidnapped-as a baby in Tonkin (colonial Vietnam) by the well-off American, Miss Eliza Baker.

As imaginative and grandiose as Gatsby’s world was, it also painted the portrait of an exclusive 1920s America-socially, of course, but also racially.

When I read Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school alongside a few of my Vietnamese American classmates, I never dared to imagine a Vietnamese person in a Western story, and I doubt most of my classmates did either.

The chosen and the beautiful book review