Highly-Anticipated Book Review: "The Chosen and the Beautiful" by Nghi Vo

Anna May Wong in flapper style… or Jordan Baker at one of Gatsby’s decadent parties?

Over the last year and a half, the thought has often occurred to me that if I were an extremely business-savvy playwright who didn’t get mentally derailed in the early months of the pandemic, I would have spent 2020 writing a Great Gatsby adaptation that could be done over Zoom. After all, Gatsby entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2021, and with its instantly recognizable title, not-too-large cast of characters, and opportunity for designers to run wild with Art Deco aesthetics, it’s ripe for adaptation (a musical version, with score by Florence Welch, was announced this spring). This also makes it especially ironic that the last big show I saw before theater shut down was Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. Now that anyone can make their own Gatsby play without wrangling with the Fitzgerald estate, will Gatz ever be seen again?

But of course, theater artists are not the only people making big plans for Gatsby adaptations now that it’s in the public domain. Novelists, too, want to get in on the action. One of the first, and most intriguing, Gatsby retellings is Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, which promised to bring the sensibility of a queer, Asian-American speculative fiction writer into Fitzgerald’s WASP-y world. I picked it up from the library last week and spent the end of this strange and eerie summer of 2021 reading about the strange and eerie summer of 1922, waiting, like Jordan Baker, for “life [to] start all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you’re going to go head-to-head with F. Scott Fitzgerald, queering and diversifying and re-enchanting The Great Gatsby now that it's in the public domain and such things are possible, you’d better be able to write. I mean, Gatsby provides such lyrical rhapsodies as “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Fortunately, Nghi Vo is up to the task. Her novel The Chosen and the Beautiful is full of seductive, glittering descriptions of New York in the summer of 1922: “Something at the heart of the trees on his property gleamed, and I saw more than one beautiful girl up in the branches, trying to grasp that sweet and lovely light with their hands. They came up empty, and while most gave up, a Black girl in a moiré silk dress remained up in the bare branches, her dress like a cocoon and her face stained with tears for seeing her desire so close and yet so untouchable.” The vibes, as they say, are impeccable.

This is The Great Gatsby retold from Jordan Baker’s perspective: a bisexual, Vietnamese-American Jordan Baker. Just like Fitzgerald’s Jordan, she is cool-headed and smart-mouthed, but now we can interpret those traits as defense mechanisms for her uneasy position as one of the only Asian faces in high society. With Jordan as narrator, The Chosen and the Beautiful focuses on her complicated friendship with Daisy Fay Buchanan, something that I don’t think Fitzgerald had much interest in at all. I especially liked the flashbacks to their girlhood together in Louisville (Jordan grew up there after being adopted by a white American socialite/missionary). And, since innumerable students have written essays about how Jordan and Nick are queer-coded, making them explicitly queer feels like the only logical choice for a 21st-century author. Plus, it makes Gatsby’s tangle of messy emotions and relationships even stranger and messier.

Although, getting the story from Jordan’s perspective makes you notice a plot hole in both this novel and Fitzgerald’s: if Jordan witnessed Gatsby and Daisy’s fling in Louisville in 1917, and has been going to Gatsby’s parties in spring 1922, why didn’t she tell Daisy and make the connection? Why does Nick have to be the middleman? Yes, Fitzgerald has Jordan say “His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years—even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man,” and Vo has Jordan say “They had the same pale eyes, the same generous and mobile mouth, the same way of carrying their weight as if it were nothing at all, and yet you would never think they were related, let alone the same man.” But neither of these sentences convinces me: after all, it’s just a few years later and “Gatsby” is not a common surname. Couldn’t Fitzgerald and/or Vo have structured it so that Gatsby was still using his birth name, James Gatz, when he first met Daisy? That would make everything make so much more sense.

More problematically, the addition of magic and fantasy elements felt like it was one complication too many. There doesn’t seem to be much thought to Vo’s world-building; in the first hundred pages or so, the fantastical elements include enchanted flight and acrobatics, demon’s-blood cocktails, ghostly hauntings, selling one’s soul to hell, and doing magic by cutting shapes out of paper. It all feels rather superficial: a grab-bag of nifty ideas that doesn’t consider the deeper changes that would happen in society if one of those things were possible, let alone all of them. Contrast this with another Tor Books fantasy that’s inspired by classic literature, the Jane Austen-with-magic Shades of Milk and Honey (my review) —in that book, the rules are always clear about how magic works and what it can and can't do.

So I didn’t quite believe all the twists at the end of the novel, especially the supernatural ones. (But then, does anyone really believe all the twists at the end of Gatsby? Viewed objectively, that book has a very bizarre plot.) And I do have to give Nghi Vo props for the way she responds to the most famous final paragraph in American literature. (highlight for spoiler) She inverts it: instead of being “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” Jordan uses magic to have a vision of the future. A final, beautiful choice.