But the Girl

Starred review from January 15, 2024
Yu’s masterly debut follows an Australian Malaysian woman awarded a scholarship to visit the U.K., where she attends a month-long residency to work on a postcolonial novel. The unnamed narrator goes on leave from her literature PhD studies and settles in Scotland, where she meets other artists in the program, most of whom are white, and struggles to fit in. One, named Clementine, befriends her, but also mocks her in front of their peers by suggesting she knows something about the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MAS370: “Are you covering something up for the government? We can’t trust them. How can we trust you?” The group also complains about popular artists getting “cancelled” over their racism. Clementine further disenchants the narrator by offering thoughtful feedback to others, but focusing her critique of the narrator’s work on the narrator’s “diverse” identity. After a bout of writer’s block, the narrator eventually begins writing about her parents’ lives and how they came to Australia, drawing inspiration from her belief that as a second-generation immigrant daughter it is her responsibility to carry and preserve her family’s difficult past. Zhan’s bildungsroman brims with striking insights and fully realized characters, exploring with nuance and self-deprecating humor the fraught reality of navigating academic and artistic spaces as a woman of color. This signals the arrival of a bold new voice.

June 13, 2023
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.