R.F. Kuang belongs to a small class of novelists whose personal biography is discussed by fans and critics nearly as much as her fiction. We are captivated by stories of prodigies, after all, and Kuang started writing her first book, a fantasy-adventure novel about a poor girl attending an elite martial arts academy, when she was just 19 years old.
That debut novel, “The Poppy War,” was published in 2018, when Kuang turned 22, and the second and third books in the “Poppy War” trilogy, which are loosely based on the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War, followed in 2019 and 2020. At the same time, Kuang earned a Master of Philosophy degree in Chinese studies from Cambridge and a Master of Science in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford.
In the years since, Kuang published “Babel,” a bestselling fantasy novel set at a magical Oxford University that serves as a kind of anti-colonialist “Harry Potter,” and “Yellowface,” a dark-hearted literary thriller about a jealous white woman who becomes a literary sensation after she publishes her deceased Chinese American friend’s novel under her own name.
Last fall, Kuang announced that she was officially a Ph.D. candidate at Yale’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. And last month, Kuang published her sixth book, another academic fantasy novel called “Katabasis” (out now from Harper Voyager).
Kuang has sustained this superhuman workload for a decade now, and you might be forgiven for expecting her to be either shockingly frazzled or off-puttingly robotic in person. But in reality, Kuang is charming and generous with her time. Over the phone, she gamely answers questions about her work with thoughtful, candid answers.
When asked about the sharpness of the satire of the publishing industry in “Yellowface,” Kuang calls the book an “internet novel” that was written “in early 2021 when we were all in lockdown” and “spending eight hours a day doom-scrolling on Twitter.”
In “Yellowface,” Kuang explains, “every sentence is designed to sound like a viral tweet. So it’s provocative and reductive and it’s really, really mean.” In the course of writing the book, she discovered that “I don’t like writing and thinking like that. I don’t think I would write a novel like ‘Yellowface’ again,” she concludes.
Kuang doesn’t believe the sharp critiques in her academic novels have caused any problems for her academic career. “People have been very nice to me about ‘Babel,’” Kuang says. She pauses, before adding, “or at least anybody who really hates it hasn’t said anything to my face.”
“Katabasis” and “Babel,” Kuang says, are “ both mounting a critique of academia from different directions.” Where “Babel” offers “a big, systemic, sociohistorical critique” of academic systems, “Katabasis,” she explains, “tunnels inward and actually has a deliberate blindness about systemic problems.”
It’s admittedly very funny that a student in the process of earning her Ph.D. should decide to write a novel about Alice, a graduate student studying magic at a fantasy version of Cambridge who journeys to hell in order to retrieve her recently deceased professor, Jacob Grimes, for purely selfish reasons. On the first page of the book, Alice reasons that “without Professor Grimes she had no committee chair, and without a committee chair she could not defend her dissertation, graduate, or apply successfully for a tenure-track job in analytic magick.”
But Kuang isn’t interested in writing a satire of her own experiences as a Ph.D. candidate. She’s set “Katabasis” during what she describes as the “’80s heyday of the Reagan/Thatcher cultural moment and the rise of neoliberalism,” she says, “because the mentality then was to deny the existence of structural inequality and to push this myth that everything is up to your own personal agency.”
Setting the book in that time period allowed Kuang the opportunity to explore what she calls “the cult of the abusive teacher.” Taken one way, she says, cruel professors are seen as “this abusive megalomaniac teacher who grooms their students and treats them horribly.”
“But there’s another reading,” Kuang says, “which is that (abuse) is just what it takes to achieve greatness.”
It’s a serious investigation of an important idea, but “Katabasis” is Kuang’s funniest book by far, recalling the fantasy-satire blend of Terry Pratchett. On her Dantesque journeys through the underworld, Alice meets a series of Shades, deceased students who are still working diligently on their degrees for all eternity. One Shade gossips about his cohort, claiming one “Made his wife call him Doctor. He’s a medievalist, mind you.”
The magic in the book is less of the Hogwarts variety and more interested in exploring paradoxes like Zeno’s Arrow. “Magic is always a way for me to play around with, or kind of unfold the concept” of the book in a way that realism cannot, Kuang explains.
“The paradoxes are a way for me to explore the peculiar delusion that is common to people in graduate programs,” she says. In her experience, grad students often “build these cages of belief around themselves and they can’t break out, but the cages of belief are also the only thing that keeps them going.”
Kuang has published both of her dark academia critiques at a time when academia is under attack from far-right political forces in the U.S. and abroad. She opposes the anti-intellectual fervor that is promoting book bans and whitewashing history in learning institutions around the country and the world, but she still thinks it’s important to be critical of the way that universities gatekeep their institutions behind walls of wealth and class.
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“I’ve never stopped teaching to write full-time because I love those moments of revelation where you can literally see the light go on in a student’s mind,” Kuang says. “It’s just that on a bureaucratic level, almost everything about the modern academy is designed to stifle that.”
But her critiques come from a place of love. Kuang seeks to improve academia with her fiction.
“People go into academia because they want to learn and discover things, and they want to share that with the world,” Kuang says. “I think that’s the purest goal of the academy. And that’s a magic that I still believe in.”
AUTHOR EVENT
“Katabasis”
R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 560 pp., $32
Kuang will be at Town Hall Seattle for an event with Seattle Arts & Lectures at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12. 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle; in-person tickets start at $72, streaming pay-what-you-can tickets start at $46; 206-621-2230; lectures.org
Paul Constant: thisispaulconstant@gmail.com. Paul Constant is a Seattle-based writer and the co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. His Neighborhood Reads series appears monthly in The Seattle Times.