Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Girl and Sylvia

An invigorating work of many faces
by
October 2023, no. 458

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 224 pp

Girl and Sylvia

An invigorating work of many faces
by
October 2023, no. 458

In the modern literary landscape, the novel about a novelist writing a novel has become de rigueur. It can provide an ideal setting for a meditation on the complexities of living a creative life. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s début novel, But the Girl, follows in this contemporary tradition, but offers something more compelling than navel-gazing: a critique of classical literature, specifically the work of Sylvia Plath, through personal and academic lenses.

The novel considers Plath as both woman and writer through the eyes of its protagonist, referred to simply as Girl: an Asian-Australian student undertaking a residency in Scotland in order to write a postcolonial novel and a PhD on Plath’s poetry (‘Seriously, another Plath scholar? More ink spilled on this white woman in perpetua?’ asks another student incredulously). It takes a metatextual form, both inhabiting and deconstructing itself and its influences – Yu’s opening sentence riffs on the first lines of The Bell Jar, and she frequently pokes fun at the pretensions of the academic and literary worlds (Girl admits that she calls her work-in-progress a ‘postcolonial novel’ rather than an ‘immigrant novel’ even though she doesn’t know exactly what postcolonialism is).

Girl falls in love with The Bell Jar as an undergraduate student – ‘I felt something new, brand new… [it] kidnapped my mind clean away’ – and is just as quickly ‘hurt like hell’ to read Plath’s description of her own reflection as ‘a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face’. Exploring the contradiction of being simultaneously seen and erased by literature, Yu dissects Plath’s mythology in a way that reflects the modern parlance of a ‘problematic fave’.

But the Girl

But the Girl

by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 224 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.