Magic is unavoidable in Vo’s West and East Egg, but although it may be consumed by those at the center of American society, it emanates from those at its periphery.

In this alternate America, the fear of demons is consistently paralleled with the fear of immigrants.

Even magic, whether a charm, an enchantment or a potion (which are always consumed as cocktails), can only win them a brief reprieve from the decisions others make for and about them.ĪLSO IN BOOKPAGE: Nghi Vo on the dangers of Hemingway. Throughout the book, the women’s choices are constrained by those of the men surrounding them. In the first scene of the book, for instance, when the two women go flying through Daisy’s house with a magic charm, they must return demurely to the couch when Daisy’s husband comes home. She sees herself as American, the daughter of the Louisville Bakers, but neither her white peers nor the Vietnamese immigrants she meets agree with her.įor both Jordan and Daisy, magic can offer some surcease, but only to a point. This is further complicated by Jordan’s inability to remember anything of her childhood in Vietnam before she was brought to Kentucky. By foregrounding Jordan’s and Daisy’s perspectives rather than Nick’s, she recasts a story about the consequences of male overreach as one about the limitations of female and non-white agency. But it is Vo’s additions to Gatsby’s original plot that truly shine. Vo is a remarkable writer whose talent for reviving Fitzgerald’s style of prose is reminiscent of Susanna Clarke channeling Jane Austen in Jonathan Strange & Mr. The result is an utterly captivating series of speakeasies, back-seat trysts, parties both grand and intimate and romances both magical and mundane, all spiraling through a miasma of Prohibition-era jingoism and entitlement toward its inevitably tragic conclusion.ĪLSO IN BOOKPAGE: Summer reading 2021: 9 books to soak in this season Retold from the perspective of Daisy Buchanan’s best friend, amateur golfer Jordan Baker-here recharacterized as a wealthy Louisville missionary family’s adopted Vietnamese daughter-the familiar contours of Fitzgerald’s tragedy are warped with a hazy dash of demonic and earthly magic. And yet, in The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo perfectly strikes that balance of the new and the familiar. This dilemma is only heightened when the book in question is as widely read as F. Too much and fans will shun it out of pique too little and they’ll shun it out of disinterest. Adapting classic works of literature is always challenging, not least because the adapting author must decide how much novelty is appropriate.

Nghi vo the chosen and the beautiful