Writing Sample: Book Review

Writing sample of a Publisher’s Weekly–style book review.

Sex and Vanity: A Novel

Kevin Kwan. Doubleday, $26.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-385-54627-0

We first meet Lucie Tang Churchill during an extravagant wedding week in Capri. Lucie, who is hapa—half Chinese-American, half WASP—and she finds herself equally drawn to and repelled by a fellow wedding guest, the aloof, Chinese-Australian George Zao. After their nearly scandalous hookup at the wedding reception—after which the first hints of the thinly veiled racism in the WASP side of her family are revealed—Lucie retreats to New York, repressing all thoughts of George like a proper WASP. Then, following a five-year flash forward, Lucie has drifted into an engagement with a vain incubus and parvenu named Cecil Pike. When George suddenly deus ex machinas back onto the scene, his return sets off a series of farcical events. Kwan’s follow-up to the smashing Crazy Rich trilogy contains similarly sharp observations on race and class as his earlier novels, and he continues to serve up these insights with a heaping portion of conspicuous consumption. Engraved invitations into the characters’ heads seem to have gotten lost in the mail, however; that’s likely the result of using E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View as a rough template, and the strain seems to have caused the characters to flatten. Sex and Vanity is a serviceable vacation read, or at the very least a forgettable escape from the nightmare of 2020. The crazy rich scenery makes up for any disappointments—after all, Champagne that’s lost a little of its fizz is still Champagne. (Jun.)

Reviewed on: October 1, 2020

Release date: June 30, 2020

Genre: Fiction