What literary satires reveal about the state of the publishing industry

I’ve been reading two very different novels with a lot in common. They are sharply satiric, highly entertaining black comedies about the business of writing books. And they are both narrated by literary fraudsters.

The American writer Rebecca F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface is about literary theft. Her heroine June Hayward, a not-very-successful novelist, is jealous of her friend Athena Liu’s stellar rise to fame with her tales drawing on Chinese history. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June nicks the manuscript of her next book and claims it as her own. She uses a new pen name, Juniper Song, and is not above allowing her readers to assume that she too is of Asian origin.

We’re not meant to like June, but boy, does she cop a hammering from the social media crowd. The book is a huge success, but as new facts emerge, she’s attacked, cancelled and haunted by what appears to be Athena’s ghost. She is permanently glued to her phone to see whether she’s up or down, and it’s a constant seesaw ride for the reader too.

Kuang is a bestselling writer of fantasy tales drawing on Chinese history (there’s a new one out, Katabasis), but wrote Yellowface as a response to her worst nightmare: becoming a “token Asian writer”. “I hate the feeling of being read just because somebody’s trying to tick off a diversity check box,” she told the New York Times. Her agent warned her that nobody would want to publish the book. But despite (or perhaps even because of) her scathing views, HarperCollins acquired it, and it’s become a monster international hit.

My second fraudster is an ambitious but as yet unsuccessful Australian novelist, the hero of Dominic Amerena’s debut novel I Want Everything. One day, he spots an elderly woman he recognises as Brenda Shales, who caused a literary sensation in the 1970s with two extraordinary novels (think Helen Garner or Elizabeth Jolley) but then disappeared.

He wrangles his way into her trust by pretending he’s her grandson and records her long confessional tales of her life and how she came to write those novels. This, he believes, will give him the foundations for an autobiography that will make his name.

It’s a tangled web he weaves… but the outcomes are far from predictable. This is not a satire of the publishing industry because our hero doesn’t yet have a book contract, but it’s certainly a comment on how fearfully difficult it is to scratch a living as a writer waiting for the big break. Like June, he goes through much anguish, but he’s still hopelessly dazzled by his own ingenuity and luck and not much troubled by ethics. I read on, hoping that his more successful writer girlfriend Ruth and the caustic Brenda would bring him down a notch and teach him a lesson or two.

Ultimately both these books are a grim insight into how untrammelled ambition, and the panicky feeling that you’ll never make it, can compromise writers’ dreams, with a publishing industry that does them no favours even when it seems to reward them.