The day when Daisy met Jay Gatsby again should have been beautiful, the same kind of day on which she had been married, or at least a crisp and dying summer day like the one where she had met the handsome young soldier. Instead silvery clouds hung overhead like wet rags out to dry, and when we stepped out of the car in front of Nick’s humble little place, we could both smell the rain, paused for the moment, but by no means gone. Back in Louisville, that high wet smell coupled with the uncomfortable prickling heat meant that a twister was on the way, crossing the flat cropland with a destructive fury that was out to ruin lives. We were in the East, however, and we had other ways to ruin our lives.
The prose Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is wonderfully languid and evocative, which is a good thing, since she draws her story from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Poor prose would sink her whole project, but as it is, this novel feels like a worthy tribute.
Vo tells her story through the eyes of Jordan Baker, who, in this version, was “rescued” from Vietnam by a white missionary woman who couldn’t bear to leave behind her favorite baby when she left. In general, Jordan seems confident and self-assured, despite being left on her own for much of her childhood. She goes to clubs, has affairs with men and women, and doesn’t seem to fret much about the ways she is different. But being reunited with her childhood friend Daisy and getting drawn into Jay Gatsby’s orbit shakes something loose in her, and she starts to uncover things about herself that she never knew before.
The supernatural elements of this story sneak up. In fact, at first, I thought Jordan was speaking in metaphors when she described magical happenings. But the book is suffused with magic. Jordan has special magical abilities, and Jay’s wealth is of demonic origin somehow, which makes perfect sense, really. I don’t recall the details of Gatsby well — I had to review a plot summary to refresh my memory before I got very far in this — but I was impressed with how well the magic was incorporated into the story without changing its essential elements. And this addition to the story helped me recognize just how much World War I must have haunted Nick and Jay. They brought those ghosts back with them.
As much as I admired the construction of the book and the creativity with which Vo adapts Gatsby to her own purposes, I wasn’t fully absorbed in the book. At times, despite how emotionally amped up it seemed like it should be, it felt a little cold and detached. But, in fairness, I think that’s a reflection of her drawing inspiration from Fitzgerald’s, whose prose style I enjoy but find similarly detached. So it’s not a flaw exactly, but something that keeps me from giving my heart to the book, despite finding what Vo is doing extremely interesting.
Shelf Love 
I thought the problem with this novel is that Nghi Vo makes Daisy a literal monster: “Daisy Buchanan was, underneath her dress waving surrender and her face like a flower, a rather handsome and lazy monster.” When we label people as monsters, we argue that they’re different from us, when the more insidious danger is that almost any person can make one bad decision and then maybe another and eventually work up to full-fledged monstrousness.
I couldn’t work out precisely what she was doing with Daisy’s character. That passage read to me as metaphorical, but when there are actual monsters, it’s hard to see it that way.