Sex and Vanity: A Novel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 7

Part 1, Chapters 8-15

Part 2, Chapters 1-9

Part 2, Chapter 10-Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: Kevin Kwan

Kevin Kwan is an American author known for his satirical and humorous writings. Kwan was born in Singapore into an established Chinese Singaporean family. His great-grandfather was a founding director of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, and Queen Elizabeth II knighted his paternal grandfather for his philanthropic work. These facets of Kwan’s familial background emerge across Kwan’s novels. When Kwan was 11, he and his family immigrated to the United States, where he received his high school education, studied photography at Parsons School of Design in New York, and later wrote and worked for publications and companies, including Interview Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Ted.com, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New York Times.

Kwan’s 2013 literary debut, Crazy Rich Asians, immediately established him as a respected humorist and satirist. Kwan developed the concept for this work of social commentary while spending time with his father before his death. Crazy Rich Asians began as a standalone short story titled “Singapore Bible Study,” which eventually grew into “a sprawling, multi-generational mock epic that centers on a clan of Singaporeans whose various factions gather from their respective lairs around the globe for a wedding that is the year’s most talked-about event among the international Chinese aristocracy” (Christensen, Lauren. “Crazy Rich Asians Author Kevin Kwan on the Lavish Culture of Asia’s Upper Crust: ‘The Reality Is Simply Unbelievable.’” Vanity Fair, 11 June 2013). The novel was an international bestseller and has since been adapted into a film. In 2015 and 2017, Kwan respectively published China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems, the final two installments in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. Both novels have received wide acclaim.

Kwan’s 2020 novel Sex and Vanity expounds upon the same satirical, social, and political themes as his preceding three novels. In Kwan’s signature style, Sex and Vanity uses wit, absurdity, and hyperbole to craft deft class and cultural commentaries. Sony Pictures purchased the rights to Sex and Vanity in July 2020, and the film is in production. Kwan’s fourth novel, Lies and Weddings, was released in 2024. Like Sex and Vanity, Lies and Weddings is another “outrageous comedy of manners” exploring the repercussions of a forbidden love affair that “erupts volcanically amid a decadent tropical wedding” (“Lies and Weddings.” Kevin Kwan). Kwan’s literary, artistic, and personal backgrounds have made him a formative voice in contemporary literature. Furthermore, Kwan’s fictional explorations and cultural commentaries have paved the way for his literary and cinematic contemporaries.

Literary Context: Retelling Classic Literature

Sex and Vanity is Kevin Kwan’s reimagining of E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room With a View. Sex and Vanity employs the same narrative impetus as Forster’s English novel but recontextualizes the characters and conflicts within 21st-century American culture. In A Room With a View, Lucy Honeychurch travels abroad with her persnickety spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. Charlotte is immediately dissatisfied with their accommodations in Italy and makes a scene about the drab view outside their hotel room windows. Kwan reimagines these same narrative circumstances in Sex and Vanity. Borrowing approximate names and locations from Forster’s story, Kwan exposes the absurdity of high society through Lucie Churchill’s and Charlotte Barclay’s ventures abroad and in New York.

Sex and Vanity thus joins a tradition of contemporary retellings of literary classics. Like his contemporary novelists, Kwan manipulates his novel’s setting to reveal how cultural trends and social constructs pervade Western culture and history. Indeed, Kwan organically translates the same sociopolitical and socioeconomic conflicts that define Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett’s narrative world to his characters Lucie Churchill and Charlotte Barclay’s narrative world. Furthermore, Kwan’s retelling of this British classic introduces more complex themes concerning cultural identity, dual heritage, and race and class dynamics in high society. While Forster’s Lucy is white and middle class, Kwan’s Lucie is Chinese American and upper class. Her cultural background augments her displacement throughout the novel and intensifies the narrative’s primary conflicts. Kwan’s lens, therefore, exposes the racial prejudice that dictates erroneous codes of conduct between the economic classes in contemporary American society.