I WAS THE PRESIDENT'S MISTRESS!!

The woman at the center of the Philippines’ political upheaval tells all.

Vita Nova is a pop-music and movie star with 20.2 million Instagram followers, and she has a lot to say to the offscreen interviewer about Philippine politics. She was, as the title says, a girlfriend of President Fernando Valdes Estregan, a hard-liner not dissimilar to real-life strongman Rodrigo Duterte. But Syjuco’s second novel does more than consider Vita a paramour: She’s at the center of stories the country tells itself about religion, relationships, journalism, and politics. The novel is structured around transcripts of interviews between Vita and about a dozen of the men in her life: a Catholic bishop, a Muslim political leader, a DJ, a journalist, a U.S. naval officer, and more. Because Vita has strong opinions about the country—and everybody has strong opinions about her—the novel has a headlong, assertive energy and a transgressive bent. (A content warning at the opening of the book isn’t kidding: Characters spew all manner of homophobic, Islamophobic, and sexist rhetoric.) Over the course of the novel, shifts in the political atmosphere—up to and including assassination—wind up putting Vita closer to the country’s destiny than she had expected. And with each interviewee, Philippine culture is revealed as more tragicomically corrupt. (A gluttonous warlord proclaims over a long meal: “We Christians would never commit such excess—Aha! Our sixth course!”) And the references to fake news, law and order, impeachment, and more make clear that we’re not just talking about the Philippines. The interview-transcript format stifles the novel’s arc somewhat, and everybody’s chatty tendencies wind up dragging the novel, despite its exclamatory provocations. But Syjuco’s most irreverent set pieces reveal how cultures can get a woman like Vita exactly backward—rather than the know-nothing sinner she’s dismissed as, she’s the scapegoat for everyone else’s greed and ineptitude.

An ingenious if exceedingly chatty yarn about scandal-struck society.