“For me… the main thing is just how deep a love can be, and how much everything else can complicate it,” explained violinist and author Ling Ling Huang.
She was excavating the layered themes in her novel Immaculate Conception, a nominee for the 2026 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. The book circles the lives of two young artists, tracking the jealousy-driven decisions of its main character with sharp specificity. Add a suspiciously decent billionaire, a low-lit laboratory staffed by ghostly workers, and a cutthroat contemporary art scene, and the novel becomes as exploratory as it is incisive.
Huang’s debut novel, 2023’s Natural Beauty, crafted biting horror within an elite beauty company. Immaculate Conception expands on her penchant for caustic commentary and emotional precision. It’s an ambitious book: literary with a sci-fi bent, concerned with technological ethics, loss of faith, and the competitive undercurrent that can destroy loving friendships, particularly between women artists.
You might recognize the contours of rivalrous friendships, but none of us have taken our resentment as far as Enka, Immaculate Conception’s central character. She’s a “fringe” artist in a stratified world where sculptural barriers, called “buffers,” divide her lower-class kind from privileged “enclave” folks. Enka ekes out a scholarship to art school and meets Mathilde, an “enclave” who’s already an art star halfway through undergrad. They bond, but Enka’s class status fuels her envy—understandably, at first—while Mathilde, poised for international renown, carries her own constellation of traumas. Enka spirals and self-sabotages, and Mathilde evolves as a feminist mystic and artistic genius—but if history tells us anything, those types rarely escape unscathed.
An oligarch family claims Mathilde’s trauma could be eased by SCAFFOLD, a novel brain-linking technology that would allow Enka to inhabit her mind—although there is some fine print. The novel’s fortress society is tangled with dystopian technology like this; AI art appears, even cloning. It’s a lot to navigate. Then again, many of us practice a similar balancing act, holding our technological anxieties in one hand and everyday survival in the other.
At a recent author talk, Huang played a Janáček violin sonata. Its “obsessive rhythmic motif and uglier sounds” are “part of the DNA” of Immaculate Conception, she explained. A substitute violinist with the Oregon Symphony, Huang’s novel draws inspiration from her own jealousy-fraught relationship with a fellow violinist in college, an experience she first explored in her 2025 Vogue essay “My Boyfriend’s Secret Girlfriend Was My Best Friend.” Immaculate Conception continues to pluck at the strings of that friendship.
“I think the biggest thing that happened during and after the writing was that I forgave myself for forgiving her…for loving her,” Huang said.
Like scaffolding, jealousy is a shield, a temporary structure designed to protect us from deeper pain. But it can harden into something more dangerous. In Immaculate Conception, we learn that what matters is how tightly you hold on.
The 2026 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th, Mon April 20, 7:30 pm, $5-$65, literary-arts.org.
