ROUGE, by Mona Awad
At what point, a woman approaching a landmark birthday might wonder, has one fully surrendered to the beauty industry? Is it when the products in our morning routine exceed available shelf space, or the day we find ourselves electrocuting our faces in pursuit of “lift”? Do we measure vanity in the number of hair, skin and nail appointments on our calendars, or in the frequency of ads for collagen gummies cranked out by our social media algorithms?
Far beyond the realm of retinol creams and contouring treatments lies Mona Awad’s novel “Rouge,” a gothic comedy about a skin care vlog-obsessed young woman named Mirabelle (a.k.a. Belle), a Montreal shopgirl who, following the death of her glamorous mother, returns to the Southern California of her adolescence to settle her affairs. The moment Belle arrives at her mother’s waterfront condominium we understand her preoccupation with beauty products: The apartment is crammed with jars and vials, and the wall mirrors are all inexplicably cracked.
More mysteries lie in store as Belle discovers that her mother racked up considerable debt; at the memorial service, an unctuous woman wearing red smilingly informs her that her mother went “the way of roses,” when really it seems she fell into the Pacific and drowned. Trying on her mother’s red high-heeled shoes one evening, Belle is led to a fortresslike house on a cliff where an exclusive spa of sorts advertises a “Rendez-Vous With Yourself.” What ensues is a surrealist take on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which first mother, then daughter is drawn into a cultish underworld that preys on feminine insecurity and narcissism.
The extent to which the beauty industry has captured not only our money and our attention but our identities constitutes the subdermal tissue of Awad’s plot, which only slightly exaggerates the grotesque extremes to which many women go in pursuit of a “transformative experience,” as the woman in red puts it. Like the serial dieter of Awad’s 2016 debut, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” or the aspiring writer lured into a literary clique in her 2019 novel, “Bunny,” Belle is included in this indictment, becoming complicit in her own erasure. Our faces reveal less about the efficacy of our serums and rituals than the state of our souls, marked as they are by the things we internalize — from our families, from popular culture — and the experiences that shape and scar us.
Among the most gratifying moments in “Rouge” are a pair of scenes in which Belle must decide whether to level with a customer who emerges from the fitting room in a new dress, hopefully eyeing her own reflection, looking to Belle for affirmation. Awad is the novelist equivalent of the salesperson in a high-end boutique who refuses to flatter, whose eye penetrates too deeply for comfort. It’s not what you want to hear, but then again, there’s nothing quite like the acid-peel burn of candor. Maybe this is the real luxury, one that can’t be beautifully packaged and sold: the tonic point of view of someone perceptive enough to see us clearly and courageous enough to be honest.
At times, “Rouge” could have benefited from an editor with those same virtues. Its style is as maximalist as Belle’s skin care routine, intentionally overheated with fairy-tale allusions and repetitive tropes — an approach that clogs the narrative pores and dulls its radiance. The book feels at least 50 pages too long. In any case, Awad (who, like her fellow novelists Catherine Lacey and Alexandra Kleeman, vibrantly vivisects the culture of morbid self-regard) needn’t lean quite so heavily on postmodern burlesque.
Sweeping away the rose petals, looking-glass phantoms and pulsating jellyfish, one finds a story about a lonely, biracial girl growing up with an unfulfilled mother amid the warped reflections found in women’s magazines and fairy tales, in which unacknowledged colorism is both text and subtext. The story of Snow White is an unsettling motif in the novel, and Belle’s self-loathing is critically connected to the fact that she has inherited her Egyptian father’s darker skin and hair. Awad nails the beauty industry lingo that insidiously affirms this hierarchy of skin tone, in which “glow” and “brightening” are purely euphemisms.
Literature is another kind of transformative experience: not just a rendezvous with the self but a mirror reflecting that self’s relation to the world. “Rouge” points to many discomfiting truths about being a woman in the 21st century, which can sometimes feel an awful lot like gothic horror. Awad doesn’t let us off the hook in our willingness to consume and be consumed, in our inability to see beyond our glass coffins. You’ve tried “self-care,” but have you tried reading a novel?
Megan O’Grady is a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is working on a book about art and life.
ROUGE | By Mona Awad | 372 pp. | Marysue Rucci Books | $28
