Mona Awad’s novels leave the reader with a marvelously disorienting feeling like, what did I just read? In her pages, things are never quite as they appear.
In “Rouge,” Belle, a Canadian woman in perhaps her mid-thirties, goes to Southern California after her mother’s accidental death. Belle is a skincare aficionado, but she always felt insufficient around her glamorous mother and her string of boyfriends. At first, she wants nothing more than to settle her mother’s affairs and return to Montreal. But when she happens upon the mysterious spa that her mother visited and is given a free treatment with incredible results, she changes her mind. “Gone are the folds around my mouth; the scar on my forehead; my misery lines; the sad, slack jaw and the puffy, dark-ringed eyes. All is sharp and taut. All sparkles. Brightly. Whitely. Beautiful. I look beautiful.” Awad refers to fairy tales like “The Red Shoes” by Hans Christian Andersen and “Snow White” but only thematically—she looks to these stories for their broader cultural impact, such as jealousy between mothers and daughters and perceptions of beauty, and the idea of beauty or worth coming through an external application.
But she also makes a lot of other cultural references that are more lowbrow than that, because she’s really funny. This might sound absurd, and, well, it does: “I misted diligently between skins with the rosewater and birth milk Moon Juice to create what Marva calls a moisture mille-feuille. I then anointed myself with the Marine Collagen Regenerating Day Soufflé using her patented seventeen dot technique. The day Soufflé not only brightens, firms and plumps, but seals in the hydrating Moon Juice skins, preventing any trans-epidermal water loss.” But I defy anyone to watch two minutes of any skincare video on YouTube or (gulp) Gwyneth washing her face on Instagram and not find something on par. Is Awad just taking aim at the easy target of the beauty-industrial complex in “Rouge”? It’s certainly not that simple. The beauty industry is built on a sturdy foundation of hundreds of years of telling girls that their worth is tangled up with their physical beauty and their youth. Whether it’s the mother of a girl in a fairy tale or not, she might wish for her daughter to have skin as white as snow and blood-red lips while nevertheless feeling deeply envious as her own youth and beauty fade.
As Belle spends more time in her mother’s town, she seems to lose her grip on reality. She thinks she looks better than ever, but an acquaintance greets her with alarm. An old family friend is deeply concerned about her. And maybe even her mother wasn’t as stern as she recalls. She remembers telling her mother about a game she played with friends as a child called “Honestly.” “We sit in a circle and take turns closing our eyes. When you close them, you ask the circle Am I beautiful? and people raise their hands if they think yes and don’t raise them if they think no, sorry. And someone counts the hands for you, and that’s how you know honestly.” After Belle explains, her mother tells her to never play “that fucking game ever again.” Belle asks why and she blurts out, “Because it’s stupid, that’s why,” a reasonable enough answer for a tired mother who doesn’t have the energy to explain the many horrible aspects such a “game” could have on a group of girls, particularly friends, not to mention a child one loved and cherished.
If you’re already an Awad fan, consider this a worthy addition to her oeuvre. If you enjoy your fiction a little off the beaten path, funny, and brimming with intelligence, “Rouge”might be a perfect pick.
“Rouge” By Mona Awad Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books, 384 pages
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