Mona Awad’s Rouge (2023) is part of a trend in horror fiction that explores the scary side of beauty. Tracing a line between self-care and self-destruction, novels on this theme consider what happens when techniques for improving the body become torture in the pursuit of an unattainable ideal. Awad’s contribution stands out because it demonstrates her talent for making fairy tales fresh. Reinterpreting elements of Snow White for a contemporary audience, she holds a magic mirror up to the relationship between a biracial woman and her white mother, revealing the ugly emotions just below the surface. The novel successfully balances horror and humor in its treatment of a difficult subject–the potentially toxic effects of white beauty standards on children of color. Yet, while the story is important and the characters well drawn, I was disappointed by the degeneration of the narrator’s voice, a breakdown in both memory and language that stalls the plot in tedious wordplay and farcical scenarios.
Taking a brief leave from her dreary life in Montreal, Mirabelle returns to California to settle the affairs of her mother, Noelle, who has died in a fall from a cliff. The women had a complicated relationship. With tan skin and textured hair inherited from an Egyptian father she never knew, Mirabelle always felt ugly next to her mother, whose porcelain complexion and smooth red tresses made her the embodiment of white Western beauty. Yet while intimidated by Noelle’s seeming perfection, Mirabelle was also enthralled by the elaborate practices required to maintain it; a fascination that, as she grew older, blossomed into a full-blown obsession with skin care. Now, in the aftermath of her mother’s death, Mirabelle is confronted with a legacy of staggering debt. She needs to make decisions quickly but is immobilized by an ambivalent grief that resists expression or resolution. In this state of emotional paralysis, she receives a box that threatens to unearth awful memories from her childhood. She also discovers a pair of magical red shoes that carry her in a semi-conscious state to a francophile spa called Rouge. Noelle was a regular there and the management is eager to recruit her daughter. But Mirabelle is uneasy. Could there be a connection between Rouge’s mysterious beauty treatments and Noelle’s death? Mirabelle is on the threshold of discovering her mother’s greatest beauty secret, but is she ready to follow in her footsteps?
Reimagining fairy tale themes in a modern setting, Awad could have easily cast Noelle as the Evil Queen, a cold white mother, whose negative intentions are transparent. But instead she constructs a complex character who exists uneasily at the intersection of competing and sometimes contradictory forces. While it’s true that Noelle enjoys the privileges of white beauty, she’s also entrapped by them. Her sense of self worth is contingent on her appearance, which is also her primary form of currency. Without any marketable skills, she can only imagine a future in Hollywood and must trade sexual favors for opportunities in an impenetrable industry. 10-year-old Mirabelle often portrays her mother as a heartless figure, but it’s through her limited perspective–her naive misconstruals of adult behavior–that we get a more comprehensive picture. And what we see is pretty bleak: Despite her glamor, Noelle is a widowed mother from a provincial background, struggling in a quid-pro-quo environment with nothing to offer but her looks.
Yet, while Noelle is a sympathetic figure in a precarious situation, she’s also an enforcer of racist ideologies. Her infatuation with beauty brings the demands of white Western aesthetics into the supposedly safe haven of the home; so that, even in this intimate space away from the world, her daughter has no refuge from a culture that calls her ugly. This is illustrated when Mirabelle is upset by Vogue’s color palettes, and Noelle responds, “I don’t make the rules.” Maybe not. But by reading “the rules” out loud in the living room, she makes it impossible for Mirabelle to escape their coercive force. In these ways–and in so many others–Noelle harms her daughter. And yet her desire to protect Mirabelle is undeniable. It’s this confluence of qualities in Noelle–her love, ignorance, envy, and even aggression–that make her a powerful character and the perfect vehicle for exploring the unique difficulties of an interracial mother/daughter relationship.
Rouge compels you to balance and recalibrate your responses to difficult characters. And while I was invested in this process in the novel’s early chapters, I began to lose interest as Mirabelle’s narrative voice was transformed. When we first meet her, she’s cynical and judgemental but also articulate and entertaining in her moody ruminations. She’s especially fluent in the language of beauty products, and her meditations on skin care almost rise above the prosaic into the rarified air of poetry. Dense with phrases like “brightening caviar,” “moon jelly,” and “moisture millefeuille,” these passages orchestrate graceful collisions between seemingly unrelated nouns and adjectives, leaving strange images in their wake. Unfortunately, after beginning treatment at Rouge, she loses access to her full linguistic catalog and her range of expression is increasingly diminished. Awad represents this loss through a series of meaningful slips. For example, in a post-treatment brain fog, Mirabelle unintentionally substitutes the word “sin” for “skin,” “dead” for “dress,” and “fascist” for “fashion.” The slips are clever, but after the first 10 instances, they become tedious. So too do Mirabelle’s comic reintroductions to people she should already know. Her amnesia leads to uncomfortable and, yes, funny, interactions. However, routines like this become old fast, and one awkward meeting is enough to make the point that she’s been changed.
By the middle of the novel, the narrative voice that had initially engaged me has been gutted. This is “style mirroring substance,” and in a book about the erasure of identity, a simplification in language makes sense. To a degree. However, Awad takes it past the point of interest and into the land of gimmick.
When she’s not experiencing aphasic episodes, MIrabelle is narrating from the vantage point of her 10-year-old self, thinking and speaking as a child without the wisdom of age and hindsight. I don’t like child narrators because they’re created by adults who are trying to remember what it’s like to be young; and their recollections of youth tend to be too wistful. Kids are not as stupid as we think. And without being especially precocious, a 10-year-old girl would know that celebrities don’t live in mirrors and that a red-eyed Tom Cruise in the glass is something to flee. That such magical phenomena are possible within the world of the novel is part of the fairy tale horror, I know. But young Mirabelle’s easy acceptance of the unbelievable made her difficult to like, and I was eager to escape her headspace, which was just too credulous for my jaded sensibility. One thing to pay attention to in these chapters is the introduction of Egyptian mythological themes by way of the character Seth and the Eye of Horus bracelet. Seth’s aversion to this bracelet is subtle and his antipathy is never explained, but the allusions add depth to the story and provide terms for a Google deep dive.
In subject, style, and construction, Rouge takes risks, and they don’t always pay off. Still, if you’re interested in the burgeoning sub-genre of beauty horror, Rouge is a smart and poignant addition that’s worth checking out.