ROUGE, more than a color...a way of life and a (bad) reason to live

ROUGE
MONA AWAD
Simon Element
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of Literary Hub's Best Reads od 2023!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in The Walrus (here). What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:

A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.

Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.