Book review: Mona Awad’s Rouge is a ravishing Gothic skincare novel told in a fairy-tale voice

Rouge

By Mona Awad
Fiction/Scribner/Hardcover/384 pages/$36.84/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/495fj25

)
4 stars

“Each morning we must arm ourselves,” incants the cultish voice of beauty guru Marva through Mirabelle’s screen, “against the many free radicals and pollutants that assail the air, leaving their unsightly oxidising marks on our epidermis”.

Mirabelle’s mother is dead. But flying back from Montreal for Noelle Des Jardin’s funeral – a party, as they call it in California – all she can think of is Marva’s voice urging her to follow her skincare routine: Botanical Resurrection Serum, Diamond-Infused Revitalising Eye Formula, Orpheus Flower Peptide Complex.

Mirabelle takes after her mother, who obsesses over fair skin and eternal youth, although the daughter has always felt she cannot quite live up to her mother’s beauty. (Her dead father, as Noelle tells a young Mirabelle in the book’s haunting fairy-tale prologue, was from a place where people were “darker and they were hairier”.)

Canadian novelist Mona Awad, born to an Egyptian father and a French-Canadian mother, plays with tropes of beauty in well-known fairy tales of Snow White and Beauty And The Beast in Rouge, and renovates them for the contemporary readership.

In Rouge, she constructs a ravishing Gothic castle of a tale that resonates eerily with this age of beauty influencers and a bloating skincare industry.

Fellow Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood – the high priestess of dystopian fiction herself – has publicly named Awad her “literary heir apparent”, and Rouge, Awad’s fourth novel, lives up to these great expectations.

After Noelle’s death, Mirabelle falls into a rut but a pair of red shoes guides her – there is a nod to Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard Of Oz – to a black polished concrete mansion that tempts her with free treatment, although she intuits that something is terribly off in a place with menacing jellyfish.

Like Atwood, Awad is a prescient bard of social malaise. Rouge is an imaginative novel that satirises the beauty industrial complex and its hold on young women, much like how one of her previous novels, Bunny (2019), is a satire of the cloistered elitism in the creative writing workshop.

Awad’s eminently magnetic prose style is distinguished by her short, clipped sentences which have the power to scar and soothe. It is Gothic prose without its usual excesses; the melodrama lies in her propulsive snips of dialogue and description that keep readers on their edge.

With its glut of colours, reading Rouge fires the visual imagination. It is a world of pleasures and horrors to sink into. It is akin to gazing at the abstract compositions of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian: red lips, red dress, red shoes, black mansion, black door, white skin, and Mirabelle’s eyes are “the colour of mud”.

On the surface, it is a novel challenging conventional standards of beauty. But the more one reads of Mirabelle’s detachment from reality – in one scene, she turns into a ventriloquist for a voice in the mirror and loses her own – the more one realises this is a novel, too, about grief.

In a free facial treatment session, where she is promised a journey to become her Most Magnificent Self, the narrator Mirabelle says of the clinician: “I look into her eyes, bright like stars. I first saw them with my child’s mind. They dazzled me then, and they dazzle me still. I nod. A tear falls from my eye. The first I’ve truly shed since I learned about Mother.”

This is not just a skin-deep novel happy to deliver what could have been an obvious satire – it is a hushed modern fairy tale that peels off its layers to reveal a tender, gothic heart.

If you like this, read: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Penguin Random House, 2007, $21.70, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/45O2pCX

). Like Rouge, colour is an important motif in the Nobel laureate’s formidable first book from 1970. The book is Morrison’s profound examination of white beauty standards through the story of a young African-American girl who longs for blue eyes.