Mona Awad is a novelist of Egyptian and French Canadian heritage whose fiction employs black humour, satire, gothic horror and fantasy to excoriate the extremes women pursue in their quest for acceptance and beauty.
Awad’s 2016 debut novel-in-stories, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, followed a serial dieter whose identity changed along with her weight. Bunny, three years later, focused on a scholarship student who preferred her own dark imagination to the company of her fiction-writing cohorts, a clique of unbearable girls who called each other “Bunny” and seemed to move and speak as one.
The apotheosis of this deconstruction of feminine self-hatred is Rouge. In brief, the novel is about (Mira) Belle, a young woman insidiously obsessed with skin and skincare videos. The book opens with a hilarious description of the numerous creams, serums and masques whose application dominates Belle’s days. She watches videos of her cosmetic guru with religious fervour, falling asleep to mantras of self-care. Addicted to this regimen’s promise of “brightening” and “lightening”, she seeks the unattainable love and praise of her stunningly beautiful mother, Noelle, who took young Belle from their home in Montreal to pursue her dream of Hollywood stardom not long after her Muslim husband died. Belle was left with only his gift of a totemic Egyptian bracelet, his darker skin and impossibly thick hair.
As an adult, Belle returned to live in Montreal, but when Noelle mysteriously dies, she returns to San Diego to find her mother has racked up large debts. As well, there are persistent questions about Noelle’s death.
The stakes escalate when an unknown woman in a dark-red dress turns up at the funeral, offering intriguing insights into her mother’s end, followed by a mysterious video recording a spa experience. Wearing red high-heeled shoes, Belle is lured to La Maison de Méduse, the same high-end spa her mother was involved with .
My chief problem with this novel is that the lavish description of this strange beauty cult underscores the story’s most compelling aspect, which is Belle’s heartbreaking sense of inadequacy as the mixed-race, awkward child of a ghoulishly beautiful white mother whose red hair falls in a perfect S.
Belle loves and hates Noelle, whose own pursuit of eternal youth has fuelled her daughter’s obsession. Having failed to achieve stardom, Noelle lives on the generosity of scary, sexually inappropriate men who blockade Belle’s relationship with her mother.
The story is embroidered with endless descriptions of cracked mirrors, fallen rose petals and red shoes that echo those of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, as well as the deathly ballet slippers worn in The Red Shoes.
The mirrors bring to mind Snow White seeing her evil stepmother planning her destruction. Belle seems to be going to the mansion and back to her mother’s apartment over and over. All the trips seemed to be the same. The repetition drove me mad.
And everything was red or rouge: the vials containing the creams, the mysterious mansion, everyone’s eyes. And the seductive image which peers back at young Belle when she sneaks into her mother’s bedroom to look into her full-length mirror is none other than – the publisher’s lawyers must have given the nod – Tom Cruise.
Rouge is at heart a brutal takedown of the cosmetics industry that encourages young women to ransom themselves in pursuit of unattainable beauty, telling them how beautiful they are when they invest in their products when they are actually no different from before, only poorer and more dependent on the industry’s wiles.
In the end, I wished that Awad, who wrote a postgrad paper on fear in fairy tales, had listened to the Jungian scholar and psychologist, Marie-Louise von Franz, who said that fairy tales are the “purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes” and represent archetypes “in their simplest, barest and most concise form”.
Simplicity would have brought this gothic novel much further forward.
