“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,” he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?”
Part fairy tale, part indictment of the beauty industry, Rouge tells a story that could be pigeonholed as fun, creepy horror if it wasn’t so crushingly relatable. With magic mirrors, predatory bogeymen, and fantastical transformations, author Mona Awad isn’t exactly going for literary realism here; but as an examination of mothers and daughters, the time girls and women spend harshly judging ourselves and each other, the pain we will endure in an effort to inspire envy and desire — these are important social issues and there is much literary satisfaction in Awad wrapping their examination in the stories through which we (in the West) would have first internalised the impossible ideals of feminine beauty and behaviour. And the whole thing’s pretty damn creepy. I was entertained throughout while recognising that I was being shown hard truths, and if I had a small complaint, it would be that this felt just a tad too long. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.
As Rouge begins, Belle (Mirabel Nour; a name that “looks like night but means light”) has travelled from her Montreal home to California in order to settle her recently deceased mother’s affairs. We soon learn that Belle’s relationship with her mother — who had been a great beauty; a wannabe moviestar in the perfect Chanel red lip — had been complicated; and while they weren’t exactly estranged, there are reasons why the two women weren’t living in the same city anymore. As Belle starts to go through her mother’s things, she begins to receive online ads for a swanky looking spa named “Rouge”; and when Belle tries on a pair of her mother’s red heels, her feet seem to know the way along the cliffside trail that eventually leads to the “opulent monstrosity” known as La Maison de Méduse, where Belle is welcomed and admired as the Daughter of Noelle. Could this be Rouge? It kind of looks like a spa; it does have a gift shop.
The narrative splits between the present and Belle’s childhood — we learn that Belle has holes in her memory leading up to the time that her mother decided to move without her to California, when Belle was ten — and as Belle has “treatments” in the present that seem to be erasing her sense of self, gaps from the past are filled in even as the present is slipping away. Belle’s behaviour becomes ever more erratic, and while there are friends of her mother’s who offer to help guide her through her grief, it’s hard to judge their motivations; hard to tell wolf from huntsman. And through it all, Belle is chasing her mother’s beauty secrets.
Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.
Right from the beginning, we watch as Belle engages in obsessive beauty rituals — so many layers of cleansers and masks and essences and creams — and learn that she compulsively watches a series of YouTube beauty videos created by a Dr. Marva. In scenes from the past, it’s shown that the child Belle was entranced by her mother’s natural beauty and sense of style, and while Noelle was a pale-skinned redhead who avoided the sun at all costs, she was forever telling Belle (who has golden skin and dark hair from her [absent] Egyptian father) that she was the lucky one with the beautiful colouring; and Belle wasn’t buying it. Not only does this setup allow for an examination of the jealousy that can be present between a mother and daughter (the child jealous of an adult’s freedom to explore and display her sexuality; the adult jealous of a child’s youth and freshness), but at the cult-like Rouge (is it a spa?), the ultimate goal seems to be achieving the “glow” — a brightening or moon-like luminosity — of whiteness; there’s an added, insidious layer to the beauty ideal Belle is chasing that underscores her OCD behaviours.
Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.
I’ll put this slightly spoilery observation behind a spoiler warning ***: In one subplot, not-Tom-Cruise (some kind of shape-shifting shadowy figure from beyond the looking glass) was able to attach itself to the child Belle (leading to the holes in her memory), and the only thing I want to note about that is how scarily easy it is for a grown man (or male energy in Tom Cruise form) to flatter and lure a prepubescent girl: I recognised lonely young Belle’s yearning for love and acceptance, and coupled with the cult of celebrity in teenybopper magazines, I could completely accept that Belle would do Tom’s bidding if he said she was beautiful and leaned in for a kiss. *** And reframe it as: There were many, many relationship details in this fairy-tale-like story that were completely relatable to me, and as with all the best fairy tales, it serves as a mirror and as a warning. The storytelling is cinematic (the publisher’s blurb describes this as “Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut”, and that feels about right), and while there are some funny bits, it’s of the wincing, ironic variety. More than anything, this is creeping horror — showcasing the horrors of modern life — wrapped in fairy tale motifs, and it made for a compelling read that I felt in my bones. Just to my tastes.
