Mona Awad’s gothic skin care novel Rouge features a fraught mother-daughter relationship, a cult-spa with mysterious and menacing “treatments,” an aquarium containing sentient red jellyfish, not one but two dress shops, a trio of opinionated mannequins, and a roster of love interests—including a squeegee-accessorizing merman, a beauty detective with a bevy of disguises, and (possibly) Tom Cruise. That’s a lot to process, but Awad keeps the surreal action at an accessible pitch before raising the stakes here for a truly creepy third act.
The novel begins with a woman named Mirabelle, whose mother, Noelle, has died in San Diego after selling her share in an upscale boutique and starting to distance herself from her young lover. Mirabelle—who has made a life in Montreal, where she was raised after Noelle’s short-lived relationship with her Egyptian father—flies to California to put her mother’s affairs in order. She spends the first few nights at a hotel, watching a doctor’s vlogs that chronicle the many “journeys” a person’s skin can take.
Once Mirabelle moves to her mother’s apartment, things take a turn for the supernatural. After putting on a pair of Noelle’s red shoes, she is forcibly walked down the coastal path from which her mother fell to her death. There, Mirabelle is welcomed at a mansion called La Maison de Méduse, where she discovers what seems a combination of a high-end skin care spa and the party scene from Eyes Wide Shut.
Her mother, Mirabelle learns, spent both time and money at La Maison, a place overseen by a cryptic woman in red flanked by veiled twin attendants. Mirabelle is told she’s the “Perfect Candidate” for a series of treatments at the spa.
When she returns to start these treatments, an impossibly beautiful young girl—the perfect symmetry of her face is described as “awful”—explains the process. “To become one’s Most Magnificent Self,” she says, one must get rid of the “Basement boxes full of moldy memories.” As she describes the treatments, she indicates that signs of aging on someone’s skin are the embodiment of their memories. Where do these memories go once they are extracted?
Enter the red jellyfish.
Awad takes the idea that “it is better to age than the alternative” into the realm of memory, asking if it is better to age with your memories or not age without them. At Mirabelle’s first session, the aesthetician suggests that “memory and skin go hand in hand” and asks, “How attached are you to your memories?” Mirabelle wonders about the “shadows and miseries imprinted there on my skin. My pores gaping open at me like silently screaming mouths.” Still, she answers, “Not attached at all.”
As Mirabelle continues the treatments, she begins to uncover the repressed secret that led Noelle to leave for California without her daughter. Mirabelle flashes back to childhood, where we see her as a young girl obsessed with her mother’s beauty and fairy tales. The difference between Noelle’s looks—fair skin, red hair, blue eyes—and Mirabelle’s—olive skin, Egyptian features—is a source of friction between the two women.
Mirabelle’s visitations seem to be hallucinations brought on by the products slathered on her face and the black disks affixed to her temples. How else to explain the repeated arrival of Tom Cruise, who insists his name is Seth, through the portal of a mirror Noelle keeps in the back of a closet? When he persuades the young Mirabelle to make a decision that will affect the rest of her life, it appears something more sinister is afoot than hostility toward a self-absorbed parent.
Rouge is marked by disturbingly weird developments intermittently punctuated with skin care humor. When Mirabelle is told she will soon embark on “the only journey that matters in the end,” she whispers, “Retinol?” Awad also effectively echoes contemporary skin care talk to escalate the novel’s spookiness. Mirabelle imagines conducting beauty rituals with her mother that make their skin burn, but they love it because it means “magic is happening, just like in a fairy tale.”
Unfortunately for Mirabelle, the treatments affect her other memories, such as those involving language, creating an alternate world where words are rearranged, adding a layer of absurdity to the narrative. Arrange becomes derange, vanity becomes insanity, ritual becomes ridicule, woman becomes demon, and skin becomes sin—all “worth it for the Glow.”
As Rouge moves toward its conclusion, it becomes progressively detached from any reality we know. Mirabelle’s connection to her identity becomes increasingly tenuous. Will she perish or find peace on the other side of the mirror? Awad uses the aquarium of jellyfish to full effect and reveals more about Mirabelle’s relationship to Seth/Tom Cruise in a condemnation of the cult-like nature of the beauty business. Rouge, through its frenzied plot and precise product details, captures the gurus, acolytes, ceremonies, and deprogramming of an industry that, like other cults, often uses false promises to engender loyalty—until it all falls apart.•
Chris Daley has written about books, cults, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Collagist, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She publishes the Submission Sunday newsletter on Substack and designs author websites at chrisdaley.com.
