Anna’s relationship with her mother is strained and affectionate, as is a friendship she rekindles with a childhood friend; Their disappointment in the lifestyle you lead underscores the potential others see in her. She relates to her acting life, but is often more thoughtful than what people see on screen, and her biggest fault is not being able to see her own depth potential.
Even in dire real-life circumstances, like when she visits her mom in the intensive care unit, Anna can’t help thinking about what’s going on in terms of what it might look like on Instagram. In one of the book’s most disturbing scenes, she records herself caring for her ailing mother, hoping that she can piece together the content from the encounter to make herself more loving; She ended up deleting the video after her mom started vomiting uncontrollably. Nothing supernatural is afoot estheticabut when Anna says “I’m a star” while high on Percocet, staring at her phone, proud of her worst motives, it’s as horrifying as any story of a woman enslaved by evil forces.
in Ling Ling Huang’s first novel Natural BeautyThis month, the peril of the beauty world is even more acute. Narrator Huang, a New York musical prodigy, was raised in poverty by kind parents who had immigrated from China; She is not named for most of the book, but she eventually adopts the nickname “Anna” as well, after being encouraged to choose a name that would be easier for white shoppers to pronounce. After her mother and father were badly injured in a car accident, Anna stopped studying piano and took a job in a restaurant to pay her bills. She stumbles upon an opportunity to work at a wellness startup called Holistik, where wealthy clients indulge in beauty treatments like paper facial wraps, vacuum sealing, and pubic hair transplants, in which human pubes are upgraded into mink fur.
while estheticaAnna has the narcissistic, narcissistic Jake as her Mephistopheles face, Natural BeautyAnna is lured into the dastardly, brilliant world of Holistik by a narcissistic, narcissistic woman known as Saje. just us estheticaAnna is persuaded by physical alterations, Natural BeautyAnna is pressured into using Holistik products and procedures, including a number of strange and invasive treatments. (On her first day, a team in lab coats gave her a full-body exam and bluntly asked if she was “afraid of worms.”) She began to look like a very different person. just us estheticaAnna is initially intrigued by her looks with the help of medspa, Natural BeautyAnna marvels at what Holistik is doing to her. “All I was taking was removing the grime of ordinary existence from the outside in,” she says.
Of course, she’s not quite sure what she’s eating. or how it works. Or what are the really side effects. Natural Beauty It turns into a nightmare, complete with unethical animal testing, toxic potions, and piles of corpses.
Like the beauty elixir Holistik sells, it sometimes seems like a novel would work better with fewer ingredients. Saje is the public face of the company, but the Holistik really belongs to a mysterious man named Victor Carroll. His niece and nephew, Helen and Henry, enter Anna’s life at the same time and in a strange way. Anna matches with Henry on a dating app; After they have sex, she catches Helen taking a shower in the siblings’ shared apartment. Helen not only doesn’t mind that this random girl interrupted her bath after sleeping with her brother, but then decides to be friends with them–and she doesn’t bat an eye when it turns out that the random girl also works for her incredibly wealthy and powerful uncle. Henry never comes across as more than an unnecessarily convoluted plot device to bring Helen and Anna together; His presence in the novel comes as a plot point left over from an earlier draft.
quirks aside, Natural Beauty It is a delightfully baroque grotesque. He can achieve folkloric power in his scariest moments – a spooky story you’ll tell in a fancy spa sauna rather than a campfire.
These aren’t the first spooky stories that explore how terrifying our pursuit of beauty can be. (Remember the 1993 major motion picture Death became her? An early classic in the Goopcore body horror canon!) But read in tandem, esthetica And Natural Beauty Illuminating just how extravagant extravagance is in “The Grime of an Ordinary Existence,” a.k.a Natural BeautyNow, says Anna, that people will ignore all sorts of moral ugliness in order to appear superficial. At their best moment, these books distill the age-old wisdom of the social media crowd: What makes us feel beautiful should also make us feel fear.