Synopsis:
Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.
Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.
Review:
Cross the trippy, identity-dissolving of Mona Awad’s Bunny with the body horror of David Cronenberg and you’re getting close to describing Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty. But not really. You’ve now described a few threads of an intricately woven tapestry that make up one weird, disturbing, and ultimately –yes– beautiful book.
There’s also an insider’s look at he world of music conservatories, a kind of wild lampooning of the “self-care” industry, a love story, and finally a celebration of the grotesque that I haven’t seen since Geek Love.
So, what’s the book about? A little bit of everything, really. But it’s all filtered through the eye of our unnamed and renamed narrator, a gifted pianist and daughter of Chinese refugees. She is isolated from her peers not just by her family’s lack of money or their inability to speak the language, but also by her talent. She plays so well that it only breeds resentment among her young classmates.
Fast forward several years, and our protagonist is still lonely and isolated, speaking to us from her dank Brooklyn basement, trying to care for her now catatonic parents. But then things change. A job offer comes seemingly from nowhere to work at Holistik, the ritziest self-care store in the city.
It’s here that the cracks in the story’s apparent realism appear, as we’re suddenly plunged into a dark sci-fi world of high tech surveillance and pseudo-magical devices that begin our narrator’s transformation.
Natural Beauty is a plot-heavy book. Things never stop happening, and each thing is more delightfully weird than the last, but it also manages to carve out space to meditate on questions of love, family, sex, the purpose of art, and the relationship between beauty and ugliness, all while having an awfully good time satirizing much of modern life. It’s a wild ride.
In a world where “aesthetic” has been transformed into an empty adjective, Natural Beauty dares to investigate the very concept of aesthetics and how that concept reaches into every aspect of our lives.
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