I’ve taken to keeping my copy of Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face in my sock drawer. I just can’t sleep with the frantic buzz coming off it. Who thought it was a good idea to have über-zeitgeisty names like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Helen Oyeyemi and Jia Tolentino plastered on the cover of a book like this? It’s reckless. No single object can handle this amount of raw buzz. My copy is practically hopping.
When you begin reading If I Had Your Face it isn’t difficult to see why it comes garlanded with praise on high from the literati. The novel is set in modern-day Seoul – a hyperreal dystopia of plastic surgery, call girls and a strict social hierarchy. It is a city where beauty rules and young women regularly undergo surgery to look like their idols.
The novel’s title is literal. Women in Seoul can choose to have their faces sculpted to look like someone else’s. Depending on how you read this novel it could either be a horrifying insight into contemporary Korean society or, and this was how I read it, a gloriously camp celebration of the excesses of a deranged society – Jackie Collins meets Margaret Atwood.
Kyuri, one of Cha’s four young women narrators, is a call girl obsessed with personal beauty. She strives to become a “10 per cent” girl, a designation given to the top 10 per cent of call girls who are deemed to be the most beautiful. Kyuri is captivating and ludicrous, much like the novel itself. Her introduction, however, is glorious: “The stitches on her double eyelids look naturally faint, while her nose is raised, her cheekbones tapered, and her entire jaw realigned and shaved into a slim v-line.” She is Frankenstein’s monster in Hermès.
Ara, another of the novel’s narrators, knows her place in society. She isn’t outwardly beautiful and thus inhabits one of the lowest social standings of our protagonists. However, much like Kyuri, her life is also ruled by obsession – with K-pop. She views Taein, a member of the K-pop group Crown, as a demigod.
When a rumour comes true, that Taein is dating Candy from the girl group Charming, Ara’s world turns into frenzy. Cha perfectly encapsulates the somewhat wholesome, somewhat psychotic nature of K-pop fandom in Ara and as a result, creates one of the most “current” characters that I’ve come across in fiction this year.
Ambivalent
However, all the novel seems to have is its characters. It would take a critic far more skilled than myself to glean something resembling a plot from If I Had Your Face. Instead, Cha decides to interweave her four narratives somewhat haphazardly into something that only resembles a plot. It is incredibly difficult to lattice narratives like this, and Cha must be commended for taking on such a meticulous form of storytelling, even though the final narrative resembles less the egg-washed top of a cherry pie than the tangled mass of tails that forms a rat king.
It is difficult to judge the tone of Cha’s novel. Is it a critique or a celebration of these women? Some reviews have called it “unsettling and deeply affecting” while others refer to it as “hilarious” and “hugely enjoyable”. The novel’s unwillingness to pick a side greatly affects its overall intensions. It is a truly ambivalent work, a sort of literary version of the baby inside Brecht’s chalk circle being tugged and pulled by two opposing forces.
Yet it is impossible to deny that If I Had Your Face is immense fun. It presents a world so heightened and over the top that you can't help but marvel at it. Cha's prose style is also very breezy and light, which aids in the novel's easy digestibility. And digestibility is key here: the book has been designed within an inch of its life to be a bestselling, finger on the pulse, incredibly 2020, conversation-starting, bookstagram-ready, novel of the moment. And good for it.
If I Had Your Face is hyperreal kitsch. An enjoyably soapy glimpse into a world where “beauty is only skin deep” is an aspirational mantra rather than a disparaging read. And in tribute to the novel’s ambivalent message, I shall finalise my thoughts in a line that entirely depends on the reader’s tastes: it’s Valley of the Dolls for the K-pop generation.
