‘New Skin’ Offers A Fresh Take On Body Horror

In the era of looksmaxxing, plastic surgery, Botox, and Ozempic, it's impossible to escape the tyranny of good looks. Are beauty standards fascist? Is losing weight about giving in or being healthy? The endless overdetermined debates about the ethics of aesthetics continues to haunt us. Even as we chase Kant's sublime through facial symmetry, we struggle to justify and categorize the various forms of body modification and whether or not they are feminist. In her debut novel New Skin , Sarah Wang wades into the culture wars with her own fictional take on facelifts, race, and desirability. While trapped in a toxic mother-daughter dynamic, Linli Feng and her mother Fanny fall prey to a black-market plastic surgery ring. Fanny, a Chinese immigrant struggling to make rent, continues to get botched procedures in a failed bid for beauty, chasing after an imagined white-centered ideal. Linli, meanwhile, hopes to escape her mother's manipulative grasp in Los Angeles and go to graduate school in New York, but her mother continually sabotages her attempts to escape. Instead, Linli ends up taking care of Fanny after yet another dismal surgery. Soon, Fanny cooks up a plan to appear on a new reality TV show: America's Beauty Extreme . If she wins, she'll get the grotesque work on her face fixed. Meanwhile, Linli ends up working at Another Horizon, an abolitionist rehabilitation center as a way to pay her family's creditors. But she soon discovers the botched surgeries her mother receives may be a malicious attempt to weasel money out of poor immigrants looking for a cheap beauty fix. Like mother, like daughter, Linli ends up getting some whitening treatments in an attempt to nail down the shadowy gang who preyed on her mom. It's a packed novel that moves briskly in about 300 pages, full of politically minded plotlines about identity, class, and ICE raids.