NEW SKIN

An immigrant mother and her daughter clash over beauty treatments.

Wang’s incisive debut takes a cool, sharp look at the relationship between 26-year-old narrator Linli Feng, who would like to stop babysitting her mother in Los Angeles and move to New York for graduate school, and her mother, Fanny, who has irretrievably damaged her face with decades of botched under-the-table plastic surgeries and other treatments undertaken in the belief that “perfection was always one procedure away.” Their situation looks bleak after Fanny is indicted on federal charges for not revealing who has been performing the illegal procedures, but things start to look up when Fanny is chosen for America’s Beauty Extreme, a new reality TV show in which contestants compete for the prize of “life-changing reconstructive surgery.” While Fanny is sequestered away for the competition, Linli goes undercover to try to find evidence that will free her mother from her legal problems. The novel hits many of the familiar beats of the story of conflict between a damaged mother and a sensitive, artistic daughter, but it manages to find some new twists. Wang walks the edge between domestic drama, as Linli discovers more about her mother’s past and begins to understand her drive to change herself, and dark satire, both of the machinations and excesses of the reality TV industry and the exploitation of those who want to fit into the U.S. by whatever means necessary—even if it means “forever scrabbling in [a] bottomless pit of debt.” As Linli subjects herself to one painful and disfiguring procedure after another in the hope of discovering more about her mother’s experience as well as evidence to free her, the novel slides in the direction of body horror.

A troubling take on obsessive self-improvement.