As an 11-year-old, Luna Lewis is followed into a bathroom in Italy and forcibly kissed on the mouth by an old man. Later, in Malta, her cousin Daniel picks up her arm. “Fat” is his appraisal: “You eat too much pizza.”
For Luna, an awareness of physical appearance that begins in girlhood metastasises into an obsession with her own beauty – the lingua franca of the female characters in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s latest work of fiction, West Girls.
The book, Woollett’s fourth, is a composite novel of cleverly interconnected short stories, à la Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. While the latter two overlap to paint a portrait of a single protagonist, the narratives in West Girls shift between first and third person to converge upon femininity itself, vividly depicting the desire, insecurity and existential uncertainty of girls and women in Western Australia.
Luna, a key character in the book, shoots up and thins out as a teenager, her fixation on her newfound appearance as intense as Narcissus: “Before I was beautiful, I cared about grades. Now, every time I shut myself in my room to study, I ended up taking my clothes off and flirting with my reflection for hours – running my fingers over the xylophone of my ribs, the skullhorns of my hips, until my body thrummed with lust.”
Luna is, like Woollett, half-Anglo, half-Maltese. She looks ethnically ambiguous, and parlays her appearance into a ticket out of Perth, “that arse-end city at the arse-end of the world”, by rebranding herself as Luna Lu, a “17-year-old Eurasian beauty, discovered while dismembering an octopus at a southern-suburbs fish-market”. Presenting as part-Asian, a successful but short-lived international modelling career follows.
In this act of racial impersonation, West Girls has plot parallels with Rebecca F Kuang’s recent bestseller Yellowface, a propulsive but emotionally insubstantial satire of the publishing industry. Yellowface’s protagonist, June Hayward, an unsuccessful author and self-described “plain, straight white girl”, steals the manuscript of her dead Asian friend and passes it off as her own, assuming the misleading nom de plume Juniper Song in the process. In Yellowface, the act of cultural appropriation has melodramatic consequences; the protagonist’s swift and cataclysmic online cancellation takes its cues from viral instances of literary racial scandal.
Arguably more insidious cases of cultural appropriation are those that occur with relative impunity – consider blackfishing, or the misuse of Indigenous iconography. In West Girls, Luna’s racial transgression falls into this category: the revelation that she is “gallivanting around Europe pretending to be Asian” invites public ridicule from another model but does not end her career; a nose job that unintentionally makes her look more Caucasian proves to be more damaging.
Race is broached with self-awareness: Luna’s Indonesian stepmother and her relatives can’t “get over the hilarity of [her] taking a Chinese name to move up in the world”. The obvious irony is that name-based ethnic discrimination is still rife in the professional world. Luna, if not contrite, gets her just desserts eventually: beauty, as Woollett’s characters are aware, is a rapidly depleted resource.
They exist in a world of ambient misogyny and commonplace, even casual, sexual assault. Fat-shaming abounds: “Penelope’s mum commentates, ‘Boom-boom!’ as Penelope [a university student] walks to the fridge.” When Rikki, a mining heiress, abandons some meat skewers in protest during a dinner with guests, she is applauded by her father: “Finally doing something about those college kilos!”
In these contexts, it is understandable that the women in West Girls invariably view their own and others’ worth through the prism of beauty, or perceived lack thereof. A minor character’s dream is “to find a boyfriend who’d buy her a boob-job and nose-job”; Luna’s stepmother, a former beauty pageant finalist, is named Indah, literally meaning beautiful in Indonesian. Luna’s grades slide as her appearance improves, and she ultimately fails high school. “I chose beauty. I’d choose it again,” she admits.
Physical attractiveness is an unreliable form of personal capital, and an awareness of its impermanence manifests in a disdain for ageing: Rikki notices “how fleshy and sunburned” her mother looks, despite “collagen and silicone treatments since her fortieth birthday”; football WAGs beg Geli, a cosmetic injector, “to stop time long enough for them to grow and breastfeed another bub without losing any brand ambassadorships”.
The depictions are psychologically astute – what does society value more highly in women if not youth and beauty? – but that all these women are ensnared by the shackles of beauty, without counterpoint, can be read as either authorial pessimism or preoccupation. Such a narrow perspective can, at times, feels limiting.
“We don’t necessarily have control over who we fall in love with,” Woollett has said of the female characters in The Love of a Bad Man, her 2016 fictional exploration of the inner lives of women who were romantically entangled with some of history’s worst figures. The same can be said of sexual desire, a subject West Girls examines compellingly, particularly through a mercurial relationship between Luna and a schoolmate, Caitlyn. Her desire is possessive, destructive: “I wondered what it would be like to see inside her beautiful head”; “I wanted her with such a violence, it dazed me.” Vulnerable, aloof, trapped by expectations of themselves and each other, the West Girls know themselves to be “capable of hurting each other in far more inventive ways than men hurt us”.
West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett is published by Scribe ($32.99)
