If I Had Your Face (2020), Frances Cha's debut novel, is about modern South Korea as seen through the eyes of five women, four of them narrators. I can't remember the last time I walked around with a book this pink in my hands. And I'm not sure why I was expecting there to be a plot, there isn't one, yet my interest never waned. 200 pages in or so it struck me as odd. The reader enters the story at what begins to seem like an arbitrary point in their lives and sees how they unfold over a period of months. She could have added another month, another 100 pages, and it wouldn't have changed the book's architecture. Physical beauty and surgery play a significant part in their lives - as work, as a measure of a person's worth, as the promise of a better life - but not a central part of the book, as the title would suggest. Perhaps the lone dependent clause, for me, suggested mystery and desperation, and desperation a desperate act, a crime, and crime - a plot. Cha almost teases it with a sudden burst of violence or a scream. But the violence remains only a burst and the screamer turns out to be fine. On to the next day.
Borges, in a polemical introduction to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares's debut novel The Invention of Morel, memorably defends the plot and imaginative invention and writes of how we unwittingly resign ourselves to Proust's realism, as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of the day. I've encountered books that forced me to repeat his observation, with a wounded moan. But Cha gets me caught up in her realism, which eschews the dulling method of meticulously recording objects and sensations, appearances and psychology. Five intersecting lives: though her voices aren't distinct, between work, relationships, personal history, and society, she covers much ground, tossing off frightening details, angering details, bitterly amusing details. Cha says in a recent interview that she didn't intend to write a condemnation but a character states clearly what's inescapable throughout the novel: someone is always looking down on someone else. Aside from physical appearance, a person's value is determined, upon being introduced, by school, job, family, connections, money. Provide unsatisfactory answers and find yourself treated coldly and barred. The protagonists are on the lower end of the hierarchy, living precariously. One woman works in a high-end room salon, a sort of club catering to rich men that's not strictly legal. She says, while under threat from a vengeful client, that if the police raid the establishment, it's not the managers and certainly not the owner, some "shadowy fuck," who face the consequences but the women. Otherwise they work to pay off debts to their employers, spend their days getting ogled and felt up and plied with alcohol, get used and thrown away by clients, can be assaulted to appease them if they're unhappy with the service. Her story is probably the most intense but all of them, a hairstylist, an artist, an office worker, get knocked around day after day and expect no less. Their world is an antagonist.
However, If I Had Your Face never steeps fully into the murk and its close isn't arbitrary. Another vein of detail: One woman is there to hold her friend's hand after a painful operation. Another woman prepares hangover food and washes her friend's soiled sheets. Two women, arm in arm, walk through the hallway laughing enticingly. A woman takes a chance and surprises her friend by scheduling her an interview for a better job.
The drawback of the novel is that its appeal is mostly journalistic. Cha doesn't exhaust her material and can handle scale, go on the attack (if not consciously then by faithfully rendering her status-obsessed, spirit-crushing world), and inhabit lives, plural. I wouldn't reread it but I'd be interested to see how she builds on what she's got.
