Review: Storylines, Carrie Cox

Carrie Cox is one of Australia’s best-kept secrets, flying a little under the radar, but most definitely flying with this timely and vital novel.

This is the Perth-based author’s third novel. Her first two (Afternoons with Harvey Beam, So Many Beats of the Heart) I enjoyed thoroughly, and with Storylines Cox retains her sensitive yet comedic voice while taking things further into the emotional danger zone. 

Thirty-something Nessa emerges from a horrific car accident facially disfigured, with extensive severe scarring she feels compelled to cover daily with “The Routine”: a lengthy, expensive and detailed make-up routine that helps her to look how she wants: not pretty so much as just normal.  

All Nessa desires is for no-one to look twice at her, so she keeps a safe distance from the world, keeping her circle to just her family and a work colleague. Even they never see her face uncovered, and she treats her workmate’s attempts at a closer friendship with a wariness bordering on suspicion.

Ironically enough, Nessa’s side hustle is a low-key wellness retreat, a no-frills escape for women which she developed reluctantly from a largely unwanted inheritance, a rundown homestead in the West Australian South West.

And all too quickly, keeping her distance becomes a trickier dance, even for someone who has become so adept at it, when her teenage niece Lily offers to help with the retreat’s social media accounts, a fraught development that swiftly carries them both into an emotional riptide.

This story goes close to the bone for Cox, who takes the facial scarring and “The Routine” part of the narrative from her personal experience of living with physical scars that, when new, made a small girl run crying to her mother in a library, since which she has covered them with makeup so expertly done that no-one who has met her would think to look twice at it.

Cox’s experience adds a focus and urgency to the questions the book asks, but they are for anyone who has ever cared about their appearance, felt it inadequate or tried to change it. It states the unstated requirement of our world: present an ordinary face and it will get you automatic acceptance and legitimacy.

Through Nessa’s niece Lily, a naturally gorgeous teen with her own “Routine” and a social media fixation to boot, it explores how achieving beauty atop your normalcy brings even further advantage – and yet wreaks even further damage.

Storylines examines what frequently, dangerously, goes unquestioned: what really is beauty? How do people respond to difference and what do they have the right to expect of others? How are faces and bodies social currencies, what tools should we use to manipulate them to gain more of it, and at what cost? How can we ever see ourselves clearly and compassionately as social media makes our love of beauty into an obsession and our habits of image distortion and fixation ever more severe?

This might sound heavy. But it ain’t.

Reading about the retreat Nessa has created in the bush feels like an escapist little fantasy, like going on a luxury retreat yourself.

It’s a gentle blend of humour and observation, a page-turning, character-driven narrative with plenty of tension thanks to a mystery over the circumstances of Nessa’s accident and how it has distorted her family’s relationships, and a tantalising hint of will-they-won’t-they romance shimmering in Nessa’s hilariously awkward relationship with her persistently lovable (and inconveniently hot) work colleague.

Cox deepens this with a philosophical and scientific exploration of beauty, its relationship with humans’ evolutionary hard-wiring, and what it really is: its subjectivity, its distinction from matters of utility, proportion and perfection.

The book combines something as old as the hills – a character journeying from fear and loathing to growth and healing – with something very zeitgeist: a dissection of what happens to that character when you take social media and use it as an agent of radical vulnerability.

So much of this subject matter is close to my heart, and explores similar territory to The Disorganisation of Celia Stone. About how wanting to be perfect, wanting to be beautiful, and wanting to be invisible all at the same time. About who makes those demands of us and who makes us make them of ourselves. About how what our appearance can do for us, but also what it can do to us. And as I am promoting my new book – something that requires a lot of putting on nice dresses and makeup, going to meet strangers and taking social media pictures – these are questions uppermost in my mind. I imagine it is the same for Cox.

Buy this for a teen grappling with social media (or their parent), or for the thinking woman in your life who wants something entertaining without being empty, fun without being dumb, relationship-driven without being rom-com. Cox manages to be smarter than all that while remaining supremely readable.

I can’t wait to talk about all this and more with Carrie Cox in our conversation coming up at Open Book in Mosman Park on the evening of November 9. It’s going to be an evening with wine, cheese and plenty of questions. You never know, maybe together we’ll hit on some answers.

If you want to book for that, here’s the link!

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