Face by Joma West

Published by Tordotcom on August 2, 2022

Face is a heavy-handed examination of superficiality. The novel imagines a society in which the upper classes are obsessed with how they are seen by others and thus with the image (or “face”) they project to the world. People make choices about “coupling” (sex-free attachments) based on what their potential partner adds to their face. Style has triumphed over substance. Individuals turn their lives into a brand to help them climb the ladder. They learn to project the correct facial expression (usually blandness, sometimes a cutting sideways glance) rather than honest emotions. Joma West may have done her research for this novel by watching high school girls interact.

Tam schemes to couple with Reyna because her father, Schuyler Burroughs, has more face than anyone. Schuyler’s friends Tonia and Eduardo decide to choose a baby because their face has become static and the right baby will help them move up in the social hierarchy (the “ladder”). Yet Reyna argues that styles change too rapidly to warrant investing in a child. By the time it grows into its features, it might be out of date.

For reasons the story doesn’t satisfactorily explain, touching is a social taboo. The burden of procreation has been assigned to designers that manufacture babies who are calculated to enhance the parents’ face. The working class, including servants of the upper class, are known as “menials.” They begin as “beaker babies” who are engineered to lack inquisitive or creative minds. Menials degrade after reaching the age of 25 (a concept that might be drawn from the replicants in Blade Runner). Menial farms train them to be deferential servants and to avoid unnecessary behaviors, including eye contact and masturbation. Like people on the ladder, they confess misbehavior to confessors in Virtual Reality (the “In”).

Reyna’s sister Naomi receives confessions of menials as part of a school project. Without mentioning her by name, the Menial Jake confesses that he wants to look directly at Madeline, Schuyler’s wife, and have a conversation with her. A loose plot eventually emerges, but West focuses more on world building than on telling an engaging story.

The novel suggests that humanity’s enduring attempt to exercise control over others, whether through slavery or ownership of menials, is rooted in fear. The concept of face is an extension of the need to control others, albeit in a more subtle way — by manipulating what people think by showing them a face and making it difficult to see beyond that mask. The ladder that members of the upper class climb is a road to power and the acquisition of power is all about controlling those who have less. That’s a good concept for a story, but the concept is delivered in expository lectures to make sure that even dim-witted readers will understand it.

Each chapter is told from a character’s perspective. Some scenes are repeated (dialog is repeated word-for-word), changed only by the perspective of the character to whom the chapter belongs. Since the characters aren’t all that different from each other, the technique results in more redundancy than insight. The reader learns what happened in the scene after the first point-of-view character departed, but that could have been accomplished through conventional storytelling without all the wasted words.

It is difficult to relate to Face because key premises make little sense. It isn’t clear whether the story is set on a future Earth or (more likely) on an alternative Earth, but the notion that humans would have an aversion to touching requires some explanation. Sex and the desire for touch are innate drives. How is it possible to be human, even an alternative human, without those drives? Much of the world that West built exists not because a such a world would have any reason to evolve, but because West needed to create elements that would allow her to skewer superficial and controlling people. Some of the differences between our reality and the novel’s reality can be chalked up to genetic manipulation, but what can a novel about a completely different reality tell us about ours? Not as much as West intended.

Satires of the status obsessed are common. Some of them are enjoyable. Had Face illustrated the impact of social media likes on social status by creating a near-future that is closer to current reality, the story’s lessons about superficiality might have resonated. By adding designer babies and humans grown to be slaves, West created a story that has too little relevance to create an emotional impact. I appreciated West’s fluid prose and enjoyed some aspects of the detailed world she built, but the story is less than the sum of its parts.

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