Pro-Anna: Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica is the final nail in Instagram’s coffin
London is unusually warm in mid-October, the undercroft at Southbank a sea of bare-chested skaters in various forms of undress practising flips, observing peers perfect their technique. There’s an air of indifference to their every motion, as if upon rolling into the cement park, they’ve entered a glass cage, all for the amusement of an audience they cannot see but know for a fact is watching, transfixed by the sweat on their skin, their mere scent floating in the air and capturing the imagination of everyone that happens to walk past. It’s a much quieter evening than the previous two to three weeks, during which time the city existed in a vacuum of delirious drinking and excessive sleep deprivation in the avalanche of frieze, the BFI film festival and fashion week. The sensory overload and subsequent depletion of the senses were now followed by a tranquil descent to rest, silence.
The young men enjoyed the remnants of summer, elevating skating into spectator sport and performance art, eyes shuttered to the world beyond the park’s railings. Refusing to look yet enjoying the eroticism inherent to being observed. I too could feel the wetness and warmth of the breeze, the fading sunlight, thrilled to disappear for the weekend after the relentlessness of overstimulation and overexposure and stay in bed with a book. It is in this context that I read Aesthetica, Allie Rowbottom’s debut novel concerned with image, the excruciating horrors we deploy on ourselves to maintain and curate it and what happens when we’ve objectified it (and by extension ourselves) to the extent that it has ceased to be a shadow of its subject and has usurped it.
In his review of Blonde, a fictional take on Marilyn Monroe, the critic Sam Kriss examined the detrimental, if not downright fatal impact image can have on the person it depicts. Rowbottom’s novel follows a young woman, a blonde herself, whose image overpowers her until it collapses under the weight of its own ambition. Billed as literary fiction, it feels more comparable to a 21st century reimagining and revision of the gothic novel, where the ghosts are digital apparitions that can haunt the real, tangible world with far-reaching consequences. In a unique blend of literary styles, it also flirts with ideas that permeate speculative fiction: in the not-so-distant future of 2032, Instagram is cultural detritus of yesterday and, should the protagonist’s mission be taken as a sign of the cultural landscape she inhabits, the obsession with image seems to have ended.
Aesthetica is split in two timelines: the first follows Anna, a 19-year-old who runs off to Los Angeles in search of stardom of the social media variety and goes to extreme lengths to embody what Instagram has convinced her is idealised beauty through a series of plastic surgeries; the second finds Anna, fifteen years later, preparing to undergo an experimental procedure, the aesthetica of the title, which promises to reverse the effects of all previous procedures and give her the image she would have aged into had she never gone through with them to begin with.
When I interviewed Allie Rowbottom last October, I couldn’t stop thinking about the novel’s two voices — the intertwining of the two narratives, seamlessly flashing back and forth in time, which augmented the novel’s haunting atmosphere, so much so that it is difficult to pinpoint who’s haunting whom. Is past Anna haunting her future self? Or is future Anna haunting the original that’s battling somewhere deep inside her to break out? In her review for Astra Magazine, Philippa Snow notes the novel’s tone is one of mourning, the protagonist in grief for her pre-Instagram self. Rowbottom’s authorial power lies in interconnecting this with Anna’s youthful ambition and naïveté. “Those feelings of wanting to be seen in comparison to someone else [perceived as more beautiful], those were feelings that I had when I was a young person growing up and looking at magazines. Writing this book, I dramatised them, imagining what that would feel like augmented by social media,” Rowbottom says.
The author made the deepest incisions into Instagram and peeled back every single layer to reveal the truth at the very core of influencers — an obsession with instant fame (sentences like I was deserving of DMs from Instagram scouts, brand offers to “collab” made me feel sicker than Damien Ark’s Fucked Up), unmasking in the process the banality of their ambitions. A contemporary variant of more traditional tales of desire, her protagonist is the byproduct (rather than the cause) of a culture in decline. Rowbottom considers this compulsion among young crowds as a natural progression of the girl-goes-to-Hollywood-to-become-famous trope. “The stardom is different,” she says, but the desire to join this rank of fame is tied to “young people’s desire to be seen, to make something of themselves.” They don’t want to create anything at all, so instead turn themselves into commodities. “Rather than honing a craft as an artist, or an actor,” she continues, “they want to get rich quick by self-objectifying and profiting off of their image. They want to be paid to be themselves.”
Aesthetica is hardly condoning these desires, but Rowbottom isn’t interested in criticising influencers either. She sees influencers as the inevitable succession of a generation that grew up in the shadow of hers: “We lived through 9/11 and graduated into a recession. There was a lot of struggle to make it and I could see those coming up behind us being disinterested in following traditional paths.”
This feels like an apt way of describing her trajectory too. Her generation of writers weren’t the Bret Easton Ellis type, smashing through the industry straight out of college. She’s one of a handful of American authors jettisoning to fame as fully formed adults, bringing in fresh perspectives and stories with the dawn of a new decade. Aesthetica is a sort of breakthrough in this regard. How many novels have you read that tackle plastic surgery or the effects of social media on impressionable minds? I previously described her as a possible successor to Joan Didion. Having seen the response to her debut, my speculation seems to have come true.
When we speak over Zoom, she has an air of NY cool about her, even though she lives in Los Angeles. She’s wearing a black sweater, her impossibly sun-kissed blonde hair counterbalancing it, understated yet assured in her confidence of her own work and its place in the culture at large. She’s less interested in cultivating mystique, opting for transparency, which she sees not as demystifying but captivating in its sincerity. “JELL-O Girls was a learning curve for me,” she says about the experience of publishing her memoir in 2018. “This time, I was proactive in being my own advocate. The material wasn’t as inherently dark as my memoir, which was about my mother’s life and death, so with this book I want to enjoy it and celebrate because that’s the stuff that carries you when you’re in the weeds with the next thing. With JELL-O Girls, I wanted to hide.” Aesthetica has in turn given her the confidence to step into the spotlight. From Vanity Fair to The New York Review of Books and from The Cut to The Observer, the book’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, signalling the arrival of an author ready to claim her spot on the pantheon of American letters. That she had an injector offer Botox at her launch party shows not only her hyperawareness of PR stunts, but also that she’s happy to play the game and add a performance element to her public persona. Her appearance on Interview Magazine alongside Tea Hacic-Vlahovic is an indication that literary celebrity is on its way back in, while her spot on Forever Magazine’s inaugural 30 Pushing 30 list has given her the stamp of approval from the flourishing New York scene.
All this, she suggests when we speak, is inevitable work you undertake as an author, though her intentions lie outside the scope of publicity. “I think my role is to get into these questions that I can’t say I have the answers to, but have taken on the questioning regardless, and sometimes real lived pain, and made something out of it. Maybe other people can look at it and resonate with it, or hate it. They might agree or disagree, but that’s all I want people to do, to think.”
Reading this novel, I thought of a particular point in my life, when much like the protagonist I self-objectified in the hope of getting something and an interest in wrestling turned into a performance of self that verged on the pornographic. That it played out in private is a big difference. Rowbottom’s protagonist exists in the vacuum of online degradation, at the collision of the beauty industry and the social media complexes, meaning the image of herself she creates becomes larger than she is and consumes her. The futuristic procedure the author invented then becomes the ultimate reset button — a way to return to an authentic sense of self, a rebirth into the real person untouched by the damage brought on by the image. I see stardom, what I chose, what became of me, and everything I missed, Anna says in the novel. Her regret feels drawn from something real, but the author’s power lies in observation. She has tapped into the desire that a lot of us experienced throughout the lockdowns of the last three years to rebuild or un-build our lives in search of the one we feel we missed out on or were derailed from. Rowbottom is resolute in this regard. “The best thing for me,” she says, “is to make good art and feel fulfilled in a culture that’s built to brainwash.” Aesthetica has become her first step towards realising that ambition — for herself and her readers.