Honestly, I thought I’d like a trip through the halls of a skincare company turned cult, where ritualised violence towards men who have wronged its employees is referred to as “Friday night drinks”, a bit more? But Chloe Elisabeth Wilson’s Rytuał is still an absolute romp you can tear through in a couple of sittings.
We open with Marnie, living a life of classic millennial malaise in Melbourne. She’s obsessed with her flatmate, Kahli, in the way that many twenty-somethings who aren’t sure of themselves latch onto cool, self-assured girls. I should know, I’ve been that twenty-something. “She was all the limp literature on not giving a fuck, repackaged and brought to life,” is very much how I felt about my best friend in my early twenties. The descriptions of millennial womanhood and relationships in this book feel gratifyingly spot on.
We find Marnie at her underwhelming job as a receptionist at a women’s cycling studio. Here, she meets Rose, who pitches her headlong into the world of Rytuał, a skincare and makeup brand with a hold over the masses not unlike Karen Walker’s over rich white girls in the 2010s. Rytuał makes limited edition fragrances, their employees lead lives filled with oysters and natural wine, and CEO Luna is disarmingly vulnerable from the get-go. We can easily see how Marnie gets sucked into this stylish world. From here, Rytuał becomes a chick-lit thriller with occasional moments of pure poetry—“In the light of sobriety, Justin’s torso still looked like a funnel.”
Marnie escalates up the ranks of the company at a confusingly speedy pace, and things at Rytuał’s downtown Melbourne office—referred to by its all-women staff as ‘Emma’—become increasingly culty. Marnie gets to see the underbelly of the company at Friday night drinks, as each woman is encouraged to share the name of a man that has wronged her at a meeting at the beginning of the week, and by Friday night he’s dragged out in front of the entire staff to be tortured with hot straightening irons and other such feminine accessories turned weapons.
Rytuał is girlboss self-care culture taken to its most extreme, and the feeling is familiar if you’ve ever, say, taken a yoga class led by an overly enthusiastic white woman. It’s unfettered capitalism with a feminist bent, and violence towards the men who have hurt women is presented as the ultimate healing. The company is largely made up of white women or those who have culturally assimilated themselves into whiteness, who happily take snatches of other cultures to pad out their lives and aid in their spiritual bypassing, but ultimately, the only thing they worship is wealth. I have to admit that it does feel satisfying seeing girlboss culture played out to its most violent end. It’s cathartic to see shitty men quiver in the same kind of fear they bring upon women all the time. And for some unknowable reason, reading Rytuał has made me feel less scared to interact with capitalistic white girlbosses in future, so I suppose I have to be thankful for that.
There’s also a hearty serving of gay in the pages of Rytuał, but it’s in quite a sinister way, which is never that enjoyable for me in terms of representation. I’m just a boring little guy who wants their queer romances sweet and wholesome, ok? What was satisfying for me was that my brain couldn’t stop picturing Rytuał’s CEO, Luna, as the white Michelle Williams (aka not the third and most forgotten member of Destiny’s Child), which really added a liveliness to the character.
The pacing in this book is a bit one-note, which is similar to the complaint I had when I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. We never see the characters wrestling with the choices they’ve made or are about to make; they just white-knuckle it right through. This does make it easy to devour, and although the story was a little rushed and the twists sometimes predictable, the writing is deft and flows well. With all that said, this is an incredibly fun first novel, and it hits a lot of marks in the way it holds up a mirror to white feminism and capitalism.
Rytuał by Chloe Elisabeth Wilson is available in bookstores today for $38. Find an independent bookstore near you to support today on BookHub.
