January: Valente's Comfort Me With Apples and Wrapping Up Agbaje-Williams's The Three of Us
Fiction Pairs Well with Feminine Rage
Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente
I have a twisted pride in the kinds of books I read. One look at my bookshelf and one might order a psych evaluation. It isn’t a cry for help, but my best attempt at priming an inquisitive mind that will fight off the inevitable dementia.
I learn the most about the world and myself from obscure novels. And it’s a special kind of art that isn’t so different from abstract paintings criticized for their childish scribble. Does it incite interpretation? If yes, then it’s art. And this kind of art is worth taking a look at.
In the award-winning literary fiction horror novel Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente, the author encourages us to question the reality that she’s painted as we follow a young woman living an assumingly perfect existence with her husband. He’s perfect. She’s perfect. Their life is perfect. But there’s a darkness lurking around, and she begins to question the look on her husband’s face as he returns home from business meetings. And why the basement is locked. And how her neighbors seem…off. Perfect…right?
I’ll no doubt get the same response as I got with Mona Awad’s Bunny. “That was a weird book,” many of you said. Yet, I couldn’t help but chuckle at this and answer with a big fat “You're welcome” because I fulfilled my nihilistic obligation to help you exercise a pathway of thinking you might never have without a little encouragement. Many of you will never read another of my book recommendations, but at least you ventured down that path once, and that’s good enough for me.
But if you’re like me and experience a rare kind of self-discovery and seasoned understanding within the pages of a literary fiction horror novel, Valente’s Comfort Me With Apples is a great next step to sharpening the tools in a literary criticism toolbox.
Nearly all of my choices for Fiction Pairs Well with Feminine Rage are meant to incite conversation; they’re not crowd-pleasers. They’re not going to dodge hard topics and they’re probably going to crush you. Think of these books as an aged history teacher who relished in their disciplinarian ways while their spectacles hugged their sharp, scrunched noses as they wrote our names on the board for talking too much. Aging is understanding that they didn’t actually “have it out for us.” And wisdom is understanding that we might learn a thing or two about the cyclical nature of history if we shut up for ten seconds.
Today’s lesson? Women’s literary fiction is known for addressing topics of abuse, control, bodily autonomy, identity, marriage, and motherhood. Patriarchal oppression touches every single word written by a woman. It’s hard to disconnect the writer from the politics around her. And while the world keeps turning and progress is made only to be stunted and reignited, some topics seem to come right back around. Comfort Me With Apples is a reminder of our history as women.
The Three of Us: Stop “should-ing” all over the place
Ore Agbaje-Williams’s The Three of Us is an exercise in perspective. The novel is a micro-study of how opinion influences our lives and the lives of those closest to us. The novel is split into three sections, one dedicated to the wife, one to the husband, and one to the wife’s best friend. It’s no secret the husband and the wife’s best friend hate each other. The wife is just trying to keep the peace but at the cost of revealing her true self to either of them.
In the entirety of the novel, there is no traditional dialogue among the characters. All discussion happens within the prose, incredibly immersed in the consciousness of each character. It’s a long train of thought where memories collide with the present and opinions hold the spotlight. Internal dialogue, thoughts, and judgments of the three perspectives are dominated by how they believe the other characters should be living.
As I made my way through the text, it brought me back to some well-deserved psychological advice I received a few years ago: Stop should-ing all over the place.
What do I mean by this?
I should do this. I should know better.
Comparatively, replace “I” with “you”.
You should do this. You should know better.
It’s the unsolicited advice we all receive from our loved ones. And the unsolicited advice we give right back to them. That external “should” eventually becomes an internal one. Just think about how many times a day we say “I should…” because we’ve been conditioned to by others who told us “You should…”.
It’s a perfectionist’s kryptonite and a hard habit to break. There was a time when I was “should-ing” all day every day. It was like I was soaking my shirt in gasoline and lighting it on fire in a masochistic kind of self-sabotage.
But this uncontrolled “should-ing” is separative jargon that can pry open our identities and strain our relationships with family and friends. It’s something worth monitoring. Although what we think of ourselves and others could never survive in a vacuum, and the thought of such is just a fantasy, wouldn’t it be nice if it could sometimes?