Triangle of Sadness

The plight of a man in a world questioning masculinity is, understandably, a very hot topic. Michel Houellebecq’s tortured and lonely men continue to wonder about how communication with women is in any way possible. In what he says will be his last novel, Annihilation, one reflects: “The maintenance of any kind of sexual activity in an established couple is in itself a real success, the exception more than the rule.” David Szalay’s Booker-nominated Flesh centres on a taciturn tough guy, perhaps the least expressive character in all of literary history. Tony Tulathimutte’s satirical story collection Rejection looks at desperately sensitive men in a world that they feel condemns them no matter how feminist they are. Men in fiction are generally embarrassed these days. And they really don’t have a clue how to behave.

The lacklustre hero of Ian Williams’s You’ve Changed is no exception. A carpenter called Beckett, in a miserable marriage with a caricatural shrew, cannot express himself, especially to his wife, Princess. He gets fired from his construction job at the beginning of the second chapter. His name is no accident: he lives, like the playwright’s characters, in a state of paralysis and self-doubt. When the book begins, Princess is already furious with him — a state that will only intensify as the pages turn — because he seems to have lost the ability to have sex with her. She tries everything to get him aroused, including some anal play, which makes him very uncomfortable indeed. The last thing he wants to think is that he is gay. Which, of course, he is. Coming to terms with this will take him longer than the book has time to depict; he never really does.

Princess is a rare type in the contemporary novel: a purely unlikeable, irredeemably nasty character. She is a fitness fanatic obsessed with her own self-improvement and plastic surgery. The daughter of white missionaries, she grew up in Africa and, as an adult, claims a vague racial status to make it clear that she is at least not as white as her hapless husband: “African was the second-highest compliment one could offer her after athletic.” She humiliates Beckett in every way she can, particularly by making him feel insecure next to her virile Black friend (not accidentally named Wood). She mocks his taste in food and music. When she learns that he’s been experimenting sexually with a man, things take a turn for the worse. She starts renting out the house to — and sleeping with — Airbnb guests.

Beckett grew up in a religious community that valued silence and sexual repression. Now, in mid-life, he is decidedly stuck in the closet. He cannot contemplate leaving his cruel wife and abandoning his self-image as a responsible, conventional husband.

The person who sets Beckett’s self-questioning in motion is the most interesting and charming character in the book: an influencer called Cliff, who asks to be called Gluten — a nickname he acquired back in university, after bringing donuts to class. He looks “like a white Trevor Noah”: hot and athletic but also goofy and mercurial. His apartment is jungly, replete with plants and budgies. It is through him that Williams’s subtle social satire emerges. Gluten’s desultory chatter skips among fitness, self-help, baking, and sex, the way Instagram churns out random stories. He calls himself a “de‑influencer” and has discovered that “if you’re fit and take your shirt off people will watch you talk about anything.” As their affair develops, Beckett notices that Gluten is “more radiant and protean on screen than in the real world,” though he is the truest to himself of the bunch.

Despite their magical fun times and great sex, Gluten taunts Beckett for not being able to be honest with himself and for being unable to commit to the one good relationship in his life. I suspect most readers would taunt him for the same reason. When Beckett cannot simply dump the insufferable Princess, one’s sympathy turns to irritation.

The cover copy says this tense narrative is “absurdly funny,” and certainly Beckett’s observations can be amusing. When desperate to find a toilet, he notices a cycling jersey is “the lurid colour of multivitamin urine,” for example. But it’s hard to laugh when trapped in such a claustrophobic, codependent abusive relationship. One can feel either rage at the narcissistic Princess or frustration at the hopelessly passive and weak Beckett, and perhaps momentary entertainment at the observations about Vancouver culture — Princess forces him to see a Communist marriage counsellor, and characters are constantly stepping outside for a “puffpuff”— but the narrative never veers into full-blown satire.

Ian Williams is an intellectual: a professor at the University of Toronto, a poet, the presenter of the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures. His talks, called What I Mean to Say, were on civil disagreement and conversation. The formal play of poetry surfaces in his fiction as typographical and visual experimentation. In his previous books, he has added flash cards and bars of music. His Giller-winning novel, Reproduction, “gets cancer” in its later stages, represented by superscript “tumours.” These embellishments deliberately make his work difficult to translate into digital formats. You’ve Changed continues this tradition in a somewhat cryptic fashion. Lines that reflect Beckett’s memories or a change in his stream of thought are presented in a lighter font. Some words are blacked out. There is no explanation for the redactions, although they all seem to be related to sex and sexual identity (words like “dick,” “ass,” “sex,” “gay”). They start to appear only once Beckett has met Gluten, so perhaps their excision is meant to symbolize the former’s internal censorship.

Furthermore, the point of view changes subtly as the narrative progresses, as if to underline the theme of metamorphosis. It begins in the close third person, then switches to Beckett’s first person, and finally lands on the second person, which Beckett uses to address Princess.

The tensions among the three principal characters erupt into petty yet violent acts of revenge, although who has committed which act and exactly why remain murky throughout. The ending is pointedly circular. After a series of cathartic events, Beckett longs for exactly the same mundane daily routines that once trapped him. As in an existentialist play, there is no way out. Despite its title, no one, ultimately, has changed. This return recalls the first epigraph, from Virginia Woolf: “But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.”