Published by Simon & Schuster on August 3, 2021
The first several chapters of All’s Well made me question my willingness to endure the pathetic protagonist for an entire novel. In later chapters, the protagonist transforms from pathetic to wicked. A wicked protagonist is more interesting than a pathetic protagonist. The more wicked she became, the more I was hooked on the story.
Miranda Fitch is a stage actor — or she was until, while playing the role of Lady Macbeth, she took a tumble off the stage and was hospitalized for back and hip injuries. Miranda regards her finest moment as playing Helen in All’s Well that Ends Well. Miranda sometimes believes she is Helen although, in true Shakespearean tradition, identity confusion becomes a common occurrence as the story unfolds.
No longer capable of performing on stage and barely capable of existing, Miranda takes a job as a theater director at a small college. She fudges her credentials — she’s never actually directed a play — but she leaves much of the day-to-day work to Grace while she lays on the floor, trying to endure her constant pain. When Miranda walks, she drags one leg like an anchor. Her physical therapy sessions only increase her pain. Various doctors and healers have proposed treatments that have no positive impact, leading her mental health provider (and perhaps the reader) to suspect that the pain is all in Miranda’s head. I’m not sure whether Mona Awad wants the reader to believe the pain is real. From Miranda’s perspective, at least, it is real enough, but Miranda’s perceptions are not entirely reliable.
Miranda’s students want to perform Macbeth. Miranda has settled on All’s Well that Ends Well. A young woman named Brianna who always plays the lead by virtue of having wealthy parents who spoil her (and who contribute to the college) leads a rebellion in favor of scrapping All’s Well in favor of the Scottish play. When college administrators pressure Miranda to relent, she goes to a bar to drink her troubles away. There she meets three men who somehow know her name, who know of her desire to direct All’s Well, and who insist that they support her effort because they all “want to see a good show.” Miraculously, when one of them helps her to her feet after another tumble, her pain and disability seem to be receding. Soon she is cured, perhaps better than she ever was.
Are the three men witches? Is Miranda? How about the young woman who takes the role of Helen after Brianna becomes afflicted with the same kind of pain that once troubled Miranda? The novel inspires more questions than it answers. All we know is that people who give Miranda a hard time (including her physical therapist) seem to take on Miranda’s pain and infirmities.
Cause and effect are difficult judge in a novel that adopts the Shakespearean reality of witchcraft. Miranda’s unreliable perception of reality also makes it difficult to know whether the events we read about are only occurring in Miranda’s addled mind. As the novel progresses, her perceptions seem increasingly distant from those of everyone else, including her belief in her own glowing beauty after she comes to rehearsal in a seaweed covered dress, having (she is certain) slept in the sea. She frequently mistakes the ex-con set designer with whom she is sleeping for her ex-husband, although she is the only one who notices a resemblance. Theatrical performances strike her as brilliant that others regard with less enthusiasm. So the reader can’t quite trust Miranda to provide an accurate narrative, but where the truth might lie is never quite clear. Perhaps only the witches know.
All’s Well, like its namesake play, is both a comedy and a tragedy. It is more successful as a comedy. Awad’s dark humor works best when she mocks Briana, a child of privilege whose sense of entitlement encourages her to believe that the dean will believe her when she accuses Miranda of witchcraft. The tragic elements draw upon magic and delusion to transform Miranda into a bad person, or a person who thinks she’s bad, apparently to teach her that it’s better to be good. But Miranda wasn’t a bad person to begin with. At worst, she suffered from a psychosomatic illness that made her a drag to be around. At best, she actually suffered chronic pain that had a physical but undiagnosed cause. The point of Miranda’s delusions is one I could never find.
In addition to the novel's comic moments, I appreciated Awad’s portrayal of Grace as Miranda’s enabler, a false friend who encourages Miranda’s belief in her own pain to undermine her. It is satisfying to watch Grace and Briana take their falls, even if the degree of Grace’s fall is magnified by Miranda’s delusion. Yet by the end, all’s well, and it doesn’t seem that Grace or Briana have learned anything from their experiences. Maybe the experiences only occurred in Miranda’s mind so they had nothing to learn. Who knows?
All’s Well offers a bit of fun for readers who want to catch and interpret allusions to Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespearean themes. Yet Shakespeare made strangeness work — there are allusions here to The Tempest, a brilliantly strange play — while Awad offers a strange blend of magic and delusion that doesn’t always seem to have a point. Still, the story’s energy and humor, its transformation of Miranda from a pathetic character to a wicked one (before she apparently renounces her deal with the devil), and its moments of sharp humor give All’s Well enough good moments to offset the confusion caused by the novel’s ambiguous nature.
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