If We Were Villains

Shit, now I'm mad about this.Maybe it's the Shakespeare thing. Not the fact that this book has a significant amount of text and quotes from Shakespeare's work, or that big blocks are dedicated to the characters' performing said works, but rather how Shakespeare perhaps informed the structure of this novel. I don't really know, it's been a long time since I analyzed Shakespeare, and I was never particularly good at it. But I have learned - not from school, but from a Tumblr post - that Shakespeare's tragedies are marked by a protagonist that is made for a different kind of story than the one he is in. If Hamlet was in Othello's situation, he would have carefully analyzed things before jumping to conclusions and there would be no play; and if Othello was in Hamlet's, he would have just killed Claudius in the first act, and once again there would be no play. In M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains, there is in fact someone who finds himself playing the wrong role in the wrong story. It's not the main character though. And like many of Shakespeare's tragedies, its less about creating a satisfying conclusion and character arc, and more about just watching things slowly tumble down hill until they crash to the bottom. Fun.If We Were Villains is a story told by Oliver, a man who has spent the last ten years in prison for the death of one of his classmates at the highly selective and high pressure school of Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where they eat, breathe and sleep nothing but Shakespeare. He tells this story to the detective that supposedly “solved” the case, relaying the weird dynamics of a bunch of pretentious theater kids who may or may not have killed someone. The conceit of relaying a tale in such a way is very classic mystery, but I found myself wondering by the end of it whether Detective Colborne said to himself, “Huh. Yeah, I probably should have been able to figure that out myself. Cool, this was a waste of an afternoon.” I give this book marks for atmosphere and prose. It wasn't as lush as I would hope for something like this, but Rio was fully committed to the vibe. The descriptions of the performances are probably some of the book's coolest and most vibrant moments. But it's the characters that fall dead for me. All seven senior Dellecher acting students are introduced as archetypes - the hero, the whore, the villain, the king, the nobody. I don't think its remarkable that I found this extremely annoying right off the bat, but I expected Rio to subvert it. I kept waiting for her to do just that. But aside from a single comment from Meredith about three quarters into the book about being labeled the sexy one, no one seems to bother. I found myself reading in disbelief that I was just supposed to take at face value everything I was told these characters were, rather than what I was shown they were. I was so mad that the story takes for granted the kind of societal programming that comes with labeling Meredith the whore, or that I was supposed to understand what was so loveable about James just because he has a hero's face. And of course the faceless one is our protagonist, Oliver - the unexceptional one who attaches himself to someone more beautiful, and becomes what the people around him need him to be. That might be my least favorite character trope.No one ever did anything that surprised me. Or excited me. Hell, the guy who gets himself killed at the beginning is probably the most exciting part of this book, and we never really know what was driving him to act the way he was. Again, the story leans heavily on the role he is assigned - the arrogant king. And despite the amount of supposed queerness (thanks, by the way, for assigning the only openly queer character as the “scary” one), this felt deeply heterosexual. Like in a way that is almost hard to describe as a queer person. I know if I had read this as a teenager I would have swooned over James and Oliver's deeply repressed love for each other, so desperate I was to have something outside of the heterosexual paradigm. Now as an adult who has to spend a lot of mental energy undoing comphet programming, I am so very over it. I feel like this book regresses queer rep a solid twenty years. Yeah, you know what, I'm too mad about this to give this anything above one star. For a while, about mid way through I was debating between a two and a three. Before I sat down to write this I was pretty convinced of two. But no. I'm not sure why people like this so much, I guess if you're a hardcore lit nerd who loves Shakespeare but somehow has not read a single thing with a queer character since [b:The Secret History 29044 The Secret History Donna Tartt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451554846l/29044.SY75.jpg 221359] (that's not a knock, I loved that book, I still love that book, but it is largely of its time), then have at it. But for the rest, there are much better, much gayer, dark academia books out there.