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Sophia has the perfect life. Every morning she wakes up in her beautiful home, surrounded by beautiful things handmade by a husband who adores her and spoils her at every occasion. Sophia’s neighbors love her for her beauty and charm, her neighborhood is lovely and pristine and safe. Really, everything is perfect.
And it’s totally fine that her husband has to spend so much time away, and she doesn’t mind that she’s not supposed to go into the locked basement of their home. She has no complaints at all, she just wishes she could understand why the neighbors are always asking her if she’s happy. Really happy.
As if everyone’s scared that one day her answer might not be yes.
Catherynne Valente’s latest novella is a stunning example of one of my favorite kinds of fiction: the story that everyone’s familiar with, but shown from a slightly different angle. Every tale that’s ever been told has a host of other characters who’s viewpoints we usually don’t see: spear carriers and henchmen and, in this case, neighbors and all the other people who came along before the main character arrived onstage. All of them have their own opinions on what’s already happened, or what’s going to happen, and their own reasons for wanting to make sure Sophia’s happy, even though she’s never bothered to really think about what that means.
She doesn’t understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty.
The chapter headers are all selections from the neighborhood homeowner’s covenants; having the story take place in a planned neighborhood gives this a “so perfect it can’t possibly be real” quality. Imagine the strictest homeowner’s association possible. Nope, stricter than that. Imagine a place where there’s exactly a half-inch leeway between grass that’s “too short” and “too tall”, where there are exact specifications for your roof shingles, where you have a dazzling array of nine different colors your house can be painted, all of them different words for “white”. It’s petty and ridiculous in a way that becomes more and more disturbing as you’re left to wonder who’s thinking up these rules, who’s enforcing them, and what exactly is the penalty for breaking them?
…she is alive and she is Sophia, alive and warm and in gross violation of her HOA contract.
Valente’s prose does everything I love about her writing, going back and forth between dreamlike loveliness and even more dreamlike creeping horror while Sophia endlessly rationalizes the growing signs that something is Extremely Wrong. She loves her husband, he’s everything she’s ever wanted and he gives her everything he wants her to want, and so what if sometimes it feels like condescension dressed up as love, or if there’s an unfamiliar hairbrush in a dresser drawer. Until all of those tiny signs become a mountain of evidence that still can’t explain what’s going on.
But all she has are pieces, these pieces, an incomplete body with too much hair and jewels and teeth but no face to see and understand.
It’s no surprise that this is an achingly beautiful, tragic story. But it’s one with a core of rage at the sheer unfairness of what’s going on. Sophia is part of a system that makes one person arbitrarily more important than another, that uses happiness as a yardstick for obedience, and that gives endless second chances and zero real consequences, but only if the story is about you.
It’s also a novella I absolutely fell into and read through in less than a weekend. Twice, actually, because it reads differently once you know what’s going on, and the ending lets you know everything is going to change, but not exactly how it’s going to happen.