In 'The Three of Us' by Ore Agbaje-Williams, a friend threatens a marriage
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Everybody needs a friend as loyal as Temi. God help anybody with a friend like Temi. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight That’s the paradox at the center of “The Three of Us,” the debut novel by the British-Nigerian writer Ore Agbaje-Williams. She presents a day in the lives of a husband and his wife and the wife’s best friend, Temi.
She’s rich, dazzling and deeply possessive. Watch out. At just 192 pages, “The Three of Us” is as short and sharp as a paring knife — perfect for carving up this marriage.
Agbaje-Williams writes in a fluid, conversational style that dissolves paper and ink into sound waves. Arranged in three acts — I mean, chapters — the novel is so theatrical in its structure and immediacy that the moment you finish reading it, you’ll imagine you actually heard it. (In fact, you can: The audiobook version, narrated by Jake Fairbrother, T’Nia Miller and Tariye Peterside, exquisitely exploits the story’s performative quality.)
Only Temi gets a name in these pages, as though she’s already smudged out the identity of the other two. But we hear from them first, in a clever sequence that sets the stage for Temi’s calamitous meddling.
At the opening, the wife is excited to see her old friend, who drops by the couple’s posh English home with wine and chips for a luxurious afternoon of drink and gossip. “Sometimes I get jealous listening to her stories,” the wife says. “They are full of chaos and one-liners and people who seem cartoonish and contrived but are somehow real. Whenever she tells them — always with a drink in hand — I am completely rapt.”
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So are we.
While Temi delivers her signature tales about dates with insufferable men, the wife talks directly to us in a winding, illuminating confession. We learn that she and Temi were raised by strict Nigerian parents who expected total obedience and impressive academic performance. “Our entire lives were mapped out in Excel spreadsheets where they calculated various probabilities and formulated a strategy for each one of us.” But Temi eventually broke away from those strictures and encouraged her best friend to follow her bold philosophy of BMFM: “By Myself, For Myself.”
“Becoming friends with Temi was like having someone lift the lid on my sheltered life and offer a hand to pull me out,” the wife says. “Until Temi, I didn’t know it was even possible to decide things for myself.”
But just how free the wife is now remains a point of some friendly disagreement. Convinced that men are useless or worse, Temi can’t fathom why her friend got married three years ago, swapping one prison — living at home with her parents — for another. “This man doesn’t fit into the plans we made,” Temi complains.
But the union makes perfect sense to the young wife. “My husband and I match because he expects nothing from me,” she says. “I love him because he loves me without requirement.”
Like so much in this crafty novel, that’s not entirely true. One disagreement persists in this marriage, like a splinter buried under the skin. The husband very much wants — and expects — to have children. “I don’t want children,” the wife confesses. “But over time my husband has convinced me — or I’ve let him, and a recent (and deeply uncomfortable) conversation with his mother, who is nice but very much believes that the world revolves around her son — that we should at least try for one child.”
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“It’s a contentious subject,” she adds, “the baby thing.” But there’s the rub: It’s a contentious subject with Temi, who presumes that she has some significant role to play in her friend’s marriage.
In the novel’s second section, we hear directly from the husband, and it may not surprise you that he takes issue with Temi’s frequent presence in his house — and her influence over his wife. “I expected to live with one woman when I got married,” he sighs. “Apparently I live with two.” In fact, his whole monologue is a series of irritations compressed under such pressure and heat that they become little diamonds of adamantine hatred. There’s something equally horrible and hilarious about watching him struggle to contain his rage against this woman who drinks his liquor, interrupts his evenings and dismisses him as “the human equivalent of a Bic pen.” He knows he shouldn’t let Temi get the best of him but he can’t help himself, and Agbaje-Williams follows his rage along a great spiral of exasperation.
This comédie à trois moves along so briskly and with such sly wit that it’s easy to overlook how the novel teases issues of class and race. As wealthy Nigerians living in England, these three immigrants live suspended between the suspicions of their White neighbors and the expectations of their African families. For the wife, especially, that position seems to exacerbate a nagging sense of unease.
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Toward the end of “The Three of Us,” there’s a reference to “Romeo and Juliet,” but “Othello” is a more apt allusion. If Temi isn’t as evil as Iago, she’s certainly as conniving in her efforts to poison her friend’s marriage. And yet “The Three of Us” is no tragedy. Not only is Agbaje-Williams too witty for anything that heavy, but every one of these characters bears some responsibility for their cringingly awkward situation. The wife admits as much when she says: “It is strange, and every so often uncomfortable, when the insults become more pointed and personal. But it’s also entertaining. I like to say almost nothing, see where it goes.”
That’s a foolish risk for her; an amusement for us. The final section — Temi’s monologue of what she calls “unfiltered honesty” — is more destructive than anything the wife could have imagined, and more deliciously wicked than anything we could have anticipated.
You may not want a friend like Temi, but keep a copy of “The Three of Us” handy. It’s the perfect bridal shower gift for that special frenemy.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
The Three of Us
By Ore Agbaje-Williams
Putnam. 192 pp. $26
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Source: The Washington Post
