Pros and cons of mutability

You’ve Changed
by Ian Williams

Toronto: Random House Canada, 2025
$37.00 / 9781039012356

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

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Ian Williams is not a novelist to do things by halves. In his Giller-prize-winning novel Reproduction he ran with the principle of “reproduction” and imbedded it deeply into both the novel’s form and its content. It is not surprising, therefore, that in his new novel You’ve Changed the principle of change is everywhere. Sometimes his approach is almost playful, other times deeply serious; yet change permeates the novel.

Williams brings to You’ve Changed another key principle of Reproduction. Of that novel, he said, “…it should be read like a good love story. That’s the only thing I want to read and write, or care about in people’s lives.” In fact, even more centrally than Reproduction, You’ve Changed is a love story. Like many love stories, this one involves a love triangle—and, as befits the theme, the changes wrought through multiple pressures and in multiple ways. 

But why should we read about fairly ordinary individuals in a fairly ordinary situation? The minds behind the world’s best love stories—even those as diverse as Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice—arguably tick three boxes. First, they create people we are made to care about. Second, they connect the relationship to striking circumstances. Third, and possibly most important, they handle form masterfully. 

How Williams manages his love story around these three principles and, to boot, how he links his love story to the principle of change, takes us to the fabric of the novel. 

First, then, the lovers. In creating the protagonist, Beckett, the author has made some subtle choices. Brought up as New England Quaker (and notwithstanding the nods to Waiting for Godot) he initially seems bland, even a bit of a wallflower, “fond of big talkers because they relieved him of the burden of being a glittering conversationalist.” Until the story takes hold of him, he is most distinguished by his penchant for distance running, cooking and tidying house when anxious, and transforming just about anything suitable into origami.

Such spontaneous bouts of origami folding, whereby he changes the ordinary through complex creases and folds, is mirrored by his job. Beckett works in construction. No pedestrian builder, though, “He was going to take people’s ugly houses and make them so beautiful their eyes would melt and drip down their faces.” It is in writing of Beckett as a husband, however, that Williams most snags our attention. Thinking gloomily of his “firm, bland tofu love,” he rues that his wife, Princess, could have chosen men that in “every aspect… were better than me.” 

Indeed, he could hardly be married to someone more strikingly different. The “fit, social, practical, easygoing” Princess is by profession a fitness instructor, but, as a woman, she is larger than life. Much larger. Outspoken, dynamic, and unpredictable, she, like her husband, embraces change with gusto. In her case, though, rather than renovating houses, she renovates her own body. The whole novel is steeped in plastic surgery, most significantly, in terms of the story line, by Princess’ flying abroad for “a Brazilian butt lift.” Even before that, we get, through Beckett’s thought line, a partial but eye-popping catalogue of Princess’ changes: “your microbladed eyebrows, your forehead with the sheen of plastic, the shore where your skin met your hair, the six tiny blemishes where you had the thread lift, the spot of filler on top of your cheekbones, the pores over your lip where you had lasered the hair….” A character who lives up to her name? A satiric edge to her blazing characterization? You betcha. 

The third character in the love story is a single man with the astounding (nick) name “Gluten.” Met almost by chance, Gluten—his name suggesting both fashionable gluten aversion and buttocks—triggers associations with a narcissistic self-gaze that rivals Princess’. In his case, adorned with “muscles [that] seemed like a plump air mattress or waterbed,” he “was always looking for an audience, fans, followers, witnesses’….” Clearly sharing a lot with Princess, he also wallows in newspeak and what Beckett calls “woo woo philosophy.” At one point, for example, Gluten concludes a rhapsodic declamation of his ability to wreak a transformation within Beckett by asserting earnestly that a “light is taking the elevator to the base of your spine and radiating everywhere from deep inside you.”

With these three highly-charged figures acting at his behest, Williams constructs a love story that is timeless, yes, but also contemporary. In fact, some readers may well feel that the book could aptly be subtitled “Scenes from a Marriage—2000s edition” and, in the process, vigorously ticking the second box.

Consider the outline. At the outset the marriage is not without… issues. Much is stirred up in an early scene via the kind of social evening that seems to bring out the worst in some couples (think: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Passive aggressive swipes and the word “sham” tainting the air, Beckett and Princess nevertheless follow up the evening with some periods of apparent harmony: “…those moments where Beckett felt his love for Princess stir.” More common, though, is brittle sparring, and, most tellingly as it happens, acute sexual incompatibility. Even some remarkably graphic (and unsuccessful) manoeuvres on Princess’ part are not enough to undermine Beckett’s complaint that she is “insatiable.”

Phase two. With Princess away for her cosmetic surgery, Beckett, through accidental—and embarrassing—circumstances ends up in Gluten’s home. What follows in the relationship between the two men is the stuff of both emotional and linguistic confusion. This is where Williams gives full sway to contemporary notions of sexual identity. The author repeatedly lards the dialogue about sexual attraction with issues of labelling and classification: “Dammit, I need a term for you,” thinks Beckett at one point. Repeatedly insisting he isn’t gay, he goes so far only to say, “The problem with all of the terms was that they had meanings. I resisted: I don’t identify as—I’m not… Okay, fine. I don’t mind lavender.” If readers find this funny they may take heart in the fact that much in this section of the novel (and throughout) is exactly that. Funny. Although occasionally explicit, the scenes in which Williams entangles the two men, constantly shifting in both physical and emotional terms, underline the contemporary notion that sexuality is…complicated. Later, as Beckett insists too much, perhaps, he did not have an “affair,” but an “overlap.”

Phase three. Princess returns. In some ways what follows is predictable. Accusations, anger, guilt, denial, rejection, partial reconciliation, and even moments of tenderness are what we might expect. What we might not expect, though, is what Williams does to make sure the next phase of the love story ignites. 

For one thing he has created characters that are not only vivid, but full-on loose cannons. Provocation through “revenge porn”, for example, leads to almost crazed vandalism at one point and, at another, fisticuffs. Further, far from bludgeoning the point, Williams creates the sense that, like sexuality, feelings can be… complicated. 

Beckett, the centre of sensibility at this point of the novel, is given the most affecting moments. The language and thoughts are distinct to Williams’ inventive approach, but the feelings are recognizable:

It was then that I decided, if you wanted me to, that I would stay with you forever just so one person in the world could know you to the studs.… The things I loved from the beginning took on a nostalgic tint. How your breath stopped before you sneezed. The passport photo you kept of your father. Your flourish at tapping your debit card.

And, of the estranged Gluten, Beckett thinks, “I wanted to tell him the rest, how he had removed a clot in my life, how blood now flowed to my ghost limbs….”

While the refusal to allow easy classification and predictability partly signals the contemporaneity of Williams’ love story, there is more. First, it is no accident that the story is set in Vancouver, where the author lived and taught for a few years before returning to Ontario. No other place would mesh as well with the “woo woo” elements and the New Age language swarming around them. No other place would suit as well Williams’ wry description of a marriage counsellor’s office, for example, climaxing in Beckett’s observation, “Everything felt like ancient Egypt.” As for the scene of “forest bathing,” where better than Vancouver to place it?

Second, and equally contemporary, is the pervasive, insistent presence of IT and social media. From avalanches of postings through blogging, to messaging and phoning, even trolling, contemporary communication in the novel is a tangled effusion of instantaneity, tropes and deceit. 

Third is the hyper-awareness of gender and race. When Princess says, “you meant, I as a Black woman, a one-quarter-Moroccan woman—enjoy cleaning up after white men?,” she merely gives one version of the sensitivity that erupts throughout her frequent, inconsistent declamations.

Clearly, Williams has ticked two of the boxes: in constructing his love story, he has created interesting characters and put them in interesting (social) circumstances. As for the third box, it may come as no surprise to readers of Reproduction that Williams is an inventive craftsman.

Less challenging than parts of the earlier novel, parts of this novel nevertheless explain why the author admits that his demands to his publishers can be “technically exacting.” Even the patterns of decorative triangles used to head each section or chapter constantly change—presumably under Williams’ direction? Early in the book parts of sentences fade into or out of grey as if the narrative itself is struggling to emerge. In the last part of the book, the greyed passages are, more arrestingly, fragments of dialogue from an earlier context: remembered words swim up to the surface without warning or control. In the middle part of the novel, though, Williams invents another device: as Beckett sifts through his confused physical reactions to Gluten, any word even superficially sexual is redacted—sometimes with comic effect. (Even the word “cock” in the context of “cockfight” is—almost—blacked out.)

More fundamentally, the narrative voice itself changes. Beginning in third person, the voice shifts to Beckett’s in the second part of the novel, and, in the end, intermingles with second person thoughts addressed to Princess. More in the sensibility of the reader than in any of the characters are the details that thread through the narrative, details as apparently as incidental as lemon loaf or origami hearts, or, more tellingly, songs. A playlist with versions of “You’ve Changed” at one point, for example, is echoed when Beckett observes, “You’ve changed, Diana Ross and George Michael and Sarah Vaughan kept insisting.” References to an advertising sign with the same words, “You’ve Changed,” likewise finds amusing echo in the earnest observation made of octopuses: “They change. They change colour when they dream.”  

The most striking emblem of change dominates the end of the narrative—a vivid account not of a house renovation, but (surely symbolically) a deconstruction—and planned reconstruction.

Perhaps the most arresting technical device, though, and the one that most ensures that the form of the novel reinforces the content, is the fact that, echoing James Joyce in Ulysses, Williams ends the novel the way he began it, in his case with a long paragraph listing domestic details. Marriage, just possibly he suggests, is fundamentally less the big events than it is “soaking the frying pan, opening cans of chickpeas, declining spam, rinsing the mouthguard, sniffing the armpits of undershirts, sniffing the crotch of underwear.”

So, Williams seems to ask, how much fundamentally have his characters really changed? Princess has said, “I change on the outside and you change on the inside.” Yet the epigraphs to the book make the vision of the book more elusive. Virginia Woolf’s words, “he remained precisely as he had been,” suggest one reading and an image from Balanchine’s ballet Agon, evoking conflict, another. The epigraphs conclude with Amy Winehouse’s lyrics, in faintest grey text, “I wake up alone.”

Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo has written and illustrated several coastal guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea, Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island, Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, and, recently, Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, Volume 2: Nanaimo North to Strathcona Park (reviewed by Amy Tucker), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. Recent BCR reviews include books by Jason A.N. Taylor, Tim Bowling, Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, and Tim Bowling.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster