“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
M.L. Rio’s “If We Were Villains” follows seven actors at the fictional Dellecher Shakespeare Conservatory, a prestigious university acting program in Illinois. The main cast are all assigned a sort of persona, repeated performance after performance over their time in the program: James (the hero), Alexander (the villain), Richard (the tyrant), Meredith (the femme fatale), Wren (the ingénue), Filippa and Oliver (the extras). But these typecasts get turned over for the Halloween production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” and these acting personalities transform into their real ones until disaster strikes, leaving one of the seven dead.
We enter the novel to find Oliver finishing his 10-year-long jail sentence. Detective Colborne suspects that Oliver is hiding the truth of what happened that fateful night, and Oliver agrees to give him the answers following his release.
These details are relayed to us, the reader, over the course of five acts, much like a Shakespearean play. The introduction of each act is based in the present — Oliver and Colborne walking around old Dellecher — and the rest in the past. There is betrayal, violence, affairs, jealousy, revelations and heartache in each act. All of these emotions culminate in the final act, where the remaining six are performing a production of “King Lear.”
An essential theme of “King Lear” is knowledge of self. In Act One, Scene One, King Lear’s own daughter says of him: “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” Using “King Lear” as the backdrop for the striking disaster was beautiful, a direct parallel to Oliver. Oliver did not realize who he truly was — more specifically, who he truly loved — until it was too late, and once he discovered this about himself, it only made the fallout worse. As Oliver said, “But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.”
During the novel, Detective Colborne asks Oliver, “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” Oliver responds, “I blame him for all of it.”
What do I blame this book for? Everything.
I read this book during the fall of my first year here at Fordham. On Nov. 15, 2021, I left this review on Goodreads: “If I could give this more than five stars, I would. Everything about this book is heartbreaking perfection. I’m shaking right now… It took me over a month to read because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the ending. I’m not okay.” Now, I am nothing if not dramatic, but having to think this much about this book while writing this Editor’s Pick makes me want to throw up.
One thing about “If We Were Villains” is that, thematically, some things will fly over your head if you are not well-versed in Shakespeare’s works. Reading this novel made me want to study Shakespeare, and sparked one of my first thoughts of declaring an English major. This novel is why I decided to take a three-hour Wednesday class on Shakespeare in the spring of my sophomore year, where I fell even more in love with the Bard and his words (shoutout to my professor Stuart Sherman, who is one of the best professors I’ve had at Fordham).
The author states, “The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent… He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.” For Oliver and the others at Dellecher, Shakespeare brings meaning to life. He makes it easier to understand the intricacies of humanity. Their need to find themselves through Shakespeare led to the demise of their triumphs, and their lives at Dellecher paralleled the works of Shakespeare in the most tragic of ways.
A quote that follows me everywhere — especially here at the Ram — is, “For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.” While words may have failed Oliver, they definitely did not fail Rio in writing this exquisite, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, life-altering novel of love, obsession and betrayal.
Molly • Feb 14, 2024 at 6:17 pm
I read this book and it continuously left me wanting to stop reading, however my soul told me to keep going. This became one of the best book I have ever read. The build up was so exhilarating, everytime Ibthought one thing, it changed and was completely different. It made every page turn exciting .