You've Changed - Couverture rigide

Williams, Ian

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1039012353 ISBN 13 : 9781039012356

Editeur : Random House Canada, 2025

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GILLER PRIZE
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The eagerly awaited follow-up novel from the Giller prize-winning author of Reproduction, You’ve Changed is a daring and clever dissection of a crumbling marriage between two people who are morphing in ways that confound each other.

Middle-aged and about to be dumped from his construction job, Beckett is not feeling his best—especially since his wife, Princess, is already pressuring him to improve himself. She’s a fitness instructor who spends a lot of time and energy finetuning every inch of her body. Still, they both think their marriage is basically fine, until a couple of friends show up for a visit, their mutual affection and sexual chemistry loudly on display. In one weekend, they upset the tenuous balance between Beckett and Princess, throwing them into parallel midlife crises.

Princess thinks the problem is physical, and attempts to revive Beckett's interest with relentless surgical alterations and bodily enhancements that have the opposite effect on her husband. Beckett tries to woo Princess back to him by relaunching his contracting business, laying his manly accomplishments at her feet. Then, while Princess is away pursuing even more drastic beauty measures, Beckett meets Gluten, an energetic and erratic man devoted to living in the moment, whom Beckett feels drawn to in ways that surprise him. Beckett is changing, Princess is changing: what will happen to their already stressed marriage?

Sharp, inventive and absurdly funny, You’ve Changed is a wild ride exploring identity, insecurity, intimacy and desire, and who individuals become when they unite, and how they change despite promising not to.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

IAN WILLIAMS is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He delivered the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, on rehabilitating conversations. His previous book, Disorientation, was selected as a best book of the year by the Boston Globe. Williams's debut novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize. His poetry collection, Word Problems, won the Raymond Souster Award, and his previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. Williams's short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

scrubbing dead skin from his heel, monitoring gas prices, cleaning the bathtub, hosing the truck, selecting the active wear cycle, shaking cereal boxes, returning shopping carts, switching internet packages, tapping screens, setting appointments, trimming his fingernails, tying his shoelaces, thumbing the remote, squeezing avocados, holding open plastic bags for grapefruit, getting married, growing a beard, dyeing a beard, shaving it all off, texting his wife, deciding which of six emojis best conveyed his present emotion, taking out the recycling on Wednesdays, unlocking his truck, sending e-transfers, pricing lumber, paint, blades, drywall anchors, soaking the frying pan, opening cans of chickpeas, declining spam calls, rinsing his mouthguard, sniffing the armpits of undershirts, sniffing the crotch of underwear, but the mumble of Beckett’s life paused when his wife announced that her friend from childhood, along with her husband, were coming to visit.

I have to work tomorrow, Beckett said. Don’t make me hang out with a bunch of strangers.

You’ll love her, Princess said, rattling a teaspoon around a cup of yogourt. Them.

I hate them already.

She was used to his half-empty glass. It’s only for tonight, she said. They’ll be on a plane to Orlando in the morning and you’ll have the rest of the day to be a sad, middle-aged Snuffleupagus.

-

When they arrived, the friend threw open her arms and greeted Princess theatrically: My African sister.

Oh, I’m just a white girl, Princess said, but she was beaming. African was the second-highest compliment one could offer her after athletic. Exotic was high on the list too, although she had friends who were offended on her behalf. Beaming. Beckett observed that her teeth were indeed whiter since the treatments.

Nonsense, my Ivorian Princess, Keza said.

Keza, my Ivorian Queen.

Dahling, you look fabulous.

No, dahling, you look divine.

Naw, girl, you tight.

No, you poppin’.

No you, no you, no you, and so they suffocated each other with compliments and collapsed on the couch, laughing and holding hands. They were girls again.

Princess and Keza hadn’t seen each other in thirty-five years. Princess had never met the husband who went by his last name, Wood, like he was daring everyone to make a dirty joke. As a couple, the Woods made a good nursery rhyme. Keza was dark and round and Wood was light and lean, so when they stood beside each other they looked like the number 10. Over the evening, every time Keza stood up, Wood stopped what he was doing and looked at her large derrière. Princess too. Beckett himself may have glanced once or twice. And Keza, knowing what was happening behind her, sighsmiled at her lot.

Keza’s voice broke through Beckett’s thoughts. She was pregnant. Our third, she said.

Princess’s mouth popped open.

Why didn’t you tell me? She spanked her friend’s wrist. We’ve been messaging for days.

Surprise, Keza said.

Princess asked the right questions about gender and due date and morning sickness and folate. She embraced Keza again then leaned over Keza’s thighs to squeeze Wood’s shoulder in a way that also assessed whether he was bone or muscle under his shirt.

I don’t know where we’ll put the baby, Wood said.

One of your kids is about to have a roommate, Beckett said, but he really wanted to say that they should pick a kid and tape an eviction notice to their bedroom door. When Beckett tried to establish eye contact with Wood to see whether he could handle the joke, the man looked away, and Beckett’s gut told him that the couple had secrets, maybe past miscarriages. Keza was forty-four now, same age as Princess.

Beckett probed instead about the layout of their house, which Princess later said was missing the point of baby news. They weren’t asking him for a consultation on renovations.

After a while, with the women talking nose-to-nose, Beckett turned on the TV, hoping to find a movie with explosions and watch it in silence with the other man. He already knew he couldn’t handle an evening of endless backstory, not to mention, Girl, you poppin’. Keza asked him to turn it off. They didn’t want to expose the in-utero baby to screens. Beckett tried to catch Princess’s eye—you said I’d love them—but she was nodding vigorously and off on a trail about radiation, brain development, a girl who got her first period at seven and a woman she knew who went through menopause at thirty.

So to adjust the silence between the men, Beckett put on one of his oldies playlists that began with Barry Manilow singing At the Copa, Copacabana. It made the white African, the Black African, and the American African in the room roast him until they couldn’t speak or breathe. Princess was both leading the attack and saving him from it. She got everyone up and soon they were sashaying their hips and shadowboxing. He had to admit that he enjoyed—I told you you’d love them—that part of the evening. Poor Lola, he always thought. And poor Beckett, because two songs later, during a song with one word, tequila, Princess attached herself to Keza’s hips to start a conga line and Wood attached to Princess’s and Beckett had no choice but to grip Wood’s hips and he wasn’t sure whether he was enjoying himself or simply co-operating. He was, most likely, suffering of happiness.

-

Dinner had no beginning or end. PB & KW leaned their elbows on the kitchen island and popped cheese and grapes into their mouths while a red sauce bubbled over on the stove and a chocolate cake defrosted. The day before, when Beckett shared that he was going to make a reliable pasta dish, Princess looked appalled that he would feed that processed, low-fibre, western slop to her people, so instead he cheated his way through a jollof recipe with tomato sauce, grilled some chicken and vegetables. But that night, everyone was insatiable. They shelled peanuts and mixed ice cream flavours and drank various juices in solidarity with pregnant Keza.

For Beckett, the volume of food compensated for the volume of talk. He was fond of big talkers because they relieved him of the burden of being a glittering conversationalist, but he perceived an imbalance between Princess’s thirty-five-year montage and everyone else’s. She went into detail about her continent hopping with her missionary parents, how the Spanish boys used to chase her then race her, her athletic medals, her United Colors of Benetton friends and boyfriends, an unusual life, no doubt, but it needn’t take up more time than Keza’s montage (sad girl boarding a plane from Côte d’Ivoire, studying hard at the library, shaking hands with white men to close deals, standing at the altar with Wood, soothing 2.5 children) or Wood’s montage (he once went to a funeral where gunfire broke out).

When Princess told people that she was African—because she did get a thrill at their reaction when she said she was neither South African nor North African, but born in Yamoussoukro—they eventually asked her questions about official languages, and animals, sometimes about the heat, and then could think of nothing else to ask, not a political question, not a question about her teachers. But now, she had her ideal conversational teammate. After dinner had dwindled to grazing and sipping, she and Keza settled back on the sectional, and were in and out of languages, reminiscing about the time the roads washed away, the passenger capacity of taxis, the distances they walked as girls, oscillating fans in classrooms, a game where they balanced objects on their heads like the women they admired, about how those women stacked fruit into pyramids at the market.

The side conversation between the men was simpler. They’d already established what the other did (construction, EDI consultant). Beckett hadn’t mentioned his dictator boss, the Mouth. Wood hadn’t expanded EDI into words. He’d also told Beckett that real estate in Orlando was reasonable compared to other major cities (Was it a major city, though? Beckett had wanted to ask), that he and Keza had started their consulting company during BLM, and that their two children (at home in Orlando with the grandparents) spoke no African languages. And although Beckett was a man so used to silence in childhood that he sometimes failed to complete his sentences, he had managed to make comments, or at least begin comments, about alligators, hurricanes, the Orlando Magic, and Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Wood, for his part, didn’t know anything about Vancouver, which he assumed to be like Seattle, so they talked about rain, grunge, Starbucks, and Frasier.

Basics covered, the men now moved on to things they could see in the room. Beckett followed Wood’s eyes then spoke about the oak flooring, the glass wall that separated the living room from the backyard, the TV, the sectional configuration, the various tools that littered the house like ornaments. Beckett gave him a tour while Princess was running her fingers through Keza’s windchime earrings. Half an hour later, outside the house, sharing a puffpuff near the compost tumbler, Beckett pointed with his pinky at all the visible things he’d built: the deck, the pagoda, the shed, the bench around the trunk of the apple tree.

When he had run out of constructed objects, Beckett asked, What’s EDI?

Same as DEI, Wood said and paused an unreasonably long time before continuing. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Right now we’re consulting with a school board about book bans. It’s all very political.

Cool, cool, Beckett said, but as a white man he turned off that road. Again, he couldn’t make the joke he wanted, which was, Let’s just ban literacy. He asked, belatedly, What about the screens on your cell phones? You guys expose the baby to those all the time.

Wood laughed. His eyes were red. Don’t take us so seriously, he said. I got myself eighty-five inches on Black Friday last year.

Until then, Beckett had been proud of his sixty-five inches. He left that subject too and told Wood about his plans to spritz sulphur on the leaves of the apple tree to get rid of the black spots. Then they talked about pears and inside the house Keza stood up and both men looked through the glass wall at the same time and Beckett had to turn off that road as well.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Canada
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1039012353
• ISBN 13: 9781039012356
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible