Review: More Strange Than True

​Shakespearean Comedy Run Amok
Review: More Strange Than True

Emilee McIntyre

CJ Spataro
Novel
Sagging Meniscus Press, pp. 278
Cost: $21.95 (Paperback)

As the Bard himself once said, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” (AMND, 1.1.136) and that certainly is the case in C.J. Spataro’s debut novel, More Strange Than True, a story of fairy mischief in truly Shakespearean proportions. Instead of existing merely as a retelling of a beloved classic, the novel luxuriates in themes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, expanding on and complicating them and sometimes rejecting them entirely.

​We are accustomed to stories like Shakespeare’s where one beautiful woman is the object of multiple men’s affections. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the love triangle (love square?) involves Lysander, Demetrius, Helena, and poor Hermia, and the men are the characters with the more pronounced arcs. One of them will get what they want, as is the case for Lysander, and one will either fail bitterly or learn that they want something else, as is the case for Demetrius. Sometimes in triangular love stories, we see from the woman’s perspective how she hems and haws over these two perfect men (how can she possibly choose?!), but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular, Helena and Hermia have very little say in the matter. It is not up to them who they choose, though they are both clear on who they want from the beginning. Women are often portrayed as the ones who are pursued and men as the pursuers. Men are the subjects of love, and women its objects. 

The world of More Strange Than True mirrors Shakespeare’s play while turning our expectations of the traditional love triangle narrative on its head. The triangle here includes Jewell (ordinary woman), Titania (Queen of the Fairies), and Oberon (former dog turned hunky man). Two women are in love with the same man, and Spataro treats that fact with the gravity it deserves. Oberon considers his feelings for both Jewell and Titania significant. As he says to Jewell, “You and I are connected. She and I are connected. I don’t know what any of it means” (142). It isn’t silly girl drama or a cat fight. It is serious conflict with serious stakes. Jewell has suffered so much loss already; could she survive the loss of Oberon too? She confesses to him that, “You’re so beautiful and honest, and smart, and without any cynicism or guile. You’re everything I wished for. But I’m afraid that you’re too good to be true. That something made of magic cannot be trusted in the real world…I’m afraid you’ll break my heart.”(83). Jewell has dated the wrong men before. She knows what it’s like to be left behind. Now that she’s found seemingly the perfect man, she can’t bear the idea of letting him go. 

For Titania, too, the stakes are high; she has never in her long life experienced attraction to someone in this way, and she isn’t willing to ignore her new feelings. When the Queen of the Fairies first lays eyes on him, Spataro writes, “She smiled at him and felt her own countenance soften. She’d seen many beautiful creatures in her life, many beautiful men: faerie, elfin, and human—but this man—there was something both beautiful and somehow familiar” (40). The intensity of the conflict Spataro creates between the two women is genuinely subversive, in the ways it asks us to reconsider our notions about a woman’s role in romance. These are characters who aren’t just beautiful things to be admired, and they aren’t content to sit around and wait for the men around them to wise up. (Sorry, Hermia.) These are characters who don’t just want; they act. Titania is willing to leave the fairy Realm as she hasn’t in years to chase her love, and Jewell is willing to fight for the slice of happiness she has carved out for herself. 

Where the characters act is of some interest as well. Spataro’s novel essentially ignores the concept of the “Green World.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the meetings with fairies and magic all happen in the magical woods outside of Athens. The fantastical elements are removed from the grounded world of the city, and the characters are only able to return to reality once they have sorted out their mismatched love. In More Strange Than True, on the other hand, most of the action happens in Jewell’s apartment, in the very grounded world of modern-day Philadelphia. 

When Titania first arrives in the apartment, Spataro writes, “She looked about the drab and colorless abode cluttered with books and trinkets and the platter of food the woman ate from. She was repulsed by the clutter…” (29). This is an ordinary place where any ordinary person might live. The magic isn’t separated from the ordinary; they go hand in hand. Because of the lack of separation, the magical elements are portrayed as just as important as the real world. Oberon is magically created in the apartment, and is just as real as the cluttered “books and trinkets.” 

Throughout the course of the novel, Spataro elects to either implement or reject the motifs from A Midsummer Night’s Dream including love out of balance, transformation, the “Green World,” dreams, magic, and of course mischief. In doing so, Spataro is able to create a rich story that lives in conversation with the original play. Through a modern lens, the reader is able to explore these ideas anew, and ask questions that slipped out of notice in the original work. The most important of these questions: what is a woman’s place in love? It is a feminist take on tropes that are so old, they almost seem to be natural occurrences. Spataro’s work is complex and delightfully odd. Certainly, no reader will finish More Strange Than True and think of it as “this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding than a dream” (AMND, 5.1.444-45).