Mona Awad
All’s Well by Mona Awad is a wild romp into magical realism. The novel opens with Miranda Fitch lying on her office floor. An assistant professor in theatre, Miranda is determined to direct Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But there’s a problem. Miranda suffers from chronic pain, the result of falling off the stage during one of her acting performances. The pain is so debilitating she can barely move. So she lies on her office floor, swallowing pain killers while ignoring repeated knocks on the door reminding her students are waiting.
Eventually, Miranda gets up and hobbles on to the stage to announce to the class they will be performing All’s Well. The students are disappointed since they had set their sights on performing Macbeth. The tug-of-war begins between Miranda and Briana, a student whose parents have donated generously to the theatre department. Making full use of her parents’ influence, Briana stages a coup in favor of Macbeth. It appears as if she will get her way, that is until Miranda steps into her local pub where she encounters three men. And that’s when the fun begins.
These are no ordinary men. They have mysterious powers, talk in riddles, are aware of Miranda’s predicament, assure her all will be well, and offer her a gold-colored miracle drink. Miranda drinks up only to find the chronic pain in her leg and hips has dissipated. The next day she learns anonymous donors have given generously to the theatre department and insist on seeing a performance of All’s Well. And that’s not all. The three men have bestowed on Miranda the trick of transferring her pain to others, which she does by simply touching Briana’s wrist. She brims with health while Briana’s condition deteriorates.
The further we get into the novel, the more surreal it becomes. Miranda hyperventilates words, thinks and speaks in staccato sentences, hallucinates, conducts conversations with people who aren’t there, and exhibits manic behavior. Meanwhile, she radiates energy, vitality, and sparkles with physical health. The play is eventually performed to an over filled theatre, the crowd demanding entrance as they wave the wrong theatre tickets. Briana miraculously recovers her health during the performance while Miranda chases a vision of her ex-husband.
The novel’s strength lies in its realistic portrayal of Miranda’s interiority, her chronic pain, and how others react to her invisible pain. A central focus is the way in which the medical profession refuses to acknowledge the reality of female pain. Miranda’s male physicians and therapists condescend, patronize, and dismiss her pain as if it is all in her head. Her desperation to alleviate pain makes her comply with their directions even when they pull, tug, stretch, prod, and poke her body while blithely ignoring her tortured cries of agony.
This excursion into magical realism borrows heavily from Shakespeare, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and echoes Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The three men are the witches to Miranda’s Lady Macbeth. Her pact with the three men is Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles. Miranda is Shakespeare’s Miranda, the beneficiary of Prospero’s magic. And the transmission of her debilitating pain to Briana while she radiates physical health and vitality is a nod to Dorian Gray.
In the end, all’s well that ends well. Or is it? Is Miranda cured of her chronic pain? Was it all in her head, after all? Is she having some drug-addled hallucination? What exactly happened? The conclusion offers no clear answers. But what a roller coaster ride it was!