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The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams
Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.
What if your two favourite people hated each other with a passion?
The wife has it all.
A big house in a nice neighbourhood, a ride-or-die snarky best friend, Temi, with whom to laugh about facile men, and a devoted husband who loves her above all else, even his distaste for Temi.
On a seemingly normal day, Temi comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife: drinking wine, eating snacks, and laughing caustically about the husband’s shortcomings.
But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made, the wife’s two confidants are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions, throwing everyone’s integrity into question — and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over years, into utter chaos.
Told in three taut, mesmerising parts —the wife, the husband, the best friend —over the course of one day, The Three of Us is a subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive triptych of domestic life that explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal when it comes to ourselves and the people we are meant to love.
This book is all about perception — how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us.
We know Temi is self-centred, obnoxious, lacks boundaries, is childish and probably has a mental disorder (is she a psychopath?) with how particular she is about controlling her friend’s life and how much of the past she wants to re-live.
We know the husband is slightly misogynistic, unable to enforce healthy boundaries to ensure his family’s well-being and exhibits traits of toxic masculinity (controlling, wants to be the breadwinner [as a form of control], dictates his wife’s diet, activities etc).
But really, who is the wife? Is she simply the role she plays to both Temi and her husband? Or is she a woman of her own volition? She is someone who hates the control of her parents, but is definitely being controlled by Temi and her husband.
She essentially lacks integrity, and is living her life just to fulfil the roles to those around her. I find this quite sad and miserable, but real.
None of these characters are supposed to be like-able.
While the ending/cliff-hanger is slightly anti-climactic, it brings to light key traits of the three characters — it shows just how inauthentic the wife is, it reveals how transactional the husband is towards his wife/their marriage and it shows how persistently childish and manipulative Temi is.
Wine plays a huge role in this book. I am a wine lover so I enjoyed a glass or two while reading.
About seven or eight bottles of wine were consumed by the characters in this book, so it only makes sense that the wine fuelled that tannic ending — pun intended.
I took the writing style of this book for what it was- different, unique. No quotation marks demarcate the various characters’ speech, but this is something I got used to after the first page.
For the life of me, I do not understand why this book has such low ratings. So much can be said about these characters! It is an excellent book club read.
The Three of Us was an engaging read for me, and a great addition to books on friendship that I am really loving at this point in my life. — African Book Addict.
Online Reporter