A Triangle for Two

It is, I suspect, profoundly unfashionable at this point to confess to liking John Updike, but I will cop to the crime: for a decade or so from the late 90s through the mid-aughts, I went through probably a dozen of his books, from the Rabbit tetralogy to weird one-offs like the Centaur (which alternates Updike-typical chapters with others where the plot and characters are transposed into a mythological register) and Memoirs of the Ford Administration (basically the same idea, except instead substitute previous world’s-worst-president James Buchanan for the centaur). It’s not that the plots or characters were especially compelling – they all centered on a callow WASP cheating on his wife, which even in 1998 was a dull business – but Updike had a hell of an ear for dialogue and a facility for absurd jokes that lightened the often-heavy plot points. But most of all the thing that kept me coming back was the scenery: every couple of pages, he’d usually feature some bit of scenery from the northeastern United Sates, lyrically yet matter-of-factly limning the trees or hills with such majesty that they became a backdrop lending tragic, transcendental weight to whatever tawdry domestic drama was playing out in the foreground.

All of this is to say that while the most distinctive thing about Triangle for Two is the fact that its protagonist is a plural system – that is, they are a pair of distinct identities that share a single body – I’m going to start out gushing about the landscapes. Like, this paragraph could have come straight out of an Updike short story (though let’s not imagine how clumsy he would have been taking on this subject matter):

‘Jan’ was focused entirely on the road, gripping the steering wheel like it might slip out of their hands and fly away. Their body was stiff, their moves mechanical. Anna stared at the landscape outside: yellow, grey, green, grey, brief splash of blue, grey. Roadside chapels with their colourful ribbons fluttering in the growing wind, small houses for large families, farming machines, all became smears behind the window.

This maybe says as much about me as is it does Triangle for Two, but this might well be the single most exciting paragraph I’ve read in this year’s Comp. It’s got rhythm, it’s got imagery, it’s got character; it’s direct, tells you exactly what you’re seeing and what it means; it’s beautiful and I love it more every time I read it. And all the game’s prose is like this, with the same careful attention to the pregnant detail carried into every description, every bit of dialogue.

This is wonderful in its own right, but also did a lot to engage me in the work of understanding the situation of the two protagonists, Jan and Maria, which is less unfamiliar to me than it would have been to Updike, I suspect, but still required an imaginative leap. But that leap was an easy one to make given poignant details like these in a description of Maria’s yearning to wear a dress and dance (the system’s body is male):

I’m there as she twirls in the living room. The curtains are drawn. She doesn’t want to look through the windows because she knows she’d start thinking about what it would feel like to have the wind play with those billowing sleeves.

Indeed, while Maria seems in some respect positioned as the secondary personality – beyond their shared body better matching Jan’s gender identity, there are indications that Jan also pre-existed her, and most of their family and friends know him and not her – she’s probably the most compelling character in the piece, her grappling with her identity full of yearning and compelling specificity:

She never thought about herself too deeply. What were her preferences? What did she like? Peace and quiet, of course, but who doesn’t like that? There had to be more. Driving, that’s for sure. The dress she had hidden in the closet. Household tasks, basic maintenance, cleaning, organising, cooking, but not baking; too many unpredictable variables there. Watching the birds, but only in the winter, when the tits came back, especially blue tits. What else? Was there anything else that was just hers?

I’ve given short shrift to the plot here, as was my wont with Updike. I liked it too, though – no infidelity in sight, it just hinges on Jan and Maria coming out to their friend Anna, whom Jan has a crush on. This complicates his relationship with Maria, as well as making things very confusing for Anna, but Triangle for Two avoids the melodrama that its title suggests: everyone is remarkably mature about their emotions and each other’s needs, and while there are some moments of tension, overall the game paints an aspirational portrait of people trying their best to understand each other. Similarly, the gameplay elements are understated but well done: most passages have a link that provides a bit more context or elaboration on the main plot, as well as one that simply moves on to the next one, but there’s at least one place where you can decide whether it’s Jan or Maria who’s ringing Anna up, which felt like a very consequential choice. One arresting passage also breaks from the parsimonious approach to links by festooning underlined-words throughout the page: you can toggle between Jan and Maria, and male and female pronouns, to create your own interpretation of who is doing what in a particularly charged moment; it’s a bravura marriage of substance and form, just one arresting piece of a game that’s full of them.