Okay, let’s begin with the big question: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is no Wicked. This immediate follow-up to Maguire’s landmark retelling of the story of Oz, the Wizard, a little girl named Dorothy and two witches (one green and wicked and the other blond and good) did not quite shake the world like its predecessor. True, it took almost a decade and a highly simplified (and many would argue immensely inferior storyline with a happy ending) for Wicked to do so, but do so it did. The sheer scope of Wicked as it tackles almost too many themes to keep track pretty much makes it impossible for any follow-up to withstand the comparison. And so let’s admit that the book doesn’t hold a candle to Wicked while also allowing for the fact that this failure is for one thing not so terrible and for another is not entirely the author’s fault. Except, of course, insofar as he is the one who chose to try to get lighting to strike twice by choosing Cinderella as the object of his next reinterpretation of a familiar tale.
Just about every American, at least, is familiar with the Wicked Witch of the West and she fascinates us no matter how she is perceived. The stepsisters of Cinderella, however…well, not so much. This is a reinterpretation of timeless fairy tale that does not situate Cinderella at its center. (Who, in this case, is actually named Clara.) As the title suggests, the perceptual viewpoint is that of one of the stepsisters. And even in that choice is a clear problem. In Wicked, Maguire could just as easily have focused his attention on Glinda and told the story from her perspective. (And if you watch the film carefully and pay attention, it pretty much casts Glinda as the secret villain, so there is fertile territory there.)
Here, Maguire has a choice between two stepsisters, but in every single version of the story (or almost, anyway) there really is no distinguishing between the one and the other. Even in the parody dream sequence on Gilligan’s Island, both Mary Ann and Ginger are equally ugly. That is the nature of their role. They may be two individuals and it is entirely possible that in early versions they were endowed with great distinction, but as the story has come down over time, they are simply not-Cinderella. And that is a hard nut to crack when your goal is to recreate perception.
But Maguire being Maguire, it is a nut that he manages to crack brilliantly without the reader (or most, at any rate) being aware of the magic trick he is pulling off. The breadth of this book cannot compare to Wicked, but at around 60,000 fewer words that is to be expected. And it is not even tried. Whereas in Wicked Maguire gives us a grand vista of the Oz that is not explored at all in the famous film version, what he does in this novel is give us a tightly constricted but almost equally fascinating vista inside a mind. The article there is of utmost importance: inside a mind.
Wicked benefits from not being told in the first-person even though it is clearly seen through Elphaba’s perspective. As the title implies in this novel, he chooses to put the perspective directly into the hands of an ugly stepsister. Again, the article should not be underestimated. He tells the story of Clara who is Cinderella and focuses most intensely upon the story of Iris who is not and less so upon the story of Ruth who is even more not-Cinderella. But to say that that novel is narrated entirely in the first-person is problematic. And it is precisely within that problem of perception and who is really narrating a story that shifts almost imperceptibly between between first-person past tense and third-person present tense that can be found the joy of reading these Confessions.
None of the characters are the equal of Elphaba, no doubt, but there is in the simple process of reading the narrative a spark of genius absent even from Maguire’s most famous work. To give it away, however, would be to behave like the ugliest of stepsisters.
