The Vivisectors
There is a limited, but great, lineage of novels of cancellation...and they are deeply discomfiting ones. Here, there is not even an incident to discomfort us. The novel promises a dangerous critique of contemporary sexual and cultural politics, and a narrator who sympathizes with the collective enemy; instead, it retreats into metaphor and meteorology ... Rather than analyze with any honesty the way humans tally up presumed evils on an inscrutable social abacus — or even depict it — The Vivisectors merely pre-empts all criticism, stepping back to vivisect its own pretense of sophistication.
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The Vivisectors tells two stories at once about one person. The suspenseful tension between them pulses at the heart of the novel’s poignance, humor, and winning personality ... The real story could also regarded as the gradual evolution from that person into someone in touch with themselves and others — a movement which is, despite the book’s stated resistance of such feelings, romantic. The narrative voice is so convincingly grouchy and dismissive that one might be tempted not to believe those moments in which the tone shifts — and yet those swerves are believable as well ... Sturdily structured, the novel ties things together at its end in a way that might strike some as blunt but could also be taken as gratifying, a surprisingly open expression of freedom.
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The reader is never given a direct account of the scene; like everything in the book, it comes to us second hand through Agathe’s crisp edicts on her generation ... In the end there is very little conclusion to the thorny problems of the novel, as it drifts into an unlikely romance. Even a ponderous read like this is enjoyable when it’s written by someone as sharply intelligent as Williams — but I wish she had retained some of the fearlessness we saw in The Doloriad.
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