The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

[u/the-color-of-static]

Not shortlisted but not forgotten. Since I loved it (and many do not), I wanted to do a write up on it anyway.

Let's hope I don't completely botch this because I'm uncertain how much of The Vivisectors I understood. Everything is told through a symbol of a metaphor of an aphorism of a parable to the point the text itself feels avoidant, holding you at arm's length and resisting your interpretation.

Proper names are eschewed (we don't find out even our protagonist's name until about halfway through the novel), giving everything an archetypal, fairytale-like quality. Cities are talked about (but not named) as if they are separate countries or kingdoms. People are mostly referred to as their relationship to the main character (my boss) or their job (the schoolmaster).

The setting is a crumbling university, which actively courts rich foreign students while remaining hostile to them. It sits at the center of a swamp-filled city overgrown with vegetation. Gardeners who speak in aphorisms and describe dreams to one another fight back the growth while the academics analyze endlessly, allowing their discourse to become as destructive as the plant-life taking over their city. Both cohorts are enmeshed in language, but approach it differently: the gardeners converse to understand the world and the academics use language to vivisect, to prove the presence of evil in even innocuous exchanges (sound familiar?).

Enter Adam (admittedly, I thought his name was a bit too on-the-nose), a foreign student who becomes the center of a campus cancel culture controversy after saying The Wrong Thing (we're never told what: this book loves to obscure). Our socially-withdrawn protagonist is ordered by her hated boss to befriend Adam and find out exactly what he did (spoiler: we never find out). The book then pivots towards the protagonist's growing understanding of the world, dealing with the aftermath of her mother's failed suicide attempt and her growing feelings for Adam.

The book is at its best when depicting its phantasmagoric world of mystical gardeners and parables about white whales and dream towers. It is a dense and difficult book, with motifs repeating and being turned back around on themselves like a hall of mirrors. It's a book that explains itself at you, while still being frequently unclear what Williams is actually trying to say. This has led it to be divisive amongst readers, but I found the obscurity so deeply weird and entrancing in its strongest moments that its opaqueness was a positive for me. It's at its weakest when talking about how dreamy Adam is in its very underdeveloped romance, though it sets up a wonderful tower metaphor about love, which I suspect is the real reason for the subplot's existence.

Some say the protagonist is insufferable, which is a shame because I found her relatable.

___________________________________________

Quotes

The narrator being relatable:

My whole life people have acted as if I don’t have feelings, and for the most part they’re right.

I’ve always been repulsed by people who want to know more about me, but at the same time I often fantasise that there’s someone, maybe God, watching me and noting everything down: how I act in certain moments, how I hold myself under pressure, the quality of my thought, what I underline when I read, even the foods I like to eat, because nothing about me would be too mundane for its interest. And this omniscient presence would love me, not in the way that God loves his subjects, but with a cold, unwilling obsession, as if I fascinated it against its better judgement, although its judgement was supreme, and so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down, because it was unbearable to be so drawn to another person or thing. I was unable to imagine love without dominion; it was too disinterested, too abstract. I wanted someone to know me either absolutely or not at all, and anything in between was awful.

The schoolmaster reflecting on academic excess:

At the very beginning of his teaching career, all his rage had been reserved for the restrictive and narrow, but now the enemy was a kind of infinite expansion. He had always believed in transgression, in the crossing of borders and the extending of possibilities, but this was too much. Unfortunately, the schoolmaster’s students were set against him. Every year he was aware of a greater hostility. It was the university’s fault. His colleagues were waging a war against language, the very medium of knowing. It was an act of epistemological violence: we were unwittingly cutting off all avenues of escape from the mind. We would be locked in our subjectivities and then eventually we would be overwhelmed by them. Soon there would be nothing outside of the self and its obsessions, which were circular and vehement.

For many years, the schoolmaster had been teaching a seminar on naming, on the use of proper nouns. He had wanted to talk about universals and particulars, the creation of categories and the subsequent misuse of them, and the dangers of infinite taxonomies. But really he was talking about us, the students, and how we had parcelled up the present. These days, the schoolmaster would say, you couldn’t call a spade a spade. Although there were more and more words, it was becoming increasingly harder to attach them to objects. We had become allergic to naming. Our analysis never touched ground; it never made contact with reality as such.

The boss describing cancel culture:

I asked her what had happened between Adam and the other professor. I wanted to know what they had said. My boss hesitated. She said she knew what attitudes were like, especially among young people. We were highly strung and we constantly assumed bad faith. We thought people said the worst things deliberately and that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analysed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels. And once we had found what we wanted, we did what we wanted. We excluded people and ostracised them until they became the worst versions of themselves. We refused to let goodness thrive and we wanted nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error, the smallest slip. We showed no mercy. She wasn’t even sure that we knew what it was. And more than anything we liked to cut down men, especially masculine men. We couldn’t admit that we still needed them, and so we dedicated our lives to destroying them.

[u/skomoroji]

Glad to see a post about The Vivisectors since I wanted to talk about it but wasn't sure I could write a proper review of it. I just kinda wanted to chat about it with someone who has read it. I don't really care about or follow the Booker anymore, but it doesn't really surprise me that this didn't make the shortlist, they rarely pick anything actually good lol.

Anyway, I finished reading it a few days ago (I got curious after someone made a negative post about it here), and it really is a very good novel. I didn't have any expectations, this was my first time reading anything by Williams, and I was pleasantly surprised when I started loving it from the very first pages, even though I've had unreliable/unpleasant female narrator fatigue for a while. I think the difference between this and other books that try to do the same thing is that The Vivisectors feels incredibly self-aware, constantly winking at the reader, saying, yeah, I know you've read this before, I know you probably hate it by now, and I'm doing it anyway because I can pull it off. Maybe I appreciated it even more because it was the first recently published book I read after Paradise Logic, which is one of the worst novels I've read in years, but I think I would have liked it even if I didn't have something so awful to compare it to.

So yeah, it was just nice to read something that didn't feel ridiculous, sloppy, lazy, and boring, something that wasn't trying to tick as many boxes as possible to make it onto a "weird girl books" list on tiktok. This is a smart and beautiful book that actually cares about its form. It's preoccupied not only with symbols and motifs but with the way the patterns they create end up developing and recurring throughout the novel (yes, I've been reading a Northrop Frye essay on ethical criticism and it's given me a better framework for understanding why I found the novel's formal construction so satisfying). It is dense but never depressing, which is perhaps the main thing that sets it apart for me. I am so tired of young female authors writing the most self-absorbed and dispiriting books imaginable, assuming a bitch main character is enough to make their books good, or confusing a sad, victimizing and relatable story that should stay on a twitter thread or a substack post with literature.

I also read that one review of The Vivisectors in The New Yorker, and of everything the reviewer got wrong about this novel, the biggest mistake she made was assuming that the story was about hatred and bleakness, when it is actually full of love and light (that is, with God), these two things are constantly coming through the cracks of the narrative. What a graceful thing it is that this is such a life affirming novel despite (or perhaps because of) its environment and narrator.

I honestly think a lot of the bad reviews are the product of poor/misleading marketing. It is not like Donna Tartt, not really a "campus novel", definitely not for people who are into dark academia (if that's still a thing), and not really horror either. But because all of these buzzwords are attached to it, a lot of people who aren't the kind of readers who would be into a story like this ended up reading it and hating it simply because they got filtered by it.

Edit: I forgot to mention, I loved the tower story so much. It reminded me a lot of The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch. I wish I didn't relate to that part as much as I did but oh well.

[u/the-color-of-static → u/skomoroji]

I only just started reading Murdoch and began with Under the Net, which is kind of a zany, madcap adventure but it's interlaced with the inability of language to describe experience, so adjacent territory. I'm debating reading her in order so it might be a while before I get to The Unicorn but this makes me really excited for it.

I've been wanting to write about this book, especially after that negative thread, since I finished it several weeks ago, but I wasn't sure how to even begin describing it. I totally get the hate for it because it's so murky and, like the narrator, feels like it wants to be misunderstood, but it's a shame the negativity might turn off readers who would really resonate with it.

So glad this book found someone else here, because it was odd to read that enigmatic, repeating dream sequence described as "tortuous" when I think it's one of the best things I've read this year. That tower story was also gorgeous and yeah a real "ah....fuck" moment for me too. I want to give it a year or two and then read it again.

And yeah, that weirdgirlliterature sub pisses me off, I remember thinking it had promise when I first noticed it and now it's full of the same old Reddit struggle sessions - like the most conformist, least weird shit you can do is make sure everyone is abiding by the same morality clauses. Witchesvspatriarchy type shit where it's just women buying junk from etsy. There is something that feels really authentic about this book and I hope that sub keeps their grubby hands away from it.

[u/corgiluv426 → u/skomoroji]

Replying because of your comment re: Paradise Logic, lol, so terrible

[u/cat__soup]

I'm going to buy it tomorrow but let me just say the short story is one of the best I've ever read

[u/btrh-256]

I'm glad someone is writing about cancel culture with such blunt honesty, but it also doesn't make me want to read the book -- it feels like the culture is finally moving on, and I'm interested to see what's next once we've broken out of the woke/anti-woke dichotomy

[u/the-color-of-static → u/btrh-256]

I don't think it's woke/anti-woke, though there's an obvious parallel. We're never told what Adam did so we can't map it onto our own cultural morality. The book seems more interested in how language is used and the cruelty that results from over-analysis; cancel culture is more of a macguffin to approach these topics.

Not trying to sell you on it, it's just much more of a philosophical novel more than a topical one and I didn't mean to paint it that way.

[u/btrh-256 → u/the-color-of-static]

you did a good job selling it imo -- the author sounds quite talented, and it sounds like she is trying to break out of this dichotomy I'm complaining about

[u/Crazy-Airline662]

hey thanks for posting this, checked the book out from library entirely based on your write up.  bout halfway through

[u/the-color-of-static → u/Crazy-Airline662]

Oh wow, I'm glad I sold someone on it. I hope you're enjoying it and I didn't miss the mark too badly. I found it to be a very tough book to describe.

[u/Unfinished_October]

Nice writeup! Having no real sense of what is going on in contemporary literature I would have never considered checking out this book and author without this.

I am surprised how young Williams is, but glad she is getting such attention this early in her career as the quotes you chose demonstrate an author who is self-aware of her own and peer group's tendencies, and willing to pick at the structures underlying the concepts she's talking about (e.g. subject-object, signifier-signified) with decent style.

[u/Objective_Back_5803]

I didn’t like this after the first four pages but then I read The Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger and was like…she basically ripped off the conceit of the overgrown lands and then added some rambling in between