Before I discuss The Vivisectors, the new novel by Missouri Williams, let me get something off my chest. Readers, I despise every last one of you. You’ve failed at every turn to recognize my achievements with due approbation. You’ve lavished praise on the most undeserving of my competitors, while refusing to allow my vastly superior efforts the most meager approval. For a long time, I assumed I was the one at fault. That so many could be so lacking in sophistication and taste was simply not possible. How naive I was to think so. As time has worn on, I’ve only seen more clearly how little I can expect of any of you. I have no illusions that my candor here will do anything to change your minds or hearts but know regardless that your profound collective weakness has not gone unnoticed. You are all lesser life forms, vermin scurrying about my feet. You repulse me, and you should be ashamed. All of the above notwithstanding, your greatest turpitude of all would be to take me literally. On the first page of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, the novel’s narrator, Agathe, a pathologically cynical young adult from an all but loveless literary family, recalls her uncle advising her, “If you wanted to write something terrible about somebody then it was best to use the first person, because they’ll never be able to accept that you were capable of betraying them so utterly, and so instead of seeing the obvious they’ll look at just about anything else.” From this, he extrapolates that “to mix up the author and their narrator was the most cardinal of literary errors.” The novel is written in the first person, and rich in abrasive admissions like “I had never really believed in anything” and “I thought that I hated women more than anybody else ever could.” That the narrator is of the unreliable variety is hardly worth mentioning, but The Vivisectors is not just about whether its narrator means what she says. It’s about what we risk, and what we stand to gain, by taking her at her word. Upon its publication in 2022, no one discussing Missouri Williams’s debut novel The Doloriad in public could describe the book they had read. Set in a disaster-torn and radically depopulated Prague and featuring a legless protagonist whose gleefully abusive family members cart her around by wheelbarrow, its preoccupation with traumas of the body earned Williams comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh, (not all of them complimentary), while its biblical cadence (“She was an infinite disc and she could not see where she ended and the whiteness of the void began”) and apocalyptic visions of a climate-changed future plagued by the eternal verities of ancient mythology inspired invocations of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Krasznahorkai. Influencers in the literary vlogosphere insisted it was “the weirdest book I’ve ever read,” if not “the most disturbing book I’ve read.” In a conspicuously indecisive review for the New York Times, novelist J. Robert Lennon judged it “frustrating, wicked and obscure by design.” Most infuriating of all, she had published the novel under a pseudonym as an unknown living in Prague, offering only a handful of unsmiling photos to hint at who she might be. The Vivisectors, Williams’s second novel, is no easier to describe—but not because the uproar of her debut’s reception is lost on her. The Doloriad was a provocative work of art; The Vivisectors scrutinizes the concept of provocation, analyzing a controversy over academic decorum until the implicated speakers and statements are rendered ridiculous. Where The Doloriad was incendiary, wreaking havoc and laying waste throughout a turbulent, environmentally destabilized tribe-society of its own creation, The Vivisectors is incisive, tirelessly inspecting the structural imperfections of the grand but crumbling ivory towers atop its foundation. The result is a novel no less challenging, but it is unlikely readers will be so quick on the attack given that Williams has seen them coming: there’s nothing that any critic could say about the book worse than what it says about itself. At first glance, The Vivisectors resembles a traditional campus novel, a comedy of manners with shades of romance and gothic family drama, but if the novel proves anything, it’s that first glances are not to be trusted. The Vivisectors takes place in a university city whose social landscape is largely governed by abstract discourse. “The academics wanted a world sapped of strength,” Agathe explains in its first chapter. “One that could be dominated by concepts and laws of their devising.” The commitment to high-minded conjecture relies on a tenuous detente with a faction of gardeners tasked with managing a copious overgrowth of plant life threatening to overtake the university campus from the nearby park. For much of the novel, Agathe remains impressively indifferent to the events unfolding around her, even her own mother’s suicide attempt. Her impenetrable stoicism wins her the total dependence, if not the trust, of her boss, a foreign academic whose interests in her own research and even her own husband and son can hardly compete with her obsessions with the opinions of others, specifically her colleagues, whom she so rabidly suspects of covertly aligning in their disdain for her that they eventually do. When a conflict arises between Jacob, one of the university’s star professors, and a rakish nonconformist from Agathe’s boss’s city named Adam, who’s already made a name for himself by prodigiously amassing sexual conquests and subsequent accusations of misconduct, Agathe’s boss enlists her to spy on him. Agathe hates Adam as much as she does her boss but accepts the assignment—and the payoff—without argument. As Agathe’s boss explains it, the conflict between Jacob and Adam is prosaic, even quaint: “The professor had said something to Adam, who had interpreted it one way, and then Adam had said something to the professor, who had interpreted it another way.” In reality, however, things are not so simple. Adam and Agathe’s boss belong to “a persecuted people who had suffered cruelly at the hands of various nations, especially ours, and whose complaints had often been dismissed.” Jacob’s people, meanwhile, “had been oppressed by our city for centuries; five hundred years ago they had been our slaves.” The brief exchange erupts into a scandal that consumes campus and leaves Adam’s enrollment at the university hanging in the balance. The dust-up between Adam and Jacob invites countless possible readings: anti-woke polemic, geopolitical commentary, Old Testament reboot, etc. None of this is accidental; these readings are ephemeral entertainments, images the novel projects away from itself to prevent the reader from discerning its true shape. Slippery generalities are the novel’s main peculiarity of style; the indeterminacy in The Vivisectors, though, is not just intentional but meaningful. These elliptical statements about Jacob and Adam ring a few bells. Is Adam Jewish? Is Jacob black? Did their argument arise over some controversial claim about Israeli or Palestinian self-determination? These readings hold up, but only for so long. Once Adam and Agathe get to know each other, he starts to tell her stories about his city of origin, a “desert city . . . of high towers and enclosed gardens,” where people “wore wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun from burning their skin.” This could be somewhere in the Middle East, but millennia ago, the inhabitants of the region constructed a pipeline from the mountains to the desert, building simultaneously from opposite ends until they met in the middle, their calculations only one inch off. “Their mathematicians had been famous,” and “the scientist or professor who could explain how they managed it had not yet been born.” Maybe these are the Nabateans of Petra, but they sound more like the Greeks. The allegorical allusions in The Vivisectors are plain on the surface but penetrate to any depth and nothing is quite as clear. “I wanted to write a book that could be like a prism,” Williams told me via email. “Something full of reflections and surfaces that you glance off.” The metaphor shows up in the text of the novel on more than one occasion. Agathe’s boss complains that Agathe and the people of her city “rotated events like glass prisms that revealed unseen colors when placed in new light,” and then Agathe observes her boss’s “desire to consider the problem from all possible angles, rotating it in her mind like a prism of glass.” Later, she says of herself, “Where my heart should have been there was a prism of ice.” Decorating a novel with doubles and mirror images is an old trick, but in this novel, Williams is doing something else. More than its fabulous manipulations of light, she’s interested in the unique properties of the reflective surface itself: Agathe likens Adam to “a smiling surface” or ruminates on what it would mean “to be a smooth and forgiving surface” just as often as she refers to prisms in particular. Not all of these surfaces render such intact, reliable images. In three of the novel’s longer chapters, Williams introduces a regular roll call of supporting characters—first gardeners, then students, then friends of her uncle—each of whom delivers a monologue. Or tries to. In fact, they wind up interrupting each other throughout, telling stories or arguing theories or posing philosophical problems that the reader can’t hope to follow amid the crosstalk. The first time I read it, I found these stretches of the novel tedious. Once I had finished it and glimpsed its design, I found them beguiling. The adjective kaleidoscopic is rarely warranted in a book review, but it certainly comes to mind. Williams is rotating the glass prism in her hand so we can watch the patterns in the chamber collide. As the conflict between Jacob and Adam escalates, Agathe’s entrenchment in the city’s ideology of pure theory becomes increasingly apparent. “Although there were more and more words, it was becoming increasingly harder to attach them to objects,” her family friend, the schoolmaster, observes. “Analysis never touched ground; it never made contact with reality as such.” Later, after Adam reveals his feelings for her, he asks, “Every time you looked at me were you thinking about yourself?” Adam imagines Agathe seeing mirrors everywhere she looks, as does her father when he tells Adam about his attempts to write her into his novels: “I placed her in a room full of mirrors and thought that the sum of her reflections might add up to a whole.” Her city was founded on reflections, her family made its name on them, but reflections, Agathe discovers, don’t add up to anything. The only thing one sees in a mirror is one’s own face. “In The Vivisectors, a preference for metaphor represents a culture at its apex; it becomes a stand-in for all other forms of decadence,” Williams clarified to me. “I don’t think that this is an accurate reflection of the tensions of our own time.” By refusing to refer by name and insisting on insinuating rather than admitting anything, the book is doing exactly what Williams wants it to do. This fiction is not speculative but specular, an array of pristine silver planes in which readers see what they want to see: their own lives, in their own worlds. If it’s about cancel culture or an unjust war, you’re not really reading it. You see your face when you look in a mirror, but you’re not looking at yourself. You’re looking at something else.  “We were always hunting for scandal, errors we could rectify,” Agathe remembers her boss complaining. Later, Agathe admits, “It was my opinion that our city was seeking its own extinction.” A society founded on decadence accelerates to collapse: history offers countless examples of similar phenomena, many of which contemporary social pessimists are quick to summon when circumstances turn dire. One might even suggest that Williams’s publisher, MCD, releasing a novel about the unsustainable grandiosity of literary institutions just before closing its doors for good makes for a biting metacommentary. The specific arc of this society’s decline and fall, however, is unique, and in the geometry of The Vivisectors, what’s similar is never congruent. By articulating the thinking behind a prevailing anxiety about the failure of communication and the obsolescence of language, and by working it out in narrative form, Williams has presented this thinking for us as what it really is: a fiction. Several characters in the novel appeal to some variety of moral panic about language in public space currently gaining purchase in the real world, as ongoing debates about free speech, DEI, and various other rhetorical lightning rods make clear. According to Agathe’s boss’s son, “We lived in an era that was allergic to facts . . . we were descending into paradoxes of the worst kind. We were in contempt of reality.” Given the popularity of similar sentiments today, from hand-wringing on the right about critical theory and the deconstruction of objectivity to the liberal media’s fearmongering about alternative facts, these beliefs could easily be Williams’s own. In her novel, however, this detachment from the tangible is a function of another fear, the fear of the primal vitality of the environment only the gardeners can contain. When I asked Williams about the potential danger of metaphor, she showed no such concern. “It seems to me that extreme literalness is much more dangerous,” she said. “I prefer a reckless imagination to a limited one. But the clash the novel explores through its portraits of cities and gardeners and academics is very old.” The distance between metaphor and reality can appear daunting, even hazardous, but in The Vivisectors, it’s a philosophical verity, an eternal function of the tension between nature and culture. At the novel’s conclusion, Agathe tells Adam a story she calls “the greatest love story of all time,” although it’s not the only story in the book to receive the same distinction. In the story, a seaside village takes a liking to an albino whale who frequently appears offshore. After a while no one sees the whale anymore, and then a dead whale carcass washes up in the tide. At first the villagers are certain they’ve lost the white whale who captured their hearts, but then they decide to believe that they’ve found another whale—the beloved village mascot is still out there somewhere, even though they can’t see him. “It takes great strength of character to insist on coincidences,” Agathe concludes. “To believe that in the infinite churn of anonymous events something so readable can emerge without being true.” The strength of character the villagers exhibit is a capacity for faith, another word for which is trust. “It is difficult to recognize the other, to acknowledge the existence of other minds,” Williams told me, alluding to one of her models for The Vivisectors, Stanley Cavell’s Disowning Knowledge. “I wanted to write a book that dramatized that struggle . . . but which insisted that some progress can be made, that recognition exists as a possibility.” Reading a book on its own terms, like recognizing another’s humanity, requires this same capacity for faith: the faith to look past the reflection, at the surface, to see not what appears, but what’s really there. Faith doesn’t always come easy. Images are everywhere. It takes great strength of character to believe there’s something else to see.

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