Revenge tale nearly brilliant
By Cristina Garcia |
March 16, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
THE darkly comic world of Heidi Julavits' latest novel contains warring psychics, missing people who have deliberately vanished themselves, twisted avant-garde filmmakers, absent mothers, striving academics, plastic surgery enthusiasts -- and the people who love to hate and pursue all of them. Beneath this hyperactivity, the novel deals with the "economics of revenge" and a daughter's search for her mother. It is told in Julavits' signature style: sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious.
The author of three previous novels ("The Mineral Palace," "The Effect of Living Backwards" and "The Uses of Enchantment") and a founding editor of the literary magazine The Believer, Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. Nearly every page contains a great description or insight. A Barcelona chair becomes a fully eroticized object - "the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive" -- while a pair of plastic surgery patients, "given their gigantic white head-bandages and the underwater slowness with which they moved," resemble "very relaxed astronauts."
The novel's narrator is Julia Severn, a talented young student at a renowned institute for psychics in New Hampshire, where she is acolyte to the narcissistic Madame Ackermann. Julia is chosen to be her idol's stenographer, a job that entails transcribing the "regressions" for which Madame Ackermann has become famous in the occult world. Except that the Queen of Divination's trance states are a huge, yawning bore. In part to spare her teacher the embarrassment of coming up empty, Julia begins to fabricate Madame Ackermann's memories, telling her that "she'd spoken in the voice of an Argentinian-born psychotherapist living in London during the Falklands War." And so on.
Madame Ackermann grows suspicious of these increasingly elaborate deceptions but soon discovers discrepancies in one of Julia's tall tales that reveal her student's emerging psychic talents. In a jealous rage, Madame Ackermann - who eerily resembles Julia's dead mother - inflicts a near-lethal psychic attack on her hapless stenographer, who then retreats into a pill-popping, zombielike existence in New York City.
Julia's narrative voice is superb. Funny, self-deprecating, exquisitely attuned, she speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device. Nothing is lost on her, and she's as unsparing about herself as she is of those around her. This pointed, fragile honesty makes her a winsome heroine, even in the most far-fetched of circumstances. After months of illness and a dead-end job as a showroom model at a flooring company, where she is made to fake speaking Arabic, Julia is lured into searching for a missing French filmmaker, Dominique Varga. The catalysts for this mission are Alwyn, a morose connoisseur of arty underground pornography films, and Alwyn's partner, an ambitious, thwarted academic named Colophon. They persuade Julia to undergo a psychic rehabilitation in hopes she'll track down Varga, a scathing artist many people might have wanted dead.
This, however, is where the story goes awry. While the language remains vivid, its satisfactions are overwhelmed by the confusion of the overdetermined plot. Overall, the stakes feel artificially pumped up by the hectic narrative, which labors to deliver forced surprise after forced surprise. But ultimately, the writing is so good that it is possible to forgive the plot problems.
The author of three previous novels ("The Mineral Palace," "The Effect of Living Backwards" and "The Uses of Enchantment") and a founding editor of the literary magazine The Believer, Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. Nearly every page contains a great description or insight. A Barcelona chair becomes a fully eroticized object - "the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive" -- while a pair of plastic surgery patients, "given their gigantic white head-bandages and the underwater slowness with which they moved," resemble "very relaxed astronauts."
The novel's narrator is Julia Severn, a talented young student at a renowned institute for psychics in New Hampshire, where she is acolyte to the narcissistic Madame Ackermann. Julia is chosen to be her idol's stenographer, a job that entails transcribing the "regressions" for which Madame Ackermann has become famous in the occult world. Except that the Queen of Divination's trance states are a huge, yawning bore. In part to spare her teacher the embarrassment of coming up empty, Julia begins to fabricate Madame Ackermann's memories, telling her that "she'd spoken in the voice of an Argentinian-born psychotherapist living in London during the Falklands War." And so on.
Madame Ackermann grows suspicious of these increasingly elaborate deceptions but soon discovers discrepancies in one of Julia's tall tales that reveal her student's emerging psychic talents. In a jealous rage, Madame Ackermann - who eerily resembles Julia's dead mother - inflicts a near-lethal psychic attack on her hapless stenographer, who then retreats into a pill-popping, zombielike existence in New York City.
Julia's narrative voice is superb. Funny, self-deprecating, exquisitely attuned, she speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device. Nothing is lost on her, and she's as unsparing about herself as she is of those around her. This pointed, fragile honesty makes her a winsome heroine, even in the most far-fetched of circumstances. After months of illness and a dead-end job as a showroom model at a flooring company, where she is made to fake speaking Arabic, Julia is lured into searching for a missing French filmmaker, Dominique Varga. The catalysts for this mission are Alwyn, a morose connoisseur of arty underground pornography films, and Alwyn's partner, an ambitious, thwarted academic named Colophon. They persuade Julia to undergo a psychic rehabilitation in hopes she'll track down Varga, a scathing artist many people might have wanted dead.
This, however, is where the story goes awry. While the language remains vivid, its satisfactions are overwhelmed by the confusion of the overdetermined plot. Overall, the stakes feel artificially pumped up by the hectic narrative, which labors to deliver forced surprise after forced surprise. But ultimately, the writing is so good that it is possible to forgive the plot problems.
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