A Trollish New Campus Novel Hates Students and Professors Alike
Missouri Williams’s début novel, “The Doloriad,” which was published in 2022, is full of images that seem intended to disturb and provoke. Its characters—a family of at least six siblings and their parents, who themselves are also siblings, along with a lone schoolmaster—inhabit a world that has recently suffered a cataclysm, which, as far as they know, has wiped out almost all other human life on earth. They are somewhere in Eastern Europe. It is in this bleak terrain that Williams’s unsettling images proliferate: a brother rapes one of his sisters, who has no legs and seems incapable of speech; that same sister, the titular Dolores, is frequently likened to a pig; their mother, known as the Matriarch, is confined to a wheelchair for mysterious reasons and rarely removes a pair of haunting wraparound sunglasses from her face; the family gathers around their TV to watch a program about a cheerleader whose classmate Brad, it seems, has just driven a pole through her chest. (Basically, “The Doloriad” is the third season of “Euphoria.”)
Stylistically, the novel is full of unexpected flourishes (one character’s hair is described as “wimpled, be-nunning him”), despoiled scenery (“the broken facades of the gray buildings were interrupted only by . . . strange, trembling columns of vegetation”), and vaporous angst (one sibling’s hatred for another is described as “thick, indivisible; an indistinct welt of what used to be identifiable moments”).
And yet, despite this wealth of minutiae and misery, “The Doloriad” is somehow empty. Although events do take place, the narrative lacks plot, character development, a sense of history, and crucial details. (What was the cataclysm? How did any of these people survive? Why does their TV still work?) Throughout, the novel’s close-third snapshots of the characters’ inner lives display a moral and affective nihilism. At one point, the schoolmaster thinks, “The history of the world was the history of cruelty.” Later, the Matriarch muses, “The history of the world was the history of God trying to kill it off.”
A generous reader might conclude that “The Doloriad” is preoccupied with emptiness, that it constitutes an extended meditation on life’s futility. Perhaps it is for this reason that coverage of the book has associated Williams with enigmatic, claustrophobic, spiritually searching writers of global literature, including the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, from whose novel “The Passion According to G.H.” Williams borrows one of “The Doloriad” ’s epigraphs. The two books share a racing, hyperbolic approach to interiority. Their authors also each humble characters who cling to superficial social graces in an attempt to evade abjection. (The climax of “The Passion According to G.H.” comes when the narrator consumes the innards of a cockroach.) But Lispector’s narrator consciously tells a story that she hopes will save her from a diminished existence, a life without much self-reflection, memory, or human connection—“Word and form will be the board upon which I float atop billows of muteness.” “The Doloriad” delights in snapping all bonds, then deflating the life raft.
Williams’s second novel, “The Vivisectors”—the subject of a reported eight-way bidding war in her native Britain (she lives in Prague now), and out last month in the States—continues some ways down the path of developing, or at least exhibiting, her themes of brutality, entropy, and disgust for humankind. Its narrator, a young woman named Agathe, is a great hater. She hates her father, a famous writer and academic who has dedicated his life to recording the history of his family in ever more minute detail. “Eventually,” she says, “our family had been described so intensely that there was no longer anything else to it but that heap of sentences, each one pushing out the last, until there was only a writhing blackness, the words with all their letters smashed together and struggling like a shoal of fish caught in a net.”
She hates the university, which is at the heart of social relations in the unnamed city that she grew up, and still lives, near, and where seemingly the only available professions are gardener, writer, editor, professor, and architect. Her father is not the only influential scholar and writer in her distinguished family, and Agathe herself studied literature at the university, but she finds academia irredeemably phony. She prefers the subject of her own unqualified brilliance to any of those on offer at the university, returning often to the theme that she is more intelligent and poised than those around her, even haughtily proclaiming, “If I wanted to, I could have a great destiny, just like that.”
When the novel opens, she is in her fourth year working as an assistant to a lecturer in urban planning, whom she refers to only as “my boss.” Agathe absolutely hates this woman, too, describing her as “indiscriminate,” “desperate,” and “terribly insecure.” These charges are, to her mind, exemplified in the boss’s body, which is “mountainous” in a way that implies a lack of self-control (as opposed to Agathe, who describes herself as “calm and clear-eyed”). While directing these bilious thoughts outward, she acknowledges in herself a profound alienation that is, by her own account, like “a big dead rock” in her soul. “When I thought of . . . the qualities that supposedly made me me, this was all I saw. . . . How could I feel anything other than the same dull hatred a rock feels when I had been made with it buried inside me?” Curiously, as the novel progresses, we discover that Agathe shares this fundamental lack with nearly all the other characters, who are described as empty or dull inside.
Agathe’s most pronounced hatred is reserved for her mother, who we learn, in the novel’s first pages, has recently attempted to drown herself in the bathtub. She survives but, paralyzed and silent, spends her days in a wheelchair like the Matriarch from “The Doloriad.” Visiting her mother shortly after the suicide attempt, Agathe describes her face as “slack and stupid.” Agathe alludes to some childhood trauma, of which her mother is perhaps the cause. However, Agathe, in contrast to her prolific father, recollects almost nothing of her family history, which she implausibly attributes to a decision in adolescence “to stop remembering things.” Though the father’s novels are alluded to at length, their content is never fully revealed. In the final pages of the book, Agathe abruptly drowns her helpless mother in a man-made pond near her father’s home.
The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university (the purview of the academics) and the city’s wild, unstoppable greenery (the purview of the gardeners, a quasi-mystical class of stoic workers who wear wide-brimmed hats and communicate in parables and aphorisms). As a consequence of the gardeners’ inability or refusal to prune back the escalating trees, weeds, and wildflowers, the city’s infrastructure is “crumbling” and its inhabitants are moving to the countryside. It seems possible the city is heading toward a cataclysmic event—but, in the end, the gardeners and the academics arrive at a truce.
The second conflict is a cancel-culture-on-campus story. The conflict is ignited by a political-science student named Adam, whom Agathe describes as combative and as having “a bright, enameled charm right up until the moment when he didn’t, and then he became sulky and petulant.” He is also hot. One day, he says something offensive, probably racist, to a professor during class. Adam and the professor’s ethnicities are never named, although it’s implied that Adam might be Jewish, the professor Black or Arab, and what follows is a kind of alternate “Human Stain” situation. The incident quickly becomes infamous on campus and gets Adam in severe trouble with the administration.
Characteristically, Williams never divulges what Adam actually said. But the magnitude of the scandal and its cultural implications are dwelled upon for pages by several of the characters, including Agathe’s boss, who compares young people to the titular “vivisectors” in what is essentially a rant against cancel culture. She accuses Agathe’s peers who have turned on Adam of refusing to “let goodness thrive” and of wanting “nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error,” particularly when it comes to “men, especially masculine men.”
Agathe finds her boss’s remarks dull, but more or less shares these views. The image of the students as vivisectors, committed to extracting the hearts and licking the bones of the transgressors in their midst, seems to mirror her own hatred of the university’s tendency toward frenzied analysis. (She favors the gardeners’ spiritual connection with nature.) Plus, Agathe herself is given to edgelordy grandstanding. “When it came to men,” she says, “the university had become a place where the ordinary rules were inverted, any idiot knew that. They had been given a lot of apologizing to do.”
Could the character of Agathe be intended as satirical? A sly sendup of a power-tripping 4chan-poster type, a lady gooner getting off on resentful fantasies of her innate superiority and heightened intelligence? Given her compulsive contrarianism, and the absence of characters who are significantly different from her, it’s tricky to gauge the novel’s level of self-awareness. The world of the novel, as far as we know, matches Agathe’s description of it perfectly. It is presented in earnest, and never more so than when it broods upon the subject of Adam, a troubled and aggressive young man who enjoys discussing the importance of aqueducts to ancient civilizations. He is well matched with Agathe, who believes she is “unable to imagine love without dominion” and wants someone to understand her “either absolutely or not at all.” Their conversation, rarely reproduced, is described as “a dialogue between mirrors.” When they finally hook up, the results are corny, like a dark-academia “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Adam pushes Agathe down onto the bed and whispers a secret name in her ear. Later, he licks tears from her eyes. “I had never noticed how long his eyelashes were before,” Agathe remarks.
In a piece for The Drift in 2022, Williams wrote with approval that the novelists she was reading were eschewing “content” for form and “the internet” for “higher things.” Citing “Pure Colour,” by Sheila Heti, and “Checkout 19,” by Claire-Louise Bennett, as successful case studies, she argued that “reading the internet is less important than reading God’s book, also known as the world.” One can imagine that some of this same intent lies behind Williams’s creation of Agathe, who excoriates the noisy proliferation of opinions at the university and venerates nature for its mute surfaces and stubborn, occult power.
And yet “The Vivisectors” still feels unhelpfully caught in the crosshairs of the internet, and not only because of the many trollish remarks that appear in its pages. One of the narrator’s complaints about literature is “that books had emptied along with the world that contained them because now almost everything that mattered to us took place inside our devices, on the abstract territories of the internet.” Is “The Vivisectors” disparaging this sort of “emptied” novel, or attempting to give it newfound spiritual relevance? I tend to think it’s the latter. Either way, abstraction wins out. For instance, Williams’s looping descriptions of the encroaching wilderness can be quite compelling, but there is something off about them. Though the special attention Agathe pays to the forest supposedly sets her apart from the navel-gazing academics who surround her, the trees she is spending all this time noticing don’t bear fruit or house animals. They are only intermittently given distinguishing characteristics or classifications. Light passes through them or doesn’t, that is all. They are a kind of sylvan screen saver. The quality of light as it cuts through tree canopies and windows is addressed constantly:
These descriptions recall a passage midway through the novel in which Agathe, while listening to Adam and her boss complain about the drama on campus, pictures “a series of geometric shapes colliding on a flat brown plane, cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders, four-cornered pyramids, and a great dodecahedron.” Elsewhere, Agathe announces that in literature it’s form that moves her, not content: “I read my way through the canon of our worldly culture, so-called masterpieces that left little impression on me, and then I sat my exams and passed them without ever having gained any insight into the human soul. In fact, all that I had understood were patterns, structures, and shapes.” Her way of seeing is unusual; it’s also clunky and shallow. Light is a series of squares. People are a series of disappointments. Adam eventually becomes the exception.
Williams may have meant for Agathe’s romantic entanglement with Adam to represent emotional growth, but the ending, arriving as it does after all that prolific hating, feels tacked on, and doesn’t overcome the novel’s predominant style, a calculated avoidance that manifests as faces that can’t quite be made out, voices that can’t quite be heard, plots and personalities shot through with holes. “The Vivisectors” quashes substance in its search for higher things. And yet it has a redemptive streak: its search for a language of spirituality, as opposed to intellect, is an intriguing and ambitious one. One hopes that in the future this literary impulse will take root and flourish.
For now, “The Vivisectors” stands as a reminder that it is not in the nature of a novel to defeat all meaning. Some portion of light inevitably filters through. I have a suspicion that Agathe’s near-stifled longing—for love, understanding, and transformation—illuminates the way forward. She has been coddled and cloistered within her city, but the spreading vegetation interferes with that way of life. It confronts the university and blocks the roads she’s accustomed to travelling on. The wayward trees are forcing a change, even if no one else will. In this reading, which goes against the novel’s self-protective wish not to be interpreted, the wilderness doesn’t represent the destruction of insight but the beginning of experience. ♦