Missouri Williams’s darkly absurd and wilfully grotesque debut novel, The Doloriad, concerned itself with the aftermath of a world-shattering catastrophe. Her second takes place in what feels like the beginning of one. The Vivisectors is set in an ancient and unnamed university town – we could call it Oxford or Cambridge, but let’s not – which is rapidly being overwhelmed by vegetation: avenues lined with “orange columns of flamevine and purple bougainvillea”, arches “dripping with wisteria”, the inescapable “stink of a distant magnolia”. A fraternity of mysterious gardeners seek to keep the chaotic foliage in check, but they are hamstrung by a bitter dispute with university officials. Power games and proxy battles ensue. It is a hot summer and decay is rampant: revolution is in the air.
As in recent work by Sophie Mackintosh or Julia Armfield, this verdant backdrop casts an ominous glow over the action, though Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity – she revels in the wretched and the craven. The locus of the novel’s intensity is its narrator, Agathe, an alarmingly cynical young woman. She views everyone she meets as a tragic case, and knows that nothing lies between her and the same sad designation but her ability to see through the stories they’re telling themselves. She rejects self-expression and desire, refusing anything that might compromise her sense of separation and superiority. Her judgments are swift, conclusive and brutal.
After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Agathe’s mother is left mute and paralysed. Hearing the news, Agathe feels nothing but annoyance at how her routine has been interrupted. In the wake of this, Agathe’s father – a well-known writer, “famous for his insight” – takes the opportunity to rant at length about how she was the root of all the problems in her parents’ marriage. He demands that Agathe spend time with her mother, who is now in a wheelchair; she is told to take her for regular walks.
On the first of these occasions, Agathe realises that she cannot push the motorised wheelchair through the unchecked and thickening suburban shrubbery. Her solution is punishingly rational: Agathe sits in her mother’s lap and operates the chair from there. “She was a lump, scarcely more alive than the chair in which she was sitting,” she thinks. “There was nothing stopping me from treating her the same way.” Later, Agathe realises her mother has wet herself. “I felt a dampness spreading beneath my thighs and soaking through the thin fabric of my skirt. For a moment I thought she might say my name. She didn’t.” It is hard to say which aspect Agathe finds more pitiable, the urination or her desire to be acknowledged.
Agathe is employed as a personal assistant by an unnamed academic at the university, and she is rarely more cruel than in her comments on her employer, “a mountainous woman with huge, rolling hips” whom she finds unutterably pathetic. The academic seeks to become the confidante of a handsome young graduate student named Adam. She sets Agathe a mission: befriend Adam, find out what he’s thinking and relay it back to her. Thus, the romance plot is set in motion.
How Agathe navigates her feelings for Adam and asserts her independence from her family will define her arc – an outline which could sum up any number of novels. Williams does not unthinkingly recreate this classic formula, she deploys it with purpose, concealing it beneath the gothically overstuffed surface. Ideas are fired at the page: identity politics, family trauma, climate crisis, comic plays and fables, academia, labour, bureaucracy. There is a savage rush of description and dissection happening throughout. But for all the layers of alienation and abjection which encrust Williams’s tale, there remains a model campus romance novel at its heart. It is as if Agathe is burning through cover, until she is finally forced to confront the one story she really can’t comprehend: the love story. And if The Vivisectors is a love story, it is also about love stories – what counts as one, the form it should take, how it might come to be believed by its participants.
Agathe’s story pivots on her repressed need to overturn the anaesthetised narrative she has been telling herself, to excise what she calls the “dark toad in the cistern of my selfhood”. Adam is the vehicle for this transformation: it is no coincidence that we only learn Agathe’s name when, halfway through the book, he asks for it. She is dumbfounded when he takes her hand. It is initially a little disappointing, given the wealth of imagination on show, that when the climactic revolution takes place, it leaves things looking so familiar. But perhaps that is the final sting in the tail, a deception disguised as sweetness – a last test, then, of cynicism, this time the reader’s own.
