In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved—not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.
There is a limited, but great, lineage of novels of cancellation...and they are deeply discomfiting ones. Here, there is not even an incident to discomfort us. The novel promises a dangerous critique of contemporary sexual and cultural politics, and a narrator who sympathizes with the collective enemy; instead, it retreats into metaphor and meteorology ... Rather than analyze with any honesty the way humans tally up presumed evils on an inscrutable social abacus — or even depict it — The Vivisectors merely pre-empts all criticism, stepping back to vivisect its own pretense of sophistication.
Continues some ways down the path of developing, or at least exhibiting, her themes of brutality, entropy, and disgust for humankind ... 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.
The Vivisectors tells two stories at once about one person. The suspenseful tension between them pulses at the heart of the novel’s poignance, humor, and winning personality ... The real story could also regarded as the gradual evolution from that person into someone in touch with themselves and others — a movement which is, despite the book’s stated resistance of such feelings, romantic. The narrative voice is so convincingly grouchy and dismissive that one might be tempted not to believe those moments in which the tone shifts — and yet those swerves are believable as well ... Sturdily structured, the novel ties things together at its end in a way that might strike some as blunt but could also be taken as gratifying, a surprisingly open expression of freedom.
