The Vivisectors

by Missouri Williams

The acclaimed author of The Doloriad returns with a wildly imaginative new novel following a reclusive graduate as her attempts to navigate campus conspiracies set her on a collision course that will upend her life.

In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal erupts: Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination.

As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe’s boss instructs her to gather information by befriending Adam. Agathe soon finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?

Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era. Missouri Williams holds up a mirror to humanity’s most intimate contradictions in a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.

‘Missouri Williams writes with a gothic angularity that puts her in a category of one. She swims in deep waters and surfaces now as a major writer for our age’ PAUL LYNCH, author of Prophet Song

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Dark Academia, Horror, Novels, Academia, Short Stories

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2026

About the author

Missouri Williams is a writer and editor who lives in Prague. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Astra, Granta, and Five Dials. Her first book, The Doloriad, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Dead Ink Books in the UK.

Reviews

[Readergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

The voice? -Amazing
The utterly beautiful vocabulary that touched my soul? -Gorgeous
The main charcter? -Infuriating
The plot? -ermm.. plot who?

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱
Hi! And Welcome to my very first ARC review! i wish it was a positive experience, but unfortunately I do not lie.
𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

We follow the story (?) of Agathe, who is SINGULARLY the MOST infuriating, annoying, self centered, unrealistic charcater i have ever met in my life. She gave zero shizz about anyone around her, and not in the good way. Helloo? she drowned her mother WHO WAS IN A VEGETATIVE STATE... I honestly had to read that thrice cuz I wasn't sure i was reading that right. My mouth fell open, i swear I looked like a goldfish for 5 mins over there. She bullied her boss for no reason, gave no explanations for why she ever even acted that way. Her thoughts and acts repulsed me- she had no empathy for other and treated others as if they were the cardboard cuts, paper dolls who have no feelings or emotions or problems.

The Voice
The voice was beautiful. I found myself drifting off, entranced by just how DEEPLY the author felt about the words she was writing, but I could also tell that this was the AUTHOR not the NARRATOR who was saying the words she was saying. The symbolisms of the story were not lost on me and I enjoyed that aspect of it immensely, even though it never really felt like it connect to teh story properly (even though i strongly suspect that i was supposed to).

The Plot
The plot wasn't there. There was buildup and I found myself waiting for SOMETHING to happen. It continually felt like I was waiting for a really good plot that was JUST COMING. But it never came. It built it up and up and my curiosity was piqued but I was let down tremendously.
We didn't even meet the driving force of the plot, the male lead till the 80% mark. And even he wasn't that good to keep me interested. There was basically nothing between the characters adn any sort of relationship felt forced and abrupt. I felt like ti could've been fleshed out more, had the author not suddenly realized that her word limit was near and tried to fit the whole book in the last 20% after wasting the reader's time in the first part.
The lengthy rambling chapters were exhausting sometimes, especially when I wasn't able to draw any connection between the character or WTF WAS GOING ON?

The introspective aspect was lost as soon as the male lead entered and the entire plot shifted its tone, which was extremely odd and uncomfortable for me. For I, as a reader, was led to believe that the entire POINT of the story was going to be otherwise.

The Charcter Development(?)
This charcater was made for charcater development. I could see that. The author knew that. And yet, any sort of "charcater redemption" only happened in the last ten pages, if you could even call it that, because she only told another "meaningful" short story by the way of apologizing for everything she did, which was INADEQUATE to say the very least. OH yea, and this is when she drowned her mother btw so idk how her apologies worked.

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

Final Verdict
Finally I would like to say, I love how this was written. And if the writer actually had a PLOT to write about I would've loved this book very much. but unfortunately she didn't and so I couldn't stand it. The narrator did unforgivable things that she didn't repent for or even realize in full. I had high hopes for this, but here we are.

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𝕻𝖗𝖊 𝕽𝖊𝖆𝖉𖤐✮⋆˙♱

A dark academia that would make me want to slice open a piece of my head to peer into my mind (grotesquely put but ykwim) ?
Yesss plssss

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

PS- I would like to thank NetGalley, the author and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange of my honest review. Thank you!

𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱𖤐✮⋆˙♱

REVIEW TO FOLLOW SOON

[CJ Alberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

Girl what the hell was this about

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has affected me deeply... makes me want to be different but I'm not sure in what way

[Elena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been in a depressive episode since May, and it's just past my birthday, and life is so unfair and I'm so tired of everything and everyone. Thinking about doing my job makes me want to barf but thinking about doing activities I enjoy also make me want to barf. I think about a month ago I was still experiencing really hardcore mood swings, bitter hatred and anger towards everyone and everything, but now I've mostly just got anhedonia and I can't even hate myself for my inability to go on morning walks, my refusal to pick the ripening raspberries, my failure to keep in touch with friends and loved ones, my resentment of the effort required to go upstairs and take a piss. Like, I thought to myself the other day that petting my cat seemed like too much effort. "Hey isn't this a book review?" you might be asking, and the answer is yes, but I want to set the stage: I am exactly the sort of pathetic, spiritually inbred lump who should enjoy a book about a nasty resentful little bigot who feels very little and thinks only in a dull litany of exposition, or at least find reading such a book tolerable, since I don't care about anything and feel distant contempt for everyone just like the narrator. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it. I owe Missouri Williams this much. Thank you for writing a book that was annoying enough that I felt moved to articulate how little I respect millennial novelists.

The narrator of The Vivisectors lives in a college town (excuse me: university city? They're British, probably, it doesn't really matter) that is being slowly overtaken by vegetative growth. She comes from a family of writers and academics; her mother is disabled and tried to kill herself right before the opening of the novel, her father is annoying and cruel, and she lives with her uncle in a sort of watered-down psychosexual Gothic parody house, across the city from her parents (who live in a different type of watered-down psychosexual Gothic parody house; more on that later). The walls are full of mice and the tables are full of animal droppings, the carpet's full of mold and the garden is ever-encroaching, but her uncle's visitors don't seem to mind all that, or the author forgot she'd written all the Gothic details in when describing the visitors. We never really find out, because while The Vivisectors portrays supernatural phenomena, it is uninterested in exploring anything about the uncanny in meaningful depth. Just as wealthy homes often use restrained white lights and candles in windows to differentiate themselves from tacky inflatable-Rudolph-and-blinking-lights houses, so too does The Vivisectors give the impression of self-conscious Halloweenism. Sure, there's magic, but my God, how gauche to expect elaboration of any aspect of the magic beyond how it looks draped over brick walls or how it feels as a restrained religious allegory. These fake spiderwebs are made of silk, not plastic, and they will be removed by noon on November 1st.

As the novel progresses, Agathe's dissociative spite slowly transforms into desperate not-quite-humanity. She works for a boss she hates, goes on long walks she describes with a kind of hollow melodrama (socks full of blood. Really?), befriends and then falls in love with the subject of a campus cancel culture tempest, and observes the slow municipal breakdown of her city as its gardeners go on strike. There are allegorical stories and extensive, sophomoric meditations on the nature of power. Very few proper nouns are used; we are treated to endless repetitions of "the city" and "the university" and "her language" and "what he said". This is the sort of artistic choice that becomes affectation very early on. The book, at least, is short.

Agathe does live in a world roughly like ours in many ways. She sends and receives emails, certain ethnic groups are the subject of conspiracy theories or were subjugated by hundreds of years of slavery, she obsesses over her step count on her phone, cities have apartment blocks and suburbs. I say this because I want to underscore how frustrating I find the coy refusal to engage with the internet as an influential force in any substantive way. So many modern authors, younger ones especially, perform cowardly sleights of hand when portraying a world inflected by the internet. We know the characters are online, but something—terror of seeming dated, paranoia about specificity of platform or subculture, sheer laziness—prevents these authors from using their craft to portray their characters' relationships with technology in a naturalistic manner. Instead we get abstractions, elisions, and too-cute allegories. In Agathe's case this abstention makes reading her first-person narration perplexing in the same way as reading a book review that angrily lists out plot holes that don't exist, or listening to someone discuss the events of a movie they clearly watched while fucking around on social media. She feels incomplete.

This feeling of incompleteness persists despite internet culture and its influence on the novel being discussed in explicit, near-didactic terms. Agathe's boss's child is a statue Twitter fascist, and Agathe listlessly half-agrees with him. The international students, Adam, the boss, many characters interact with Internet culture and speak about its foibles. Agathe herself is relentlessly cynical about power relations, and her interior life (derogatory) will be familiar to anyone who's watched the blue state fascists of Twitter and Substack convince themselves they're not Nazis, or convince themselves that they are, since Nazis have to be willing to kill people in non-aesthetically-pleasing ways. This would probably be tiresome if the novel bothered to stake out any meaningful ideological positions, but you can feel, midway through, the author choosing instead to lean in to religious allegory. Adam, after all, was the first man, and St. Agatha the patron saint of rape victims. Agathe is tormented by dreams of falling down staircases, her father removed all the staircases in their house, and she kills her mother in the last few pages of the novel. This is a trauma plot is a sainthood narrative is a self-aggrandizing parable of the internet. But what it's not is a novel willing to taint itself with details. The fascism stays abstract. The city, choked by nature, is described almost exclusively in trite visual terms. The novel even contains its own meta-critique: it "lacks local colour", but that's not unique to the novel as "almost every world feels abandoned". The thesis is that the internet has changed the world (true) and thus that we're in a sort of mediocre cultural fallow period before spring growth pops out of the ground. The problem is that this is a topic for an essay, not a novel which glances at big ideas like a thirteen year old confronted with the varsity showers.

I suspect that Williams views this as a good thing, or at least that she'd respond to such criticism with praise for the modern novel in all its nonspecific glory. Isn't negative space interesting? Isn't the juxtaposition between the wild, overgrown, magical garden and the crass, urban planning teaching, email avoidant boss so delightful? But the truth is that this conceit, if in fact it is a conceit rather than memetic laziness from a fan of Sheila Heti, is just as annoying to read as the clunkily written yet sweatily ambitious multi-generational sagas of the mid-2000s. Modern writers are always dwelling on literary innovation and scoffing at the concept of trying to tell a good story: isn't plot overrated? Isn't worldbuilding the job of sci-fi/fantasy, which of course we all enjoy but would not deign to write? At some point you have to wonder if perhaps characters that are over-written to the point of parody, or under-written to the point of vapor, serve mainly to compensate for, or distract from, underdeveloped storytelling skills. Innovation in form and subversion of traditional story structure in many newer novels isn't much more than a band-aid. You can always claim that your novel's flaws (rickety plotting, pointlessly contradictory narration, carelessly awful sentences, no setting to speak of) are part of the point, and therefore it is lowbrow to complain about them.

One issue with this lack of specificity is that it makes the book's central plot ludicrously stupid. Adam is being CANCELLED!!! for something he said. We never find out what it is. We never find out his ethnicity, or his professor's, or indeed anyone's, though I lost track of how many times white skin is described in tones of self-conscious reverence. I think that the author is aware that putting an explicit conflict between a rude and sexy maybe-Israeli and a guy who might be Black or Arab or maybe Indian would instantly commit her to a narrative she'd rather avoid—namely, one that can be argued with. Similarly, the book has a trauma plot so clumsily written it made me feel a bit embarrassed to read, but the trauma itself is only ever glanced at; it could be argued that the trauma is the main reason for the novel's dissociative affect, but why bother arguing when we're given so little to work with? I am sure Williams read Parul Sehgal's piece, and I am equally sure that it influenced the on-page cowardice that leads her to write passages like, "Whenever I tried to imagine the house, its image receded. Even when I had lived within its walls something had always stood in the way of my grasping its nature, and so my vision of our family home was of little more than a sequence of dim rooms with high ceilings, each one somehow more hostile than the last, and though to another’s eyes they would have passed without distinction as nothing but neutral surfaces, for me those quiet rooms were filled with horror, albeit one that remained nameless, as I could never quite remember the things that had happened inside them." This is an eminently skimmable novel because the author's own disinterest in or embarrassment about half of its contents is very noticeable. You can feel the moment her own attention slides off the page.

This inattention makes the brief moments of specificity all the more painful, and I don't mean that in a laudatory way. Agathe and her boss both have a prurient interest in disability. There are appalling speeches about autism and leering descriptions of physical disability. I'm disinterested in, shall we say, vivisecting such language from the perspective of the author's psychology; this is precisely the behavior the novel fumblingly attempts to critique, and it's boring. But human psychology is instructive here. Horror is a genre of decision: what details to include and what to hint at. When and how often to show the monster. How to ensure a reasonable portion of the audience sees the ghost, when you still want most of them to only notice something unsettlingly off. Gothic fiction isn't always horror, but it does always engage with horror, and many of the same rules apply. A big scary house with bad memories associated with it isn't meaningful if you can't be bothered to actually write about the house. A decaying city sinking into vaguely supernatural wildness isn't particularly engaging if we don't have a sense of the foundations before they begin to crack.

I don't know if Williams named herself in reference to Tennessee Williams deliberately, though I can make a guess since she's a playwright herself. (Personally I would have simply admitted to myself that I was English, and kept the name Heather.) But Tennessee Williams understood the point of the Gothic: detail. Quentin Compson doesn't say "I dont hate the region! I dont! I dont!" Stanley Kowalski doesn't yell "Wife!!!" The intentionally nameless narrator of Rebecca doesn't dream of going back to "the estate" again, and the contrast between Manderly in all its awful beauty and the nameless narrator is part of the point. The vagueness of Williams' prose is, again, likely intentionally dissociative, but it communicates a lack of care by the author and cultivates a lack of interest in the reader. The abrupt rupture into hyper-specific monologues about autism produces an effect similar to watching a pimple popping video, and I suspect that, too, was deliberate. But it doesn't work. It makes me think Williams doesn't quite understand why people read novels, or why readers pay attention to anything at all. I mean, if I want to read someone being offensive about autism, I can log onto X: The Everything App. A formally ambitious novel should want more for itself.

The worst part about all of this is that there are occasionally touching and meaningful passages. Overheard stories break up the narration several times, notably written as screenplay-esque dialogue between multiple people who interrupt one another and try to pull the conversation back to their own narratives. Here the author employs the usual tools of our trade to great effect. I haven't seen a review that engages deeply with the (to me, obvious) religious themes yet, but I found the writing moving. Outside these sections, the occasional paragraph lifts its head and remembers to have a body, with flow and spirit. Mostly, though, the text just sort of plods on. Cliches abound. Descriptions barely matter, though they will always mention details you'd expect a filmmaker to notice and would hope a novelist would take more time crafting: "The study lay to the right of the living room and was large and light-filled. It occupied the corner of the southern edge of the house and was lined with windows through which the sun invariably seemed to be shining."

The Vivisectors asks us to reconsider our modern habit of pre-judging, abusing power structures to our own advantage, and refusing to see one another. The book's title is introduced in a rant to this effect, voiced by Agathe's boss in a summary of a conversation, not dialogue, the dominant form of conversation in this book. I suspect this is deliberate, and the author believes she is experimenting with form to communicate something important. Isn't interesting how little of the book contains true dialogue, when the book itself is so concerned with the ways in which we misunderstand and hate one another? Similarly, mirrors are a recurring and obvious motif: what do we see when we look at ourselves? What do we do when we project ourselves on others? But answering these questions requires writing actual scenes or committing yourself, at the level of the sentence fragment, to imbuing your non-scenes with meaning. Williams accomplishes neither. The second paragraph of the novel contains the sentence, "He was a frail man, older than his sister, my mother, by a good twenty years." The entire passage is concerned with Agathe's family; there is no reason to insert "his sister, my mother," when you could communicate this less clumsily two sentences later. The book does not improve from there. It invites close reading and then spurns every attempt at doing so.

At the end of Agathe's boss's rant about vivisectors, Agathe remarks to herself, "I was impressed to discover she had learned a new word, but inside I was thinking that none of this applied to me." The novel's main achievement is making such arrogant contempt incredibly memorable, while lacking the craft to truly examine or transform it.

[m. · Rating 2 out of 5]

eARC provided by Netgalley in exhange for an honest review.

I'm not really a big believer in the 'show, not tell' advice that is often given to writers. I believe a certain amount of balance is required. Like, I don't need to read three pages describing a room—just like I don't need to be spoonfed every detail about a character's personality through exposition. In The Vivisectors we encounter a strange case: in each section of the novel, Williams is doing one or the other. There is no balance or equilibrium here. Everything is either handed to you, over and over again, in short, sharp sentences, or drawn out over endless paragraphs.

There is a lot of repetition in the writing, and it doesn't seem stylistic. Rather it feels like I'm getting hit in the head with information that could be, instead, passed onto me in a natural way. For example, towards the end of the novel: That evening my uncle had visitors. Then, later in the same page: My uncle's friends were visiting him, and he had opened the doors to the library.

Every time a plot point is set in motion Williams forces it to a halt by info-dumping on a new character, community within this world, past event, or by going on a rant about politics or literature. It makes for an agonizing read. It feels like a constant push and pull—or maybe like a tug of war where Williams is dangling me over the edge of a precipice. Look at this cool thing I wrote! she screams over at me. I try, helplessly, to climb up the rope of her endless, meandering paragraphs, to reach stable ground for even a minute. Only to have her pull me over another hole the next second.

I'm naive and hopeful. I want to attribute this to a lack of editing, and have it not be a choice made by Williams. But then there are moments where the point she's trying to make becomes clear, and I'm left bitter and disappointed. Like when the narrator describes herself as having a rock inside of her: But at the center of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else (...) She uses that same metaphor consistently throughout the book, so much so that it gets tiring.

Most of all, though, I have to admit I'm confused. I'm not really sure what Williams is trying to do here. She seems to be making fun of herself a lot of the time. A character goes on a multiple page rant about the current lack of quality of modern literature, and he exemplifies this decay by pointing out that most contemporary narrators don't have names—much like Williams' own, which remains unnamed through most of the book. But she also seems to take herself extremely seriously, especially towards the end of the book, within the tight, messy frame she developed.

In a slightly fantastical world of unnamed cities, where nature seems to run wild and grow into huge, lush gardens that no one can keep at bay, Williams seems preoccupied with our own world's problems. She talks about academic decay, immigration and cancel culture within a university structure—problems of which I know nothing about, having escaped from college as quickly as I could. As a result, none of it interests me. I can't say it's entirely her fault, as my deep uninterest in academia has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. She does, however, fail to make me interested in any other aspect of this novel, which is the important part here.

Where in The Doloriad, the characters harshness and bleakness contrasted against their world's own disillusionment, in The Vivisectors the characters blend in and fade against their city's sterile backdrop. None of them are well constructed or developed throughout the book. They all seem like rounded stereotypes, with one or two defining characteristics that the author exploits over and over again, to no avail. The main character is angry and unfeeling—her boss is needy and stupid—Adam is charming, but empty—her mother tried to kill herself.

The novel, which has a cold, eerie feeling throughout, turns into a mushy love story in the end. I had expected that, and it's precisely because of it that I hoped the author, whose past work I have loved dearly, would prove me wrong. She didn't. In my mind The Vivisectors is a small, metal ball. It's clean and shiny, but impossible to hold on to. It slips between your fingers and it makes a lot of noise when it hits the ground.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

January 1, 2026 Update I've now finished the new novel The Vivisectors (expected publication UK May 21, 2026 and USA May 26, 2026) thanks to a preview ARC from NetGalley and can confirm that although this short story shares its title, it is not itself part of the novel. The short story also involves students at a university, but it is not the outright dystopian academic satire that became the theme of the novel.

Teaser for Novel to Come?
Review of the short story as published in Astra Magazine (July 20, 2022)

Missouri Williams recently announced via X (formerly Twitter) that their next novel would be The Vivisectors, to be published in the Spring of 2026 according to an article in The Bookseller.

Two years sounds like an extremely long leadup time for a work that was complete enough to be the subject of a bidding war by publishers. Presumably there are still editing and proofing stages to be done so it remains to be seen if that will be the true schedule.

In the meantime, there is this excerpt (perhaps Chapter 1?) which was made available online via Astra Magazine in July of 2022. If the title alone wasn't disturbing enough, a read of the 7-page story will confirm that the upcoming novel is likely to be as shocking as William's post-apocalyptic novel The Doloriad (2022) even if it is the supposed "satirical campus novel" as described by The Bookseller article.

[Rachel Louise Atkin]

Someone tell me if the Doloriad is this bad so I can put it on Vinted

[endrju]

The Doloriad was the book of the year for me back in 2023. If you had dog ears, you could’ve heard me squealing with joy when I was approved on NetGalley for The Vivisectors ARC. I quite possibly hit infrasound, to be honest.

The experience of reading The Vivisectors was… complex. There are motifs recognizable from The Doloriad, especially the environment and environmental collapse. The atmosphere, however, is significantly different, as there is no disfigural violence, so to speak. That doesn’t mean Williams has given up on her signature density. Once I abandoned the idea of treating this as a novel in a conventional sense and began approaching it instead as a constellation of elements - motifs, narrative threads, etc. - I started to get somewhere. Where exactly did I end up? I’m not entirely sure. But the fact that I’m still thinking about the book weeks later suggests that something definitely happened.

The mold song:

I was born by a window,
In somebody's room.
It rained and it rained.
The water fed me.
It was never enough -
I was hungry.

The room was a kingdom,
But I was no king.
I was little and lonely,
small and hungry.
A patch of black mold
With small hungry dreams.

One day I noticed
On the beam above me
A patch of dry rot.
It was large and majestic.
It had many eyes.
They all winked at me.

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very consuming read, I really enjoyed the flow of this book and the narrator. This book is some really relatable themes like academic drama, career chaos, family drama, and discrimination. Loved the suspense throughout and the way it shows how communication or lack thereof can affect things. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

missouri williams: to me she is god

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

I read books about graduate students to overcome my own trauma of being a graduate student hehe!!

[cass krug · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was a slog to get through for me. the writing style was very tell, not show and the narrator is so deeply removed from emotion and the people around her that it makes it difficult to care about her. i can’t really explain what the plot is about. lots of esoteric rants about the academic world coming into conflict with the nature that is threatening to overtake the crumbling city the book is set in. the descriptions of nature and the setting were probably my favorite part of the book. everything else was too vague and vibey.

thank you to MCD and netgalley for the digital copy! publishes may 26

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

“There’s so much to tell, and what I ought to do is show.”

Overcrowded with ideas, critiques, self-critiques, and meta-critiques. Almost as if every chair at the reading table has already been occupied by the novel debating with itself. I don’t feel the need to reread it, like I did with The Doloriad, which felt like a whole weird world inviting rediscovery even before turning the last page. The Vivisectors feels more preoccupied with examining arguments and anticipating its own reception than creating a fictional world. Which is not inherently bad...

The wheelbarrow’s return stood out to me, though. That image alone carried more weight (no pun intended) than the novel’s self-explanatory machinery!

[kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

arc received from netgalley in exchange for an honest review

beautiful and dense book which problems lie in it’s narrative and stylistic imbalance. still worth reading imo but read the doloriad first

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wheelbarrow makes a return! Love to see it!

[roro]

it's so fun to read because you actually get to think while reading

[Gabrielle De · Rating 5 out of 5]

actually this was a really weird and beautiful love story?? i guess that is a kind of spoiler but nvm. loved the weird back n forth about out of control gardens and out of control cities, because i think about cities and gardens a lot and this was thinking about them too in a really unusual and essential way.

[thebookybird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly bizarre but I dug it

[Annaliese · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Vivisectors begins with a grad student living in a city which is quickly becoming overrun by plants. The vines and grasses threaten the structural integrity of buildings and cover the roads and paths, and the only thing that can keep them at bay are gardeners, a class of people that are seen as the sort of natural opposition to the academics in the city’s university. Our grad student, Agathe, props up the career of her professor boss (known only in the book as “My Boss”) while simultaneously grappling with family trauma (notably, her mother making a suicide attempt right at the beginning of the book) and witnessing the reclaiming of her city to the earth.

I will go ahead and say that I really looked forward to this book because of the concept of campus novel meets futuristic sci-fi(?), but once I started it, I dreaded picking it up again. It is in constant defiance of “show, don’t tell”, which is made especially worse by an unmemorable and unsympathetic main character/narrator. The prose is overwrought, over dramatic, aiming for something high-concept but floundering. And the plot is just nothing…just nothing. I reached a little over halfway and skimmed the rest; I hate to do it but there are just too many books in my list to waste my time on something I don’t enjoy (although I do appreciate the opportunity for an ARC, as I quite usually admire the work that FSG publishes).

Unfortunately, I would not recommend this to my audience, but I am all in encouragement of trying it out anyway. I hope many readers do find enjoyment in this one, but regrettably it was not enough to keep me on board.

I received an eARC from NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange for an honest review.

[Krystelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Sadly this book did not gel with me at all. I have given it two stars on the basis of how pretty some of the writing is, but unfortunately those segments were far and few between. Occasionally I’d hit on a sentence that went right to my heart, but for the most part, I felt like I was reading the absence of a book.

I think that probably encapsulates the feeling of this novel for me best- it really did seem like I was reading a lack of a thing, which was weird. I can’t say any of the characters stood out, or that I remember any particular scenes or specific elements of the book. It just felt so vast and empty, and not in a way that felt intentional- more so in a way that felt sad and dissatisfying.

I am keen to read other works by this author as I understand that they have previously written some really beautiful pieces, but I feel like I definitely missed the boat (and everything else!) with this one.

[Roger · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's significantly shorter than The Doloriad, but somehow just as dull.

[amanda]

reading this while waiting in line at chipotle was an Experience

[Carys Morley · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5.

I truly don’t know how I feel about this. Half of the time, it seems like the author is mocking or being satirical. But the other half, it seems entirely sincere, and more like a long rant containing her view of ‘the internet’, class, academia, and the environment through an exaggerated version, and possibly about how love is the antidote? If it’s mocking or sincere, or maybe both, it’s unclear, and arguably therefore unsuccessful. It’s not like it’s vague in an interesting way that means I’ll think about it a lot, either.

This novel is extremely ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’. Narrative style got quite boring, but there were several bits I did really enjoy, but they passed quickly. I rushed through other parts. Some of the language/sentence construction was annoying, but occasionally a really striking sentence would make me pause. The main character was self-aggrandising and clearly unreliable, but again, not in an interesting way.

Significantly less weird than The Doloriad, which I also had fairly mixed feelings about until the final third, which sold me.

Yeah. I dunno about this one. But also I’m unlikely to think about it more, so on that level, quite a big failure.

[Tilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything is a little awry in The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. This book was unsettling and allegorical, but from the author of The Doloriad, I’d expect nothing less from her new book. It’s dark academia meets metaphysical crisis meets class politics.

The reclusive narrator stumbles through her days working as a glorified assistant for a university professor and becomes entangled in the controversy surrounding a student. Meanwhile, the city is overrun by nature, bringing lofty academics, fabled gardeners, and her estranged parents under scrutiny.

It’s a novel that is centred in an uncannily familiar place, but that now and again off-balances with such vivid descriptions that take you out of our time and place, into a dystopian setting that is unknown and strange.

It felt like nature was sprawling out, tangling and rewilding in my imagination reading this book. The descriptions of the setting were the finest moments.

*Kindly gifted by the publisher, 4th Estate

[Pow Wow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much a book like no other, a gothic, grotesque panorama of times that takes every current discourse in the book and then completely disassociates it into abstraction until all that’s left is a mirror house of reflections and associations. Wonderfully morose, funny, complex and despite its high brow stylings eminently propulsive and readable. The prose is razor sharp, brilliant, heady yet utterly concise and thoroughly enjoyable, never trying to impress, instead simply being confidently impressive all by itself. Won’t be for everyone but the rare novel that makes you believe in the future of the art form.

[Bethany Brohm · Rating 3 out of 5]

3. 7 - This was a strange one for me. One one hand, the writing was striking and it made some interesting points about academia. On the other, nothing really happened and there was a lack of characterisation (which I think was intentional). I enjoyed reading this though, figuring out whether I liked it was part of what was enjoyable!

[Wes Tefft · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was good overall. I enjoyed how cynical the narrator was. It felt a little longer than it needed to be. Some of the sections involving dialogue to express metaphors also didn’t seem necessary. I did enjoy this book, though.

[Bella Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt the novel often prioritised convoluted metaphors and imagery over developing ideas into something emotionally or narratively satisfying.

Many of the individual ideas could have been interesting yet I struggled to see them accumulate into anything. I also found it difficult to engage with the plot as the novel often felt more concerned with intellectual abstraction than character or story.

[Robert Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

—Andrew Marvell, "The Garden"

Missouri Williams’s second novel, The Vivisectors, has proven to be a novel I cannot stop thinking about, perhaps to a greater extent even than her first, The Doloriad, which is one of my very favorite new novels. This work is a wonderful provocation, both very much au courant, as its very title comes from an epithet applied by an older character to its narrator’s own generation (i.e., twentysomethings, a few years out from college), but also timeless, redolent of the fable, the parable, the folktale. It manages, in fewer than 300 pages, to interrogate many of our Zeitgeist’s most pressing concerns, but also to connect them to enduring philosophical and moral questions. This is an astonishing follow-up and not to be missed.

The Doloriad, a postapocalyptic novel that only offers indirect evidence that any humans other than the central family remain on the earth, is somehow less ambiguous about its setting than The Vivisectors. The earlier novel offers enough hints to tell that it is set in what remains of Prague; in this new novel, we are in an abstract City whose primary attributes are an extremely venerable University dating to the middle ages and a completely out-of-control park that has overtaken the city center and begun to invade the suburbs, obstruct the tram lines, etc. A sort of town-and-gown quarrel has arisen between the University and the Gardeners, who seem to comprise a kind of working class (and are constantly thwarted by environmental initiatives emanating from the University, which nevertheless cannot control the burgeoning vegetation on its own; throughout, there is a lovely inversion of the more familiar sense of the garden as a rational Enlightenment feature and nature as primitive, vigorous, etc.). Only a few real universities match the description of this one (its history stretches back to the Middle Ages); the City seems larger than Oxford, so could it be Paris or Bologna? Well, the language spoken in the city is simply described as “the dominant language” (14); there is a group of people in the city and university who were once enslaved and only recently achieved any semblance of equality. John Donne is in the library. The University relies upon foreign students from somewhere to the south to fund its endeavors, which nevertheless mostly benefit native students. Perhaps this is England, after all?

Probably, it doesn’t matter. Although readers might be tempted to rationalize the setting or look for something like “realism” in The Vivisectors, it is much better to take it for what it is: a book of fables, philosophical dialogues, parables, allegories, etc., but above all a book that reflects the mind of its narrator, whom we eventually learn is named Agathe (a name shared with a central character in The Doloriad). Names for people are otherwise almost as scarce as names for locales; aside from Agathe (a Greek name, redolent of Plato’s Good) and Richard, we get names from the Hebrew Bible: Jacob, a professor and part of a group that was disadvantaged until very recently, and Adam, who gets to skirt the edges of these parks and gardens, eventually, late in the novel, finding himself in a garden and reaching out his hand, hoping to have it taken.

The mythic register is impossible to miss, but it is easy to mistake for stiltedness early on. Although there are some wonderfully naturalistic bits of dialogue (including a memorable tirade by Agathe’s boss, a basically incompetent professor, diagnosing various people, including herself, as possibly autistic; this single-paragraph performance is one of several passages that could succeed as flash fiction on its own). One example of dialogue, attributed to a character only known as “1st Gardener, should suffice:

The garden is always excessive [...] it cannot be captured in speech. But despite this you must describe this garden. You must describe it in a fallen language, in a language full of holes, with words that are imprecise and ugly. There is no other way. And so what passes into history is an image of the garden. An imperfect image of a perfect garden (75).

There are a few ways to look at this language, which is far too academic and writerly to belong to any real speaker in a conversation. One is to dismiss it as clunky: and indeed, The Vivisectors does not advertise beauty of style as overtly as The Doloriad does. But it would be a grave error to stop at this judgment; the other option is to let the voice of The Vivisectors’ narrator, the strange and reticent (until “now,” i.e., her creation of this book that we are now reading) Agathe, work its subtle magic. Unlike Williams’s first novel, this is not the work of an ostensibly objective third-person narrative, but very much Agathe’s book. Notice that before “reporting” the “speech” of the gardeners, as above, what she actually says is “the glass prevented any sound from reaching me [...] without understanding why I knew that what they were saying belonged to a speech that had been spoken since the beginning of the city, the beginning of any city, repeated and reiterated, the words of a book that had always resisted being written down because its truth was self-evident” (67).

The strange, alien, highly composed rhetoric of the characters, in other words, is really Agathe’s all along, and she tells us so, not least of all near the end: “the style of my narrative is beginning to make me tired. There’s so much to tell, and what I ought to do is show. I can no longer describe but need to invent. It’s the only way I can tell the truth” (263). This is just one of several delightful metafictional moments in The Vivisectors that allude to, send up, and undermine writing advice (“show, don’t tell,” in this case). Agathe’s style colors the narrative in other ways that essentially teach us to read her document as it goes along: the dialogue, first, which is usually philosophy’s métier; three major sections of the novel take this form. Embedded within these dialogues (in which characters are just as likely to talk past each other as to each other) are self-contained stories: parables, folktales, fables? These remarkable set-pieces, some of which could survive on their own as short stories, are supplemented by some of Agathe’s own fable-like writing, as well as an assignment that she grades for the professor-boss whose career she has essentially enabled via ghostwriting. Again, like Platonic dialogues, or like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, they consider various incarnations of ideal (or at least otherworldly) cities, holding them up allegorically as commentaries upon our own reality.

It is vitally important to note that Agathe is no outsider or underdog: she is a scion of the City’s literary élite, a native, a graduate of the University (and not one of the despised and exploited foreign students like Adam, whose story so powerfully intersects with hers). This élite is depicted as hopelessly self-absorbed, overly intellectual, decadent, and effete; the moral geography flipped from the one that extends back to Tacitus: here, it is southerners from hot climes who are vigorous, the northerners are Byzantine, unable to fend off what seems like the feeblest of antagonists, vegetation. This binary powers many of the novel’s key passages, expressing itself in a couple of very contemporary guises: the opposition between life online and offline, for example, between socially conservative conceptions of masculinity versus something more like “cancel culture,” etc. In fact, the eponymous term “vivisectors” is only used a couple of times, and in the most developed passage, it stands as a kind of rebuke to Agathe’s generation: “More than anything, [my boss] said, we loved to sit in judgment [...] We were vivisectors, she repeated. We had no idea what we wanted to find, no sense of direction, and so we destroyed other bodies in service of nothing” (33). They—the twentysomething intellectuals of the City—murder to dissect. Or so this character insists.

The more I followed and trusted Agathe’s narrative (well, “trusted” in a sense; she is admittedly not always reliable, and she tends to at least project a frustrating—to herself and other characters, not just us—neutrality on all of the “big questions” through most of the book), the more her “quotations” and inventions taught me to read the book: the whole work is probably best seen as a grand fable, containing other fables, allegories, parables, etc. within it, but ultimately reflecting Agathe’s own thoughts, her attempt to process being part of a declining power, a fading order, and to imagine what might be on the other side of these images of decadence and collapse. This is neither a retelling of myth (à la Ulysses) nor a mock-archaic neo-myth (like The Silmarillion), but a thoroughly modern novel that nevertheless deals in archetypes, channeling them through a subjective point of view that renders them both highly idiosyncratic and also universal. We find an Adam in a garden, as mentioned, but not quite an Eve; rather, we have a vigorous southerner, brimming with true masculinity (or so it is alleged) and a kind of Hellenized Eve, naturally Pyrrhonic, from an exhausted and ostensibly ending culture. There is even a kind of murder in this book, one of family against family, but it refuses to conform itself in any way to existing archetypes, and is passed over with shocking brevity, bordering upon nonchalance, by the narrator.

This is only one more reminder that The Vivisectors is a Protean text, one that deftly eludes attempts to pin it to a rhetorical position, a time, a place. Like the uncontrollably fecund vegetation that threatens to destroy the city (by the end, only one runway of the airport remains usable), it ramifies, keeping readers off balance, undermining the smooth pavements of our cultural truisms until they are thoroughly cracked and destroyed by burgeoning roots. Missouri Williams has turned in another brilliant novel and cemented her place as perhaps the young writer to watch, especially in the Anglosphere, which has been starved of work of this ambition and caliber for some time. The way she manages her fable-like structure puts this work directly in conversation with (and reminds me of) writers like Calvino, Buzzati, Kafka, and Coetzee, just to name a few. Like most great books, this one does not lapse into didacticism, does not “tell you what to think,” but is so savvy and so subtle in its dissection—vivisection, if the dry bones of our culture live—of the pressing issues of its time that it feels like a universal guide to, and provocation of, thought itself.

[Antonin Kilian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Vivisectors come as a surprise after Williams' debut success with The Doloriad. Just as The Doloriad, it is confident and masterfully constructed, entirely in control of its prose, while also being as engaging as any bestseller.

This is the singular achievement of the book: The Vivisectors is an incredible read, a modern campus novel that touches upon numerous contemporary issues and taps into our shared Zeitgeist, but it is also one of the most daring literary fictions of this decade. How extraordinary is the chorus of gardeners? Have you read anything as wild as the mold song? All the while, each chapter and scene fits into this labyrinthine space that, no matter which turn you take, leads to philosophical questions that too many writers just glance at.

The Vivisectors, for its concerns and metafictions, is best compared to Gerard Murnane's The Plains or Nathalie Sarraute's The Golden Fruits, especially in the way that it embeds a discussion about its own techniques along with those of modern literature more generally into its very texture.

Ultimately, Missouri Williams presents not just a book that showcases stark artistic growth, not just a reading experience full of thrill and emotional impact, but also, and most importantly, a mature meditation on our dark times and what literature faces today.