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A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance.
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.
Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity's most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning. Missouri Williams is the author of The Doloriad, which won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was named a best book of 2022 by Vulture. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and The Drift.
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.
Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity's most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning. Missouri Williams is the author of The Doloriad, which won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was named a best book of 2022 by Vulture. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and The Drift.
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Reviews
"The Vivisectors is incisive, tirelessly inspecting the structural imperfections of the grand but crumbling ivory towers atop its foundation . . . The adjective kaleidoscopic is rarely warranted in a book review, but it certainly comes to mind. Williams is rotating the glass prism in her hand so we can watch the patterns in the chamber collide."
Stephen Piccarella, The Baffler
"Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity - she revels in the wretched and the craven . . . But for all the layers of alienation and abjection which encrust Williams's tale, there remains a model campus romance novel at its heart . . . 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."
Ian Maleney, The Guardian
"Williams's second novel is as brilliant as it is dark, full of unsettling, revelatory allegory, and frankly unlike anything I've read before."
Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
"Missouri Williams is good. She is exceptionally good. Astonishingly good . . . a propulsive, insightful, and ultimately moving novel . . . If you take a chance on the things that Missouri Williams has to say"
if you believe in something beyond subjectivity