5. The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits

Category: 50 Books

I don’t know how to describe this book. There were so many twist and turns and odd characters and I’m not even sure what the main plot was about. In fact, I don’t think there was a main plot; everything was a subplot. Here’s what the book jacket said it was about:

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother’s suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.

Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia’s emerging gifts, and soon she’s recruited to track down an elusive missing person—a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far deeper than she ever imagined.

Now, when I read that I thought, “Meh, another paranormal thriller.” or something like that. But on the back part of the jacket there was this sentence:

As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits’s acclaimed novels, The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter’s love.

And it was “female rivalry” that got me. I am fascinated by female rivalry (in the same way I am fascinated by the 99% vs 1% here in the US and that we 99% do not riot.)  I had to give the book a try. I am so glad I did. First off, the whole paranormal part of the story is told in a very matter of fact way, nothing spooky. It’s more psychological lit-fic than paranormal thriller. 

The way Julavits writes is really refreshing (or maybe it’s that I’ve been reading too much nonfiction lately), her prose is just so precise and often had a very cool (as in temperature) sarcasm to it, which I ate up in giant spoonfuls as though my life depended on it. There was a part very early in the book where the main character, Julia, is trying to figure out how to locate a particular safe in France and what it’s serial number might be. She thinks, “I’d never been gifted at probability calculations, but I estimated that my chances of guessing the correct safe number were in the vicinity of ten to the seventh power multiplied by thirty-six twice, or something equivalently shitty.” I loved that. That’s where the book got me. I loved how specific the number was, and yet the specificity was totally meaningless, ridiculous, even.

I say Julavits writing is precise because the book is a very good length, less than 300 pages, and she tells her story without rambling. I never skimmed, I never skipped ahead, I was never bored, and I never, ever knew where the story was going. The dialogue was snappy and to the point while also being so vague at times I had no idea what was going on, which is exactly how Julia is in the book. She’s very passive and is being led or dragged around by many different women who are trying to “help” her. Some of the women are trying to help her, others not so much. The more Julia pieces together what’s going on the more whole she herself becomes.

I enjoyed this book the way I enjoy Paul Auster and Bradford Morrow. It’s well-written, perfect in length, and I keep going back and thinking about it from time to time.

 


Five Roxy heads means you should put this book in your face!

 

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