Charlottesville Words

I think it was critic James Wood who once complained that so many contemporary novels consist mainly of a clever premise tediously worked out to its foregone conclusion. There is nothing tedious about Heidi Julavits’ The Uses of Enchantment — I could hardly put it down — but I did experience a familiar sinking feeling about halfway through, a feeling that with each turn of the page I was not so much entering into an imaginative world as turning the crank on a marvelous plot machine.

The story of Enchantment is reflected back on itself, in Nabokovian hall-of-mirrors fashion, from the Salem witch trials to Freud’s “Dora” to the protagonist’s own unreliable narrative(s), while the characters are doubled and re-doubled like young lovers in a Shakespeare comedy. After a while, all this self-referential hide-and-seek begins to weigh the book down. Several important characters are little more than foils for Enchantment’s themes: the Freud-Hating Feminist Therapist, the Self-Promoting Author-Analyst, the Hostile Sisters, the Withholding Mother, the Prim Headmistress. As a result, the emotional authenticity of the book is cheated; you can’t be sure the author is taking these people seriously, so why should you?

And yet…Julavits has a canny ear for apt description, insightful metaphor, and lively dialogue. The two central characters, the adolescent Mary/Miriam/Ida and her abductor/co-conspirator K., are disturbingly seductive. I’m look forward to Julavits’ next book. Here’s hoping she puts more heart and less machinery into it this time.