The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. MCD. 288 pages. 2026
Before I discuss The Vivisectors, the new novel by Missouri Williams, let me get something off my chest. Readers, I despise every last one of you. You’ve failed at every turn to recognize my achievements with due approbation. You’ve lavished praise on the most undeserving of my competitors, while refusing to allow my vastly superior efforts the most meager approval. For a long time, I assumed I was the one at fault. That so many could be so lacking in sophistication and taste was simply not possible. How naive I was to think so. As time has worn on, I’ve only seen more clearly how little I can expect of any of you. I have no illusions that my candor here will do anything to change your minds or hearts but know regardless that your profound collective weakness has not gone unnoticed. You are all lesser life forms, vermin scurrying about my feet. You repulse me, and you should be ashamed. All of the above notwithstanding, your greatest turpitude of all would be to take me literally.
On the first page of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, the novel’s narrator, Agathe, a pathologically cynical young adult from an all but loveless literary family, recalls her uncle advising her, “If you wanted to write something terrible about somebody then it was best to use the first person, because they’ll never be able to accept that you were capable of betraying them so utterly, and so instead of seeing the obvious they’ll look at just about anything else.” From this, he extrapolates that “to mix up the author and their narrator was the most cardinal of literary errors.” The novel is written in the first person, and rich in abrasive admissions like “I had never really believed in anything” and “I thought that I hated women more than anybody else ever could.” That the narrator is of the unreliable variety is hardly worth mentioning, but The Vivisectors is not just about whether its narrator means what she says. It’s about what we risk, and what we stand to gain, by taking her at her word.
