![]() ![]() ![]() The novel’s narrator is Julia Severn, a talented young student at a renowned institute for psychics in New Hampshire, where she is acolyte to the narcissistic Madame Ackermann. ![]() A Barcelona chair becomes a fully eroticized object - “the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive” - while a pair of plastic surgery patients, “given their gigantic white head-bandages and the underwater slowness with which they moved,” resemble “very relaxed astronauts.” Nearly every page contains a showstopping description or insight. The author of three previous novels (“The Mineral Palace,” “The Effect of Living Backwards” and “The Uses of Enchantment”) and a founding editor of the literary magazine The Believer, Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. It is told in Julavits’s signature style: sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious. Beneath this hyperactivity, the novel deals, fundamentally, with the “economics of revenge” and a daughter’s search for her mother. The darkly comic world of Heidi Julavits’s latest novel contains warring psychics, missing people who’ve deliberately vanished themselves, twisted avant-garde filmmakers, absent mothers, striving academics, plastic surgery enthusiasts, Sylvia Plath obsessives - and the people who love to hate and pursue all of them. ![]()
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