Heidi Julavits will be at Skylight Books this evening to read from her new novel The Uses of Enchantment. I will be there. Less because I am enchanted by her writing and more because I am enchanted by the concept of her. This writer who writes well and who is also married to Ben Marcus (who also writes very well) and who is part of the Believer aren't-we-all-clever enclave. I read her first two books with much skepticism and found I was not altogether moved. I find Julavits more effective in her well-researched and well-argued pieces for The Believer. Yet her new novel was interesting to me in a way I had not expected. While some of it was problematic for me, there were moments of such humanity, such precise clarity about the human condition and what we are all searching for in the end but never admit out loud to one another, that I found myself wishing the rest of it was more captivating. Her ability to pin down and illuminate some of these darker, yet universal impulses was impressive. Whole passages made me stop for a moment and say aloud - "this is what good writing is about, this is what it should do...highlight what we know to be true but cannot effectively articulate on our own."
Through my new "read as a writer" lenses, there is more to ponder. The structure of her novel is tricky and I marveled at how such stunts were either pulled off or not. There are moments of brilliant banter back and forth between characters and I envied her ability to be so witty & to write it well enough that the wit was not lost. Often what appears on the page is flat when such acrobatics are attempted. Well, flat or altogether too "aren't-I-clever-and-witty?" I was also dimly aware, throughout my reading, of the amount of research and/or personal experience with Freud and therapy needed to construct such a book. This awareness of how the book may have been constructed and researched was distracting to me. I found myself on two parallel tracks - one inside the book and one outside of it, wondering how it had come to end up in this final assemblage of words and sentences and chapters. Why not in some other, less overt, arrangement?
I have much more to say and don't intend to do a full review here...a more thorough analysis is needed. I also know that I am not an average reader that requires a proper plot and nicely summed up resolutions. If something is well-written, if even a few passages ring true for me, I feel it was worthwhile. By this criteria (this alone?), I found The Uses of Enchantment to be worth my time.
The NYT was less kind:
"Ms. Julavits might have written a braver book without such coy subterfuge and the condescension that comes with it....Though ''The Uses of Enchantment'' is written with sharp, sometimes captivating eloquence, it remains disappointingly hollow in the final analysis."
Eager to see how my thoughts may change in either direction after the reading tonight. My perspective & some of the more poetic excerpts from the book to come. Stay tuned.
