One reason I am so drawn to Missouri Williams’s writing is because, as many critics have pointed out, she writes like no one else. As I told her in the conversation below, she also seems to read like no one else, drawing on traditions that I feel haven’t been well represented in contemporary fiction. That is, on un-categorizable novels that, like her own, make room for the surreal and the imagination, are packaged like psycho-thrillers, and whose authors have basically discovered how to combine the best of many different genres into their own, inimitable quality.
Missouri and I have been messaging about these kinds of books for a few years, and she just published one herself in the form of The Vivisectors, which has since been justly long-listed for the Booker Prize. We logged on in June, at the height of the European heatwave, to discuss it over video call while our infant daughters napped.
I originally intended to turn our conversation into a podcast, because what better moment to start a podcast than at the dawn of AI, and ten years after the actual death of the podcast. But it turns out the lightly edited transcript of a podcast that never was is the true sweet spot for our times.
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Hi, Missouri.
So, this is my podcast voice.
I don’t have one yet, but maybe I’ll get one over the course of this hypothetical podcast.
We have time to workshop. You’re calling from the Czech Republic right now?
Yeah, I’m actually in Černošice, which my husband insists is a suburb of Prague, but it really isn’t.
And I’m in Geneva, where it’s also sweltering.
I’m really glad that we have the chance to talk about The Vivisectors because, as you mentioned before this podcast went live, we’ve been messaging about books for a while.
It seems like a while. It must be coming up to two years now, because I was living in Brussels when we started talking, I think.
We’ve traded some book recommendations, and of course I’ve followed your writing, and at some point I realized, Oh, Missouri really likes the same authors that I like. You’re the person who pointed out Lanark to me, by Alasdair…. What is his last name? I should know–
Alasdair Gray, right?
It is Alasdair Gray! We also went back and forth on The Magic Mountain a little bit. And I think we were reading Independent People for a while—
Yes, I loved that book. And how it’s full of sad farmers drinking cups and cups of coffee.
Me too. It’s one of the few books that has made me cry.
Yeah, very sad, incredibly absorbing book.
Lanark is a good book for capturing the tenor of our conversations because it has these fantastical elements, but also a realist novel folded in. And we’ve also been messaging about canonical tomes like War and Peace, in addition to these more uncategorizable books. And that includes your books. The Doloriad, which won the Republic of Consciousness Prize (podcast voice), is a dystopian novel, which—is that a word that you would use?
I guess I would use it, but not totally wholeheartedly.
Not like a card-carrying dystopia.
I think a lot of the people who pick it up thinking that it’s a sci-fi dystopia are grievously upset and disappointed.
It’s a dystopian novel in its own way, then, set after a kind of world-ending event, and we follow a family of survivors.
The Vivisectors feels like it’s closer to our world and at the same time possibly farther away. It’s set in a world of city-states. And we’re focusing on one that’s in decline. It was once a colonial power, once a literary power, and now it’s totally overgrown. There’s an army of gardeners that’s trying to bring order to the encroaching vegetation, and the rest of the city is organized around a famous university. Our narrator works as a kind of ghostwriter for her employer, a university professor, and through this professor becomes embroiled in a campus spat between another faculty member and a student who have different grievance claims that come into conflict. And it’s also a love story in a way. Does that sound like a reasonable summary of The Vivisectors?
It sounds like a great summary.
Good, I’m not always a great speaker!
One of my favorite elements of The Vivisectors and of your writing is discovering the world. There’s a critic, Christian Lorentzen, who once described Ishiguro novels as operating on “world-glimpsing,” as opposed to world-building. I thought that was something that The Vivisectors does. It slowly reveals this city-state that I’ve described. And I find that so captivating. So I guess I wanted to start by asking you about your relationship to genre, and to calibrating a reality quotient. One that is not going to be, you know, one-to-one with consensus reality?
The Vivisectors was a very different book to write than The Doloriad because it’s so locked within the subjectivity of its narrator (Agathe), and so utterly filtered through her perceptions and way of interpreting reality. I suppose what interested me most was the challenge of writing something that could be an allegory but could also feel so native to the experience of living in this allegory. And so there’s nothing that’s too explanatory about it. It doesn’t have the kind of weaponry that fantasy and sci-fi do.
I like the phrase world-glimpsing. It does feel like a good way of thinking about The Vivisectors. That is, the novel is not concerned with explicating itself. I wanted it to really feel as if Agathe is so absolutely in her world, and you discover this world at the same time you’re discovering her, very, very slowly.
For me the central difficulty was how to write a novel that felt intensely private and individual to this particular narrator while also channeling these broader philosophical traditions. I was very interested in Plato’s Republic and the use of the city as an analogy for the soul, for example. I wanted to write this claustrophobic and cohesive portrait of a city that could feel topical, as if it might belong to our world, and which is also so marked by this narrator, and at the same time I wanted to keep the story on the plane of an allegory with this potential for universality. So I do think you have glimpses of our reality, and the novel is very contemporary in a strange kind of way. Like for me it’s very much a post-Brexit novel: you have these concerns about failing infrastructure, a city in decline, this empire with a long colonial legacy, but then the story draws on so many other different places and things too. And that was an interesting thing to try and build, a world that could feel both abstract and grounded.
Another thing that I really loved about the kind of world that you spin is that it does have all of these allegorical elements—I also thought about Brexit—but the Internet exists too, and there are smartphones. On the one hand, it has the quality of a nameless, aging old European city, and yet people are on their phones. I basically really loved that you included Wi-Fi.
I guess I was wondering, how did the Internet work its way into imagining this world?
Well, at first I was aggressively insisting to everyone that I wanted to write an Internet novel that didn’t mention the Internet at all. And I obviously didn’t succeed at that, because I did find that I needed to mention the Internet. My next novel, I would like it to be an enormous thousand-page tome that’s set in a world where there’s no Internet whatsoever but at the same time for it to just have that quality on every single page and in every single sentence. I don’t know how I’ll do that either.
But with The Vivisectors, the Internet kind of creeped in, especially in the monologues that characters deliver about why the city is bad and why the world is in decline. The book is full of diagnosticians: everyone is constantly trying to figure out what the problem is. And a lot of these speeches are inflected by the things I was seeing on Twitter or Reddit at the time. I wanted to channel some of the aspects of the culture war, to kind of reflect those debates throughout the work. So there is this background of discourse, it’s very online, it does belong to our world. But I also didn’t want to write something so topical that it becomes obsolete in the instant that you write it. I wanted to yoke it to something more enduring, for the book to be more universal in its concerns.
I like that you mentioned Reddit as a kind of inspiration because there are these sections in the novel that break out into a play script. There are the gardeners who are speaking amongst themselves, there’s another section featuring a chorus of students, and everyone is delivering these monologues. They don’t necessarily overlap with one another, people are talking past each other, and at first it reminded me of a play, but then you mentioned Reddit, or a message board, and it also has this quality. So I think that’s one way you manage to write the Internet novel without mentioning it in those sections.
That’s so funny, nobody has said that to me before, but it’s actually really apt. When people ask me, I say that I’m inspired by the choruses in ancient tragedy, but the choruses in The Vivisectors are so disconnected, people just talk past each other. For me that’s part of the humor of those sections in that you have these characters just kind of espousing without really hearing one another, while the connections between them feel almost accidental. And yes, these discordant choruses are probably so inflected by message boards and the intrusion of a bot with its chain of nonsense, or the redacted post and so on. I love that.
Another thing actually that was on my mind—and I think it also falls into this project of how to fold the Internet into the book—is that this is a novel that is full of gossip. I feel like it’s fashionable to say that novels operate on gossip— I think it’s tautological, maybe it just goes in and out of fashion to say it—but your novel is, in a way, all gossip. So much about the campus spat comes to us second- or thirdhand from Agathe’s employer, who’s just talking at her all the time.
I have my own theories on gossip (or secrets) and the novel, because either you’re listening in on someone’s most private, intimate thoughts in third person, or you’re in first, and you’re getting a confession. But I was wondering what your relationship to gossip is, and how you decided to give us a kind of “controversy glimpsing” between Jacob and Adam, the two characters who have this major spat on campus. It’s a controversy that maps onto the kind of identity politics discussions that have consumed university campuses recently.
One of the goals I had was to write something that had no significant event and knew it, that was concerned instead with the lack of a motor to set the apparatus of fiction into action. This is very much a preoccupation of Agathe’s: she thinks that the city and its inhabitants have retreated from the world, and that there;s nothing that can bring them back into reality because things don’t really happen anymore. And so for her all these spats on campus and debates are a performative way of masking the fact that their world is radically empty.
And this is part of the novel’s trajectory. There’s this ongoing discussion about all the things that happen within the space of the novel. Do they matter to any of the people involved in them? Or are they just performance? Is there a real feeling or a real event buried in any of this, or is Agathe correct to insist on her position of absolute spectatorship? She says that she’s passive, that she listens, she observes, but then as the novel progresses she’s drawn out of a conversation and into an action, and it becomes – like you said – much more of a confession.
And then this isn’t just a confession of having experienced and participated in these things, but also a confession of responsibility in that Agathe too has disappeared her world into a speech about nothing, a way of looking at things that reduces the world to nothing. So the novel is concerned with the dissection of this event that has barely happened––you don’t know what’s been said or who’s been wronged or how they’ve been wronged, you just know that this is the only kind of action that happens, the fuel that keeps this city animated.
But there is this movement from the idea that everything is meaningless, these non-events and the conversations around them, to the sense that perhaps things can have a kind of meaning after all. I guess it doesn’t sound like a very powerful trajectory, but there it is.
I guess when you mention spectatorship that also reminds me too of this post-Brexit position, or of positions of imperial decline—of becoming a spectator onto history or something like this.
We recently went back and forth about Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs which is another novel seen very much as allegorical—as a famous political allegory—and that is both beloved but also, for other readers, frustrating for not being as black-and-white as some might demand. It was originally published in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power—but Jünger later suggested the novel could have applied to Stalin or other regimes just as well as to Hitler.
You’ve mentioned a few of the allegorical elements of The Vivisectors, but I wanted to ask about writing a book that invites allegorical interpretation and at the same time resists it in a way.
I found the experience of reading On the Marble Cliffs so fascinating for this reason, because of how, like you said, it resists legibility. There are so many points of confusion or even moments of indirection that prevent you from reading it as a straightforward comment on its time. But that’s the kind of allegory I admire, and I think there’s something so uniquely modern about it—or well, I was thinking about how private On The Marble Cliffs feels when contrasted with the social and collective allegories of things like Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene, where you have this shared frame of reference, and so as you’re reading you’re spotting symbols, and you have this shared vocabulary of like, this stands for this, this figure represents this feeling, and we can all do this because we’re all in the same Renaissance. There’s something more straightforward—not for a modern reader, of course––about these types of allegory; they’re much more legible than a story like On the Marble Cliffs.
They feel morally legible, too. It’s like a moral rubric—if you solve the allegory, then you know how to act.
And they’re very clearly signposted because you’ve all been reading the same things, drawing on the same classical traditions, on the bible and so on; you’ve been inculcated into this worldview at every stage of your development.
Whereas so many of the recent—and I’m saying recent in a very non-recent sense—books I admire have that same kind of allegorical drive, but they’re much more solipsistic, they’re much more––intimate was the word you used earlier––and so the allegory doesn’t intersect with our reality in the same way at all. It’s much more oblique.
And so on the one hand these kinds of allegories are talking in a general way about our time and as a reader you’re encouraged to play detective, to match one thing to another thing, and so on, but then the demand that’s being made of you is actually much more severe than that made by the allegories of the past, because you might not have a shared frame of reference, you might be in the dark about many of the things that the novel is drawing on, a lot of the symbols are either opaque or impossibly multivalent because we’ve lost that shared vocabulary. And I find that a really interesting exercise as both a reader and a writer, how to tread the line between the intensely personal and private and the desire to make something that other people can enter and that can also say something about our particular moment.
That’s kind of rambling, I’m sorry.
No, I mean that also just seems like an accurate description of how we are as readers now. That’s the opportunity and the challenge, that we come to a book more or less assuming that we don’t share the same references. The play-like sections in your novel could be read as Greek choruses or as a Reddit thread, and that’s just one example from this conversation.
I love a book that feels like it’s this direct kind of IV-line into someone’s imagination. On the Marble Cliffs satisfies that requirement rather chillingly, and I think you have mentioned Ana Kavan’s Ice as well, which is like—is it a dream, or is it really happening? We’ve discussed these deeply imagined and idiosyncratic books, and then we’ve discussed something like Independent People, or The Radetzky March, and as I mentioned we were most recently going back and forth on War and Peace.
I know that you love War and Peace—maybe as much as I love something like The Magic Mountain—and I wanted to ask, what do you do you draw from these books? What are you stealing from realism at the same time?
Oh gosh, I’m not sure, I feel as if I would love to write an enormous realist epic. I remember reading something years ago, I can’t remember which critic said it, but they were talking about how contemporary novels are like a carousel going round and round. Like they show you one character, and then the next, it’s always one horse at a time, and so they miss the large-scale entanglement of older novels. They don’t have the mass of characters and events that you might have in a Dostoevsky novel, for example. There’s no industrialist who is always charging off and saying, ‘I have urgent business to attend to, I’m going to St. Petersburg.’
Perhaps we just don’t have that richness of world. I would love to write something that has that kind of density though. I hope maybe one day I will. But I guess we produce books that reflect our times––although that’s quite a banal statement to make––and the forms provoked by the way we live now just don’t seem to include that scale of entanglement. When I read these enormous realist novels, I feel like a voyeur looking at a past that has ceased to exist because the things that give rise to that past and that way of thinking don’t exist anymore either—
Like urgent business in Petersburg. Or fate—
Yeah, there’s no urgent business in Petersburg. My business is on my laptop.
I suppose what I would like to borrow from those realist epics is a kind of emotional truth. Like I love those character portraits of how these people act in different circumstances, the way that their reactions are so surprising. Like they go to a party and then they fall in love, and you never anticipated that this character could be such a person, and what happens casts them in a whole new light. And it’s difficult to create that kind of emotional arc without that scale of entanglement and these involved, active worlds. And so the challenge is creating something that feels emotionally honest to the experience of being in the world and being surprised by it, in a much more solipsistic form, without that scale and without all those different tools.
When you put it that way, I mean, The Vivisectors is also very much a character study of Agathe. I feel like one of the achievements is that she has this spiritual awakening at the end, possibly because she fell in love, or because she’s disentangled herself from her employer. And when I was rereading it again, before we logged onto our laptops, I was noticing like Agathe tries to claim throughout the book that she sort of has no subjectivity. At her parents’ house all of the frames are empty—instead of pictures of people there blank squares. And there’s this idea of editing, which Agathe likes, as this emptying of the self that’s almost holy—you’re giving yourself over to someone else. Yet those around Agathe, like her boss, seem to have like an excess of subjectivity in a way. Or at least this desperation to be seen and to be liked.
So I guess I just wanted to ask you about how subjectivity is operating in the book both for Agathe and around identity politics too. Or maybe just about that idea of emptying of self?
With Agathe I wanted to create this narrator who is just so taken with her way of seeing and so absolute in this way of seeing, and then also to think about how this stance might coincide with or undermine the different diagnoses of social ills in the novel. So you have her boss’s child telling her that the city is decadent, people have stopped having children, that this is why nothing works, there’s no sense of the future, or her boss telling her that the city doesn’t work because people are so unfriendly, and so on. There are all these different portraits of a city in crisis—and the identity conflicts that make up the scandal at the university belong to this too—and they are presented to a person who is so resolutely closed to any possibility of change. I wanted to bring these two things together: a sense of social decline and shared disaster, and this totalizing subjectivity that just doesn’t care about any of it. It’s possible that the problem isn’t the city, but Agathe.
One of the things I find interesting about On the Marble Cliffs or Anna Kavan’s Ice is trying to imagine the kind of trauma that might create this type of voice and the language and symbols that accompany it––so why has this style arisen, why has this way of seeing come about… For me as a reader the more buried that is, the more interesting. And Agathe’s way of looking at the world draws on a lot of the problems that have absorbed me for a long time, especially skepticism towards the other, because part of what makes her so difficult and so hostile is this complete denial of other people’s investments in the world, their thoughts and feelings. For Agathe everyone is just an empty performer, and that’s one of her major realizations, even though it’s so basic, that other people are real, that they have feelings.
And Agathe is, she’s such an exaggerator, because she’s so uncompromising in so many of her statements, and I find this—as with anyone who is deadpan, declarative, and with a tendency towards hyperbole—is always going to have a comic element.
It reminds me we’ve also messaged about the Hungarian novelist Ágota Kristof. She’s another writer whose books you could never quite pin down as, Oh, it’s an allegory for exactly this period, or exactly this place, and yet her work maps undeniably to 20th-century history and her experience as an refugee in Switzerland, where she took up writing in French. And I remember she really loved the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. She said something like, You know, all my friends thought that he was so dark, but I thought he was hilarious.
I know we mentioned the humor of these Greek-chorus or Reddit-discourse sections, but can we state for the record that The Vivisectors a humorous book, even if it’s the darkest humor?
Yes, definitely. I found so many of these sections hilarious to write because she’s so absolute in her interpretations and so self-obsessed and reductive. You can’t really take Agathe at her word, and so it surprises me when people do read her very literally, because she contradicts herself constantly. She presents you with one extreme portrait after another, and then takes it all back like two pages later. I also loved writing the choruses. One of the parts I had the most fun with is the mold song. I initially had just these students talking to each other about how bad the city is, but then I sent it to my agent––who is always my first reader and is also just the best person––and he replied saying, I like this loads, but can you make it more fun? And I was like, Make it more fun, make it more fun, how do I do that, and then I put in this dumb poem about a patch of mold. The patch of mold is singing about being a patch of mold. It’s such a bad poem, but I had so much fun when I was writing it. I was on the Eurostar between Brussels and London, and I was just crying with laughter while people stared at me.
It’s actually really hard to write good bad poems. I had the same problem in my first novel and I ended up using a poem that I wrote when I was a kid, because it was so mediocre… Or maybe it’s really easy to write bad poems—all my poems are bad, that’s the easiest thing—but like a passable poem is a challenge.
Anyway, I’ll let you go. I think I should probably have a transcript that we can edit, but if anything went wrong, then I’ll ask you to send me your voice memo?
Or I could just make it up!
When I was working on Another Gaze, I remember editing interviews and just being like: This doesn’t make any sense. When I started, I was 24, and so unforgiving. And now I’ve done interviews myself.
I think that in this day and age, because we’re mostly textual creatures, it’s astonishing how difficult it is to represent yourself in speech.
You know that is my one glimmer of hope for AI, that since we can’t give anyone papers to write on their own anymore, we’ll have to do oral exams on the spot. Maybe we’ll become eloquent pioneers of the new oral tradition or something.
I have also been thinking about this. Perhaps it’s going to send us straight back to this Platonic desire for presence, this insistence that the written word actually is completely untrustworthy, back to the oral performance, back to being in a place in time. But I don’t know if I will survive that shift. I’ve spent my entire life not talking. Maybe it’s too late for us.
It’s too late for us.