Considering truth and its appearance
Twenty-nine-year-old Mary Veal has returned home from Oregon to the fictitious town of West Salem for the funeral of her mother, Paula. She is not just fulfilling an obligation, but looking for some sort of posthumous forgiveness from the parent who refused to see or speak to her in the last years of her life. Mary's offense was to have apparently engineered her own disappearance 15 years earlier, returning after an absence of almost eight weeks with claims of having been abducted. But ``apparently" is the operative word, and the quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology, ideology, and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of Heidi Julavits's new novel, ``The Uses of Enchantment, " a riveting, at times deeply funny, disturbing book.
Once the site of Indian raids and witchcraft trials, West Salem is now inhabited by elite private girls schools, psychoanalysts, and bored, pressured, suburban overachievers. So it's almost a given that the novel's focus will be on the nature of adolescent female hysteria, whether the 1692 version epitomized by ``possessed" girls Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams , or Freud's 1905 version in ``Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." Indeed, within the first few chapters we are introduced to Dora, to Abigail Lake (an ancestor of Mary's mother's who was convicted of witchcraft), and to ``The Abduction and Captivity of Dorcas Hobbs by the Malygnant Savages of the Kenebek," an apparently fictitious journal (imagined by Julavits and read avidly by the young Mary) chronicling the kidnapping, depravity, rescue, and redemption of a young girl.
But this book is no straightforward exposition of recurring psychosocial phenomena. It's a postmodern subversion of them. For example, the name ``Dorcas Hobbs" just happens to be a meld of Dorcas Hoar and Abigail Hobbs, two real girls who pled innocent to charges of witchcraft, were convicted, and then subsequently spared from execution after ``confessing." And their tale in some ways parallels that of Mary, who first claimed that she'd been abducted, then that she'd left of her own volition, and finally -- under the coercive influence of Roz Biedelman, a feminist psychotherapist who is trying to make a name for herself -- that her male therapist, Dr. Hammer, had essentially coerced her into telling the latter story rather than acknowledge the reality of her abuse. This is the charge that contemporary critics -- real and fictitious -- levy against Freud in his treatment of Dora.
Complicating matters still more are the perspectives, in alternating chapters, of an unnamed man who was Mary's companion (or captor? or lover? or victim?) during her disappearance, and the therapy notes of Dr. Hammer. As much a careerist as his nemesis, Biedelman, Dr. Hammer eventually parlays these notes into a book entitled ``Miriam: The Disappearance of a New England Girl." It's Mary's quest for the missing copy of this book that sends her back through the literal and emotional landmarks of memory.
For all of its intellectual gamesmanship, ``The Uses of Enchantment" is an unflinching and moving tribute to its protagonist. Mary, the ``identified patient" (or identified problem), is ultimately more honest than any of the other people in her constellation.
Readers angered by ambiguity should avoid this book. But those who have the courage and optimism to take novels seriously (as Julavits, editor of The Believer magazine, clearly does) will find themselves haunted by it in the best sense of the word.
The Uses of Enchantment, By Heidi Julavits, Doubleday, 356 pp., $24.95
