Things tend to come apart in The Vivisectors, the second novel by Missouri Williams. No surprises there, given the title. But what’s more striking is the thoroughness with which decay dominates the book. Williams cleverly braids together three genres of deconstruction: the Gothic, the apocalyptic, and the critical. The former concerns itself with curdling bloodlines and moldering houses; the second, with the end times of a people writ large; the third, with the picking apart of ideas and art. At the intersection of these three kinds of unmaking sits Agathe, our narrator—heir to a possibly abusive family, to a probably doomed civilization, and to a definitively fucked version of academia.
In the novel’s very near future (or barely alternate present), a changing climate threatens the city where Agathe lives: The heat and the floods get scarier each year, as do the creepily resilient plants that flourish under such tough conditions. Residents cope with this baseline precarity either by burying their heads in the sand or by methodically combatting it, divergent philosophies reflected by the only two career options that seem to remain in this timeline. There are the verbose but useless academics at the university (a once-great institution, now washed up), and then there are the highly competent gardeners who keep at bay the rapidly encroaching wilderness. But the gardeners are growing discontented, and they have ways of making their power known. So, too, do the university’s international students, who are sick of being treated as second-class citizens by the bigoted locals. Insurrection hums everywhere.
About all these Armageddons—meteorological, botanical, social—Agathe cares not a bit. Living on the edge of the city in a rotting manor that would spook the Ushers, Agathe cultivates an apathy to the floundering world and to her own painful family past. “It was as if none of the things that had happened to me had left any mark at all,” she proclaims. “[A]t the center of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else, and when I thought of my name or the qualities that supposedly made me me, this was all I saw—a great big lump of stone sitting in the shadows.” Though her idiom can at times verge on the Mall Goth, we soon glean that Agathe is not exaggerating. Even the most extreme events cannot make her feel a feeling. In the novel’s L’Étranger-esque opening line, she cooly recounts that “The morning after my mother finally tried to kill herself, my uncle decided to say something to me, although we usually ate breakfast together in silence.” She bats away the news of the suicide attempt (and her uncle’s efforts to connect), saying with a shrug, “I wasn’t interested in what had happened.”
Allergic to sentiment, past, and personality: What does it mean for such a character to be our way into a novel, a narrative form traditionally anchored in those hallmarks of interiority? For all the moody richness of The Vivisectors’ setting, and obvious parallels to our own melting world, when the opaque Agathe is the window through which we glimpse them, it can be a struggle to care much about either. “There was nothing in my head and nobody knew who I was,” she insists. “I was nobody. I was a ghost.”
Of course, The Vivisectors is far from the first novel to place a living specter at its center, especially in recent years. Jess Bergman has diagnosed an epidemic of xanned-out female protagonists in 2020s fiction, with novels like 2018’s Severance (in which a character named Candace runs a photography blog called NYC Ghost) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (in which the nameless narrator strives to spend most of her life sleeping) forming the backbone of the typology. Comfortably numb (though inevitably young and attractive) un-heroines have continued to surface in more recent downtown novels, too; think of Emma Cline’s The Guest (2023) and Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth (2025). With Agathe, Williams brings this character type to boil, then adds a dash of malice.
This flavor of fictional woman usually has a bullshit job, and Agathe’s very much fits the bill: She works as an assistant to a professor she loathes, editing emails and grading uninspired student essays. Her only hobbies are slamming coffee and walking the crumbling streets, which she does until her feet bleed. Like any good flâneur, Agathe sticks to the margins of her city and its messy sociality, witnessing without caring or participating. But none of her milieu’s environmental or human disasters compare, in our misanthrope’s mind, to the cataclysm of feeling that she soon faces. When her boss orders her to spy on a grad student named Adam (who’s stirred up a campus tempest in a teapot with an obliquely xenophobic comment in class), Agathe begins to fall in love with him. This threatens to shake her out of her ennui, to pull her into relation with others, to make a person of her. The prospect appalls: “This is what love is like in my dreams—an anticipation of violence,” she says. Earlier, a gardener told her a parable about a girl who is tortured to death each night by her lover. The lesson seems to have sunk in.
Readers of Williams’s prior fiction may be feeling more than a little déjà vu at this point. Her first novel (the sublimely demented The Doloriad [2022]) and several of her short stories seemingly take place in universes parallel to that of The Vivisectors, making something like siblings or inbred cousins of the string of narratives. Many core elements of plot—school, murder, brooding, climate apocalypse—resurface again and again (although these events unfold more lackadaisically in The Vivisectors than in most of Williams’s other writings, moseying along too slowly to maintain tension at times). Most obvious of all are the recurring characters: People named Agathe, Adam, Jacob, and Dolores appear in multiple works, as do character types (the editor, the neurodivergent girl, the bad teacher, the very bad mother in a wheelchair).
The closed loop of this dramatis personae further erodes any fragile claims to individuality that this latest Agathe may have enjoyed. Indeed, we begin to get the sense that Agathe and co. are figures in a myth, not people. Perhaps The Vivisectors is one of the many interpolated stories and dreams that the mutant children of The Doloriad recount to pass the time and to process their hideous reality, an allegory for an allegory. The Vivisectors is certainly shot through with allegory, and with other narrative forms that tell the truth at a slant: parable, metaphysical poetry, philosophical dialogues, Arthurian legend. (At one point a spot of mold on a wall sings a song, a wonderful bit of strangeness.) On the one hand, this reflects Agathe’s academic surroundings, which prize figurative language for its ability to present reality through a glass darkly. “This city was built on metaphor,” warns the husband of Agathe’s boss. “You can’t start calling a spade a spade, not now, no matter how hard you try.”
But spectacular extended metaphors and images are also the medium through which Agathe simultaneously divulges and obscures her own interior states. Here is how she describes her opinion about the departmental drama swirling around Adam:
[I]f we were lucky there would be a scandal; if we were lucky … strangers could analyze it and find within it a universality that might help them understand their own lives and oppressions … together, we might argue our way toward a collective truth; together we might build a tower, the most perfect tower that the world had ever seen, a shining tower that would resist all attempts to undermine it because even though it was a tower of discourse it rested on the most secure of foundations, foundations of experience, shared experience; and if the tower was covered in mirrors then all the better because at least then everybody might see themselves reflected, even if they couldn’t see inside … The city had a dream. It dreamed of this tower.
Without ever quite saying ivory tower, Agathe repurposes that cliché, transforming it from an emblem of distance (from reality, from community) into one of intimate connection. However, the passage also proffers a defense of figurative language itself, which invites readers to extrapolate from particulars towards “universality” and “their own lives.”
Elsewhere, the novel cues us to distrust metaphor. This is signaled nowhere more strongly than in the title itself. The Vivisectors never subjects the reader to scenes of vivisection, at least not in the physical, fleshy sense of the word. The only cutting to speak of takes place in other registers: gardeners nurture plants with shears; lovers slice each other with the unbearable blade of intimacy. Worst of all are the university’s scholars, who, as Agathe’s boss complains in a rant about Adam’s cancellation,
thought … that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analyzed a situation until we had proven the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels … We were like vivisectors, [the professor] repeated. We had no idea what we wanted to find, no sense of direction, and so we destroyed other bodies in service of nothing.
In the professor’s usage, “vivisection” means ruinous mincing—pulling ideas and people apart without ever finding their inmost truth. This framing evokes a long tradition of campus novels and films that position scholarly interpretation as orthogonal to morality. Narratives like Disgrace (1999) and After the Hunt (2025) follow academics who wield extraordinary powers of analysis, yet fail bombastically to turn those lucid thoughts into ethical action. Works of dark academia (think The Secret History [1992], Katabasis [2025], or Bunny [2025]) dial up the cognitive dissonance, taking those moral failures to a murderous extreme.
In The Vivisectors, the professor’s awareness of this tendency among her colleagues and students would seem to imply she’s capable of resisting it. Yet elsewhere, she is revealed to be precisely one of the prolix idiots she criticizes, a Polonius with tenure. More immediately, her repetition of the vivisectors simile within the same passage undercuts its gravitas, as does Agathe’s bitchy reaction to the diatribe: “I was impressed to discover that she had learned a new word, but inside I was thinking that none of this applied to me.” Coming as it does so early in the book, the slippery vivisection analogy inclines the reader to distrust figures of speech and their abuses throughout, even as Williams throws such language at us as relentlessly as a pitching machine.
If Agathe dwells contentedly in the realm of empty words and endless analysis when the novel opens, her affair with Adam gradually, devastatingly draws her into the orbit of action, attachment, and consequence. The novel’s ending sees Agathe do things for the first time: She commits a murder, then reconciles with Adam. In a different story, it might be jarring to see brutality paired with a traditional, even sappy, romantic denouement (“I was seeing him at last, his sameness and difference … Everything around us was lit up with life. I extended my hand. He took it”). In the context of The Vivisectors, though, these two acts represent comparable transformations for the previously indifferent Agathe: They both require a baseline of care for the other. You have to be at least somewhat invested in a person to want to hurt them or to hold their hand. (Also, to be fair, the person Agathe kills probably had it coming.)
Granted, The Vivisectors offers no explicit indication that Agathe’s personal growth will also inspire her (or her fellow city-dwellers) to take on the more collective battles she’s been strenuously avoiding: climate change, the immigration crisis, class unrest. You’d have to extrapolate from her narrowly individual happy ending in order to read a more communal optimism into the story’s arc. But it’s plausible that the one could beget the other—that if Agathe can swap out her critic’s red pen for a gardener’s hoe when it comes to Adam, she’ll do so in other domains, too. Or that other city residents will.
Either way, The Vivisectors is foundationally about the relationship between interpretation and love. The novel suggests that we must, paradoxically, set down the scalpel of analysis to truly engage with another person, another people. “The most sublime act is to set another before you,” reads the novel’s epigraph, a quotation from William Blake. In forcing its 2020s-coded slackeress to do just that, Vivisectors represents the closing parenthesis to an era of character, and a rejoinder to apathy broadly conceived.