Williams's 'The Vivisectors' Dissects Cancel Culture With Dark Humor and Philosophical Drift

Missouri Williams's debut novel opens on a scene of quiet devastation: a mother who tried to die and failed, now paralyzed and dependent, confined to a state of living suspension. This image of arrested decay sets the temperature for everything that follows. The city itself is rotting from the inside—a forest creeping inward from the edges, consuming roads and buildings, held back only by a silent order of gardeners who tend the green like monks tending a garden. The university where much of the action unfolds is similarly compromised, its institutions crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions.

Agathe, the novel's narrator, is a woman who works for someone she despises: a university lecturer consumed not by scholarship but by scandal. A heated exchange between a teacher and a student—the exact nature of the offense remains deliberately obscure—becomes the gravitational center of institutional attention. Agathe's boss wants to know what really happened, enlists Agathe to befriend the student, to extract the truth. But Williams has no interest in delivering it. The novel refuses to tell us what the scandal actually was, and this refusal is its central gesture. The Vivisectors cares far more about the machinery of outrage itself—the pettiness, the absurdity, the way institutions cannibalize themselves over incidents no one can quite articulate—than about the incidents that supposedly sparked them.

What emerges instead is a meditation on knowledge itself: how we pursue it, how we fail to understand anything despite our endless talking, how language itself becomes a tool for obscuring rather than revealing truth. Agathe observes the world with the kind of teenage-existentialist disdain that might have felt at home on a certain corner of the internet a decade ago. She is ugly, misanthropic, determined to offend. She compares her mother—the paralyzed woman from the opening—to a plant. In one scene that hovers between the grotesque and the genuinely funny, she gives up trying to wheel her mother through the grass and instead climbs into the wheelchair beside her, using the controls to propel them both up and down the park. She calls this taking her mother for a walk.

These moments of dark humor are scattered throughout the novel like islands in a sea of something else—something more exhausting, more self-regarding. Williams has a tendency toward long tirades that begin with promise and gradually lose momentum, sentences clipped short before they can gather real force. The novel's philosophical ambitions—its desire to think against the grain of contemporary culture, to imagine complexity in a world that demands simplification—arrive too late and struggle against the weight of the prose itself. Agathe is simultaneously the novel's greatest strength and its most frustrating liability: a character vivid enough to carry the weight of the narrative, but also a vehicle for observations that often feel more clever than true.

What lingers is the sense of a writer reaching for something important—the way institutions fail us, the way language betrays meaning, the way we live among decay and call it normal. The novel's refusal to explain the scandal, to satisfy the reader's hunger for narrative resolution, is a deliberate choice, a formal argument about the nature of knowledge and understanding. But the execution frequently overwhelms the intention. The Vivisectors is strange and disturbing and sometimes very good, but it is also a novel that seems to work harder than it needs to, that mistakes difficulty for depth, that leaves the reader exhausted rather than enlightened.