The Vanishers: A Novel

From the acclaimed novelist and The Believer editor HEIDI JULAVITS, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can inflict on one another.Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even by death?Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia's emerging gifts, and soon she's recruited to track down an elusive missing person—a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far deeper than she ever imagined. As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits's acclaimed novels, The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love.Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: The Vanishers is a lot of things: a paranormal detective story, an affecting exposition of familial and female dynamics, and a hilarious satire of academic politics. Here, Heidi Julavits has crafted a novel that is as ambitious as it is strange. After angering her jealous mentor, Julia, an up-and-coming psychic, is exiled from the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology, an elite psychic academy dubbed the Workshop. Subjected to a "psychic attack," Julia is crippled of her powers, until she receives an offer she can't refuse: to team up with her mentor's academic rival to get revenge, while seeking out a mysterious filmmaker who may have a connection to Julia's dead mother. It's a bizarre adventure that takes her to a recovery facility for victims of psychic attacks and which doubles as a spa for plastic surgery patients. Beneath The Vanishers’ quirky, metaphysical charms is a dark, Freudian undercurrent--Julia can’t help comparing her mother’s suicide to Sylvia Plath's--that surfaces at the very end in a satisfying, thrilling twist. The Vanishers is a truly unique, thoroughly imagined astral mystery. --Kevin Nguyen Featured Guest Review: Karen Russell on The VanishersKaren Russell is the author of the short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, named one of New York Times' Top Ten Best Books of 2011.Julia Severn, an initiate at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology and stenographer to the great seer, Madame Ackermann (a recipient of "the occult equivalent of a MacArthur"), has a lot of raw talent. So much, in fact, that the relationship between mentor and protégé quickly sinks into hostile territory when Madame Ackermann taunts Julia with specters of her late mother. After a game of mental telepathy goes awry (forget Twister," these party games the academic psychics play, they are high stakes), Julia finds herself abstractly ill, undiagnosable and unable to continue her studies with Madame Ackermann.Julia heads to New York, where she meets Alwyn, a young woman who has "vanished" herself, leaving her family without a clue as to her whereabouts; and Colophon Martin, a one-time employer and current adversary of Madame Ackermann. They theorize that all of Julia's strange symptoms can be traced back to her former mentor: Julia is suffering from a psychic attack launched by the jealous Madame. Colophon urges Julia to check herself into Vienna's Goergen Asylum, a cavernous Art Nouveau spa for patients wishing to recover in secret from plastic surgeries, and for the vanished victims of psychic attack.On the surface, The Vanishers is about two paranormal scholars with the ability to carry out perplexing psychic attacks on their adversaries, and it is without a doubt a chilling metaphysical mystery. But it's also a totally delightful satire of academia, where email attachments can carry luminous pathogens and psychic warfare might at any moment erupt near an Institute cheese plate; it's a medical horror story that will be intimately familiar to anyone who has ever been sick with something that resists names and medicines; and it's a darkly hilarious send-up of spa culture and the various forms of amnesia, facial disguises, and self-erasure bottled and sold to us by the "health and beauty" industry.The Vanishers delivers pretty much every pleasure a reader could ask for, and its unusual framework weaves together the powerful themes that dominate Julavits's other novels--it gives fresh expression to the experience of grief, of mourning for one's mother and for one's vanished self, of the fraught bonds between women and the twisted consequences of female rivalry and the games that people play with one another. I was amazed by the language in The Vanishers, at Julavits's gift for distilling complex desires, dream and emotion, and certain interior experiences that I had believed to be beyond articulation, into prose of shocking beauty and originality.The Vanishers is an absolute masterpiece. Julavits takes readers on a wild ride that hops continents and decades, but the real setting is the grey territory between sickness and health, sanity and delusion, love and hatred, life and death.One thing is certain, you will never think of "mental health" in the same way again. Review"Open The Vanishers to any page and you'll find some of the snappiest dialogue going. Stylish and fiercely funny, Heidi Julavits' fourth novel explores the imagined dangers and dizzying thrills of being a career psychic....Julavits is a fearlessly inventive writer, a risk-taker who never shies away from prickly, tangled, often meaphorical emotional darkness and constantly strikes out into unexplored territory....the sharply original narrative, which moves at top speed, [is] always entertaining and full of curiosities, deadpan banter, and metaphysical playfulness.....a wild, fun ride that doesn't let up until the last sentence."--Elle"Intelligent and ambitious"--Kirkus Reviews"Wry, witty....magical, and Julavits's often acerbic prose generates laughs despite the sad reality"--Publishers WeeklyPraise for THE VANISHERS:“The Vanishers is a fascinating inquiry into matriarchal structures: their power struggles, the projections, distortions and anxieties that result, and, above all, the creative - and destructive - energies that they unleash. A real achievement."—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C“It is always an adventure and a delight to read Heidi Julavits. Her intellectual brio and descriptive inventiveness are on full display in The Vanishers, but she’s gone further this time by inventing a new genre: the astral detective thriller.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad“The Vanishers is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, delivering all the immediate pleasures of mystery, horror, and satire while exploring grief in language that is as shocking for its originality as its precision. Julavits takes readers on a wild ride that hops continents and decades, but the real setting of The Vanishers is the gray territory between sickness and health, sanity and delusion, love and hatred, life and death.”—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by WolvesPraise for THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT:"A technical marvel . . . that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train . . . Entertaining, devastating, and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine's lank hair." —Los Angeles Times Book Review"Julavits expertly keeps the reader baffled until the end, but beneath the mystery is a sophisticated meditation on truth and bias." —The New Yorker"Suspenseful, energetic, and literarily playful." —San Francisco Chronicle