Conventional wisdom: Listen to kids. Believe them. When a teen-aged girl speaks of abduction, her shrink has his own ideas in Heidi Julvaits’ new novel, The Uses of Enchantment. Julvaits (pictured) reads from the book, her third, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the New Haven Free Public Library. Read on for Tanya Angell Allen’s review.
The Uses of Enchantment
By Heidi Julvaits
Doubleday, $24.95
Reviewed by Tanya Angell Allen
“Every girl wants to be Anne Frank,” says Mary Veal, the teenaged main character of Heidi Julavits’ novel The Uses of Enchantment. “I mean, minus the dying part. But how exciting, to be locked in an attic like that. If you didn’t have to die, you know? That’s why it’s such a great read. Because the bad stuff happens outside the book.”
When psychiatrist Dr. Hammer tells Mary that she’s missing the point of Frank’s life, she replies, “Her life didn’t have a point…she was just a girl. Girl’s lives don’t have points. That’s why they do what they do.”
Mary herself becomes the subject of a best-selling book called Miriam, written by her psychiatrist Dr. Hammer. The book is later criticized by other psychiatrists because it contains fabricated exchanges and a possible misdiagnosis. Comparisons are made to Freud’s Dora: Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, which has also been criticized for Freud’s use of deception in presenting his patient’s story. Freud, referred to in The Uses of Enchantment as “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century,” allegedly altered Dora’s story to back up his own psychoanalytic theories.
Mary’s life becomes the subject of psychoanalytical study after she reappears one day as mysteriously as she disappeared a few weeks earlier. She claims that she was abducted, has amnesia, and that she has been under an enchantment. Hammer decides that she made the abduction up and had instead hidden herself away. He makes comparisons between Mary and young women who in the seventeenth century claimed to have been kidnapped by witches. He refers to them all as “hyper radiants,” saying that for people with this condition,
Tthe increased pressure under which they’ve existed either crushes their spirit, or, as I suspect is a trend, their spirit rebels, it ingests this negative energy and reflects it outward as an act of intensive, even destructive creativity. I can help them harness what currently manifests as a destructive tendency and transform it into a positive tendency. A work of art.
We are not told how Hammer proposes to help these women turn this creativity “into a positive tendency,” but clues about this might be found in the novel itself and in Julavits’ example, as The Uses of Enchantment is partly a story about storytelling. It alternates between stories of the man who might or might not have abducted Mary in 1985; the older Mary of 1999, who has come back to her home town to attend the funeral of her mother; and the psychiatrist who wrote Miriam. Tellingly, the younger Mary is sometimes referred to as “Scheherazade” by her suspected abductor, who might or might not have been abducted by Mary himself.
The real details of the teenager’s story are purposefully ambiguous, but at one point the Mary of 1999 realizes that one thing she has always been good at is “creating a plausible story out of disparate details.” She can “help people make sense of the senseless; as in the game of props, she could take these seemingly unrelated objects or details and weave them into a convincing story that would alter a depressing landscape into one slightly more saturated with hope.”
This is, in a way, a description of the work of creative writers, many of whom transform the energy created by emotional pain and traumatic circumstances into art. As Anne Frank once wrote, “I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” If The Uses of Enchantment was a different book, it might contain an epilogue in which Mary goes on to get a fiction writing degree from a top university and then becomes a celebrated author like Julavits herself.
The Uses of Enchantment is the third book of Julavits’ promising career. She is a founding editor of the literary review The Believer, which is a sister-publication of McSweeneys. Although The Uses of Enchantment is a book for adults, discovering authors like Julavits might help more creative young women find voices of their own through writing. By harnessing their creativity they can make sense of the senseless, give their lives meaning, and gain control of their own stories.
Heidi Julavits will read at the New Haven Public Library at 6:30pm on Thursday, Nov. 9. For more information please see the Writers Live! website or contact John Jessen at
this e‑mail address
[email protected] or at 203 – 946-7001
