A Trollish New Campus Novel Hates Students and Professors Alike
The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university (the purview of the academics) and the city’s wild, unstoppable greenery (the purview of the gardeners, a quasi-mystical class of stoic workers who wear wide-brimmed hats and communicate in parables and aphorisms). As a consequence of the gardeners’ inability or refusal to prune back the escalating trees, weeds, and wildflowers, the city’s infrastructure is “crumbling” and its inhabitants are moving to the countryside. It seems possible the city is heading toward a cataclysmic event—but, in the end, the gardeners and the academics arrive at a truce.
The second conflict is a cancel-culture-on-campus story. The conflict is ignited by a political-science student named Adam, whom Agathe describes as combative and as having “a bright, enameled charm right up until the moment when he didn’t, and then he became sulky and petulant.” He is also hot. One day, he says something offensive, probably racist, to a professor during class. Adam and the professor’s ethnicities are never named, although it’s implied that Adam might be Jewish, the professor Black or Arab, and what follows is a kind of alternate “Human Stain” situation. The incident quickly becomes infamous on campus and gets Adam in severe trouble with the administration.
Characteristically, Williams never divulges what Adam actually said. But the magnitude of the scandal and its cultural implications are dwelled upon for pages by several of the characters, including Agathe’s boss, who compares young people to the titular “vivisectors” in what is essentially a rant against cancel culture. She accuses Agathe’s peers who have turned on Adam of refusing to “let goodness thrive” and of wanting “nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error,” particularly when it comes to “men, especially masculine men.”
Agathe finds her boss’s remarks dull, but more or less shares these views. The image of the students as vivisectors, committed to extracting the hearts and licking the bones of the transgressors in their midst, seems to mirror her own hatred of the university’s tendency toward frenzied analysis. (She favors the gardeners’ spiritual connection with nature.) Plus, Agathe herself is given to edgelordy grandstanding. “When it came to men,” she says, “the university had become a place where the ordinary rules were inverted, any idiot knew that. They had been given a lot of apologizing to do.”
Could the character of Agathe be intended as satirical? A sly sendup of a power-tripping 4chan-poster type, a lady gooner getting off on resentful fantasies of her innate superiority and heightened intelligence? Given her compulsive contrarianism, and the absence of characters who are significantly different from her, it’s tricky to gauge the novel’s level of self-awareness. The world of the novel, as far as we know, matches Agathe’s description of it perfectly. It is presented in earnest, and never more so than when it broods upon the subject of Adam, a troubled and aggressive young man who enjoys discussing the importance of aqueducts to ancient civilizations. He is well matched with Agathe, who believes she is “unable to imagine love without dominion” and wants someone to understand her “either absolutely or not at all.” Their conversation, rarely reproduced, is described as “a dialogue between mirrors.” When they finally hook up, the results are corny, like a dark-academia “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Adam pushes Agathe down onto the bed and whispers a secret name in her ear. Later, he licks tears from her eyes. “I had never noticed how long his eyelashes were before,” Agathe remarks.
In a piece for The Drift in 2022, Williams wrote with approval that the novelists she was reading were eschewing “content” for form and “the internet” for “higher things.” Citing “Pure Colour,” by Sheila Heti, and “Checkout 19,” by Claire-Louise Bennett, as successful case studies, she argued that “reading the internet is less important than reading God’s book, also known as the world.” One can imagine that some of this same intent lies behind Williams’s creation of Agathe, who excoriates the noisy proliferation of opinions at the university and venerates nature for its mute surfaces and stubborn, occult power.
