Product Description

In late afternoon on November 7, 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal was abducted after field hockey practice at her all-girls New England prep school.

Or was she?

A few weeks later an unharmed Mary reappears as suddenly and mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming to have little memory of what happened to her. Her socially ambitious mother, a compelling if frosty woman descended from a Salem witch, is concerned that Mary has somehow been sullied by the experience and sends her to therapy with a psychologist named Dr. Hammer.

Mary turns out to be a cagey and difficult patient. Dr. Hammer begins to suspect thatMary concocted her tale of abduction when he discovers its parallels with a seventeenth-century narrative of a girl who was abducted by Indians and who caused her rescuer to be hanged as a witch. Hammer, eager to further his professional reputation, decides to write a book about Mary’s faked abduction, a project her mother sanctions, because she'd rather her daughter be a liar than a rape victim.

Fifteen years later, Mary has returned to Boston for her mother's funeral. Her abduction—real or imagined—has tainted many lives, including her own. When Mary finds a suggestive letter sent to her mother, she suspects her mother planned a reconciliation before her death. Thus begins a quest that requires Mary to revisit the people and places in her past.

The Uses of Enchantment weaves a spell in which the reader sees how the extraordinary power of a young woman’s sexuality, and the desire to wield it, have a devastating effect on all involved. The riveting cat-and-mouse power games between doctor and patient, and between abductor and abductee, are gradually, dreamily revealed, along with the truth about what actually happened in 1985.

Heidi Julavits is in full command of her considerable gifts and has crafted a dazzling narrative sure to garner her further acclaim as one of the best novelists working today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #499474 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Released on: 2006-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. On November 7, 1985, Mary Veal, 16, a not especially distinguished upper-middle-class girl, disappears from New England's Semmering Academy. A month later she reappears at Semmering, claiming amnesia, but hinting at abduction and ravishment. The events in Believer editor Julavits's third, beautifully executed novel take place on three levels: one, dedicated to "what might have happened," is the story of the supposedly blank interval; another is dedicated to the inevitable therapeutic aftermath, as Mary's therapist, Dr. Hammer, tries to discover whether Mary is lying, either about the abduction or the amnesia; and the present of the novel, which revolves around the funeral of Mary's mother, Paula, in 1999. There, Mary feels not only the hostility of her sisters, Regina (an unsuccessful poet) and Gaby (a disheveled lesbian) but Paula's posthumous hostility. Or is that an illusion? This structure delicately balances between gothic and comic, allowing Julavits to play variations on Mary's life and on the '80s moral panic of repressed memory syndromes and wild fears of child abuse. While Julavits (The Effect of Living Backwards) sometimes lets an overheated style distract from her central story, as its various layers coalesce, the mystery of what did happen to Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page. (Oct.)
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From The New Yorker
The author's third novel is a spooky coming-of-age tale set in West Salem, Massachusetts, a town whose witch-hanging history both captivates and circumscribes the lives of the teen-age girls who reside there. One afternoon in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal disappears from field-hockey practice at the austere Semmering Academy; she reappears a few weeks later claiming to have been abducted. The truth of what happened is only hinted at in Mary's sexually charged experiences with her supposed captor and in her provocative exchanges with the therapist assigned to her case. He decides that Mary is lying - aspects of her story seem taken from a previous student's faked abduction, itself inspired by a centuries-old fable involving a kidnapped girl and witchcraft - but, it turns out, he is not without his own agenda. Julavits expertly keeps the reader baffled until the end, but beneath the mystery is a sophisticated meditation on truth and bias.
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From The Washington Post
As postmodern readers, we have our sea legs by now. If we open a novel and discover that the first chapter is called "What Might Have Happened November 7, 1985," we roll with it, recognizing that the "truth" is subjective, that every story, even our own, is a hostage to memory and interpretation. In some aspects, Heidi Julavits's intricately constructed third novel, The Uses of Enchantment, is a classic postmodern examination of the complexity and irony of narrative. But relax. Julavits, in her probing of the politics of storytelling, does not deny us a good story; The Uses of Enchantment is also a highly compelling, old-fashioned quest.

The novel, divided into three rotating sections, begins with an encounter in West Salem, Mass., between an unnamed girl and an unnamed man on a road near the girl's hockey field. The man has been parking near her private school for weeks, reading the paper in his car, and is treated by the all-girl student body "as their mascot, rallying proof of their irresistibility." On this day, the girl leaves school early, taps her hockey stick on his window and accepts a ride. Julavits's depiction of this man is one of the great achievements of the novel. Though he is a self-proclaimed dullard at the height of the quiet desperation of middle age, his story, perceptions and dialogue are captivating. His lack of allure is palpable, as is the absence of passion of any kind in his life. Yet his scenes with the girl are invigorating and increasingly fraught with sexual tension, a tension not created by physical attraction or attractiveness on either part but by the desperate need they share to recreate themselves in order to connect.

In sections entitled "West Salem," we learn that this girl may have been Mary Veal, once a quiet child of WASPy, inattentive parents and an unremarkable student who disappeared for seven weeks in November 1985. Now, in 1999, this absence reverberates still, for Mary has never told the story of what happened to her. This withholding, only an exaggeration of the chronic withholding at which her family seems expert, is why Mary believes her mother refused to see her in the weeks before she died. On her return to her childhood home for the funeral, Mary hopes for a letter or some sign of forgiveness from her mother, but she finds nothing.

In the obituary, her mother is referred to as "Miriam's mother," something that disgusts family and friends, disheartens Mary, yet has no meaning for the reader until we begin the "Notes, 1986" sections, a first-person narrative by the therapist Mary was sent to after her reappearance. Initially, Dr. Hammer is eager to help Mary, sincerely trying to decipher her cryptic responses. Their dialogue is as fresh and fast-paced as that between the girl and the man, but Julavits is careful not to use the same tricks. The nameless girl is a virgin with a vague aim of seduction, which both energizes and terrifies her, whereas Mary is a vessel of anger, shame and ennui: "This couch sucks, she said. I bet you've had this couch since Oberlin. Which means you've probably had sex on it." When Dr. Hammer begins to nurse a theory that Mary faked her own disappearance, his listening becomes selective. Mary, sensing his sudden retreat, stops obfuscating. In anguished exchanges, she tries to tell him her story, but he resists, wanting only to see a lying girl he has already named Miriam for the book he will write about her.

Overtly playing on the relationship between Freud and his most famous patient, Dora, whose claims of sexual abuse Freud interpreted as fantasy, Julavits sets up a dizzying house of mirrors throughout the novel. "She had begun playing games, games inside of games inside of games," Julavits writes of Mary, yet the author could well be describing her own technique.

For the first half of the book, it is hard to reconcile the acid-tongued, sexually charged 1985-86 Mary with the numb, hollow Mary of 1999. Her story -- if there is a cohesive one, and at first we suspect there is not -- comes in fragments. In the hands of a less skilled writer, we might give up. But Julavits has woven these pieces expertly, with sure-footed intelligence, biting humor, bitter ironies and gorgeously timed dialogue, along with recurring phrases and motifs that work like incantations, echoing from section to section, character to character, gathering force and meaning.

Back in the house in which she grew up, the 1999 Mary feels invisible (she cannot even trigger the light detector in the driveway), but once she finds her first clue in her mother's desk and is forced outside the house on a hunt that will demand all of her resources, the girl and the woman begin to adhere. Often, and perhaps even forgivably, a novel as ambitious as this one cannot withstand the constraints of an ending, but even here Julavits does not falter. In an unexpected final turn, the two Marys and the three narrative threads entwine satisfyingly. And, as in all good quests, salvation lies not in what is finally found but in the wisdom, if not the truth, garnered along the way.

Reviewed by Lily King
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

An interesting premise - but an unsatisfying read.
I purchased this book based on a favorable review but came away disappointed but the unlikable characters, clever yet unbelievable dialogue and ambiguous ending.

The plot: Mary Veal returns home to attend the funeral of her mother and reconnect with her estranged family. The book flashbacks to two significant events in her life: the first, when she hops into a stranger's car and embarks on a journey of arranged abduction/seduction with her captor. The second is her time in therapy with Dr. Hammer. Mary claims amnesia about the incident but the doctor doesn't believe her and sees his patient as a way to advance his career and reputation.

The book is a difficult read, primarily because not one of the characters is likeable in any way. While the three male characters (Mary's father, captor, and therapist) are weak men damaged by past events, the author reserves most of her scorn for the women in her book. There are stereotypical frosty women (Mary's mother and sisters, Miss Pym), manipulators (Roz Biedelman, Bettina Spencer) and drunks (Aunt Helen). But the most unlikable character is Mary herself - who not only fails to take responsibility for what she has done but, like the child she remains, doesn't understand why everyone is so hostile towards her.

The book jacket teases that the events of Mary's youth will be gradually revealed - which is simply not true. The question of whether the "abduction" was real or imagined is never a mystery (The author lets you know pretty early on how Mary came to disappear). Rather, by the time you reach the confusing ending there are a host of unanswered questions: What was her relationship with her family before the incident? Why did Mary choose to go with the stranger? What happened during the time of her captivity? Did Mary's mother ever forgive her? and How was Mary changed by the mistakes she made as a youth?

In addition, the absence of quotation marks around dialogue is an unnecessary distraction.

Overall, I can not recommend this book.

Frustrating
I see this book made the Times list of Notable Books for 2006. I wish I understood why. I get annoyed with books that make me feel like an inadequate or uncomprehending reader, which is what this book did. Too clever by half. I had a sense that the author had a blast constructing this tale--but I was exhausted by the time I finished it. And why, in a book that is so dialogue-driven, must we sacrifice quotation marks? Such a simple device--and it would have helped immeasurably. I'm sure that if I went back and reread the book, many more pieces would fall into place. But I shouldn't have to do that--and I have other things I'm dying to read. I recommend this book only if you have large, uninterrupted blocks of reading time so that you can ponder all the references, both within and without the text. I just didn't enjoy having to work so hard (and I'm not sure whether or not she was abducted either!)

The good, the bad, and the ugly

The good: Julavits writes well. You keep turning the pages despite yourself. Maybe because you are thinking it will somehow get better.

The bad: The story itself. It leaves you scratching your head and wondering what the author is trying to say. I guess that could be good except that the story was so unbelievable and silly. And the characters were so unlikeable...especially Mary. I just wanted to smack her. In addition, since when do we not use the proper punctuation throughout a novel? Why can't we use quotes when someone is talking?

The ugly: I feel like I wasted a lot of time reading this book. Did the critics read the same book I did?

In summary: Not recommended. The description of the book is much more interesting than the book itself.