The Uses of Enchantment” is nothing so much as a trio of mirrors, reflecting an infinity of illusory images. And though Heidi Julavits lifts her title from Bruno Bettleheim, her inspiration is far more clearly drawn from Freud and the repressed memory hysteria of the mid-1980s that, in retrospect, seems unfathomable.
Her mother’s funeral brings Mary Veal to her childhood home in West Salem, a Boston suburb. She’d been banned from her mother’s deathbed; what she now desperately seeks is a closure that forgiveness withheld makes virtually impossible. The unforgivable is tied to something that happened when Mary was 16. Fourteen years later, she remains an outcast in a family where warmth is in short supply.
The story alternates past and present. Chapters entitled “What Might Have Happened” are set in 1985 when Mary, then a junior at the exclusive Semmering Academy, went missing. She was last seen at a field hockey game, called on account of rain. She might have climbed into a car, driven by a man she didn’t know. She might have dropped her field hockey stick into a gutter, leaving it to be found by anyone with a passing curiosity about her disappearance.
Only two facts seem irrefutable: Mary Veal disappeared the afternoon of Nov. 7th and didn’t reappear until the afternoon of Dec. 31, “when she was discovered by a student sitting in front of one of the rain shelters that line the Semmering sports fields.”
The disappearance bears a striking resemblance to that of another Semmering student who, several years earlier, had faked her own abduction. Given his experience with this earlier case, and the alleged lessons he’d learned through his involvement, psychologist Dr. Beaton Hammer is asked to take Mary on as a patient. Hammer’s observations of the case are the source of the first-person narrative contained in chapters entitled “Notes.”
Reality is a slippery thing in Julavits’ haunting, and haunted, narrative. Mary’s high school disappearance is the elephant in the room, and her mother is not the only one unable to forgive: It seems at least one of her sisters blames Mary for indirectly causing their mother’s death. What is puzzling is how this young woman could have done something that would continue to cause such pain.
What is unsaid in the present is gradually revealed through the past. The three strands might reveal a young woman adept at bending reality and also some people unwittingly willing to help her do so. Or perhaps they reveal a young woman already so disenfranchised from her family that disappearing is the only logical response. Or maybe this is only a story of a deliberate Lolita pursuing a reluctant Humbert.
Questions of what might or might not be true are enhanced by vibrant, spot-on characters. Freudian screw-up Hammer is drawn in by Mary’s too-perfect resemblance – down to panicked coughing fits – to Freud’s Dora. But he is no more clueless than his counterbalance, feminist psychologist Roz Biedelman. In the end, there are a lot of egos at stake, but no one is helping Mary. It’s not so much that they aren’t capable, they just aren’t interested.
What Mary seeks now is peace born of forgiveness. What Julavits does, with deft grace, is use the tangle of past and present to show the reader how that might happen. But, as with so much of this novel, it might not.
Julavits’ ability to pull this ongoing picture of a shifting reality is more than a trick of light or craft. Mary’s story is told as a sideways look at life, but it forces to reader to face, straight on, just how subjective reality can be. And if, as Mary seems to believe, your reality is formed by the stories you tell yourself and others, it is just possible that she will eventually find a story for her life that will carry both forgiveness and truth.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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The Uses of Enchantment
By Heidi Julavits
Doubleday, 352 pages, $24.95
