Volume 53, Number 18 · November 16, 2006
The Girl in the Woods
By Sarah Kerr
The Uses of Enchantment
by Heidi Julavits
Doubleday, 356 pp., $24.95
In March 2003, the young American novelist Heidi Julavits wrote a long, wandering essay for the first issue of The Believer, the new literary magazine of which she was a founding editor (with backing from Dave Eggers, the memoirist, novelist, admirable philanthropist, and canny literary entrepreneur behind the McSweeney's imprint). Picturing herself working at home, pajama-clad, sipping a beer, and finding the courage to forgo safe politeness and speak the truth, Julavits described the shrinking of a creativity-sustaining literary culture. She declared that readers and writers were poorly served by a growing tendency among book reviewers to skip past substantive engagement and indulge in lazy inflationary praise, or else its opposite: a 'hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.' Julavits's name for this smug tone, 'snark,' resonated enough with the reader's experience to suggest that she was on to something and maybe even gutsy for saying it. On the other hand, where a detached editor might have urged her to tighten her analysis—prune this unfairness, anchor that blitheness—she tended to take the less mediated path. In places her argument sounded less like an argument than a theater piece in the voice of a rather high-strung character named Heidi Julavits.
Review, 3023 words
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