The novel’s humor depends on a neat division between the indulgent academic and the exploited assistant. Yet the real university – hollowed out by funding cuts, understaffed, and reliant on contingent labor – rarely affords anyone the luxury of the time it’d take to monologue anymore.
Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors is a campus novel set in a world where the campus is slowly ceasing to matter. Williams’ anonymous City overrun by foliage, maintained only by the labouring Gardeners, and presided over by a University desperate to remain relevant and solvent through rigid adherence to identity politics and the recruitment of international students feels uncannily suited to higher education’s present moment. Despite the monster vegetation, the world of The Vivisectors is our world: one in which the institution persists long after its social purpose has thinned, clinging to procedural debates and moral adjudications while the material conditions around it deteriorate. Within this setting, Williams stages a series of conflicts that both parody and reflect the tedium of the contemporary academy: Agathe, a young woman hired to perform the entirety of an academic’s labour; Adam and Jacob, a student and lecturer locked in an unresolved dispute over racism and antisemitism; and a University that responds to crisis not with action but with seemingly endless rounds of discourse. The novel seems to suggest that devotion to identity politics is both a cause and a symptom of the university’s collapse and what Williams offers is not a roadmap for what comes after academic collapse but a vivid and cynical portrait of an institution stuck in an endless loop, rehearsing the same arguments as the city around it disappears under foliage.
The Vivisectors (2026) – published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux – is Williams’ second novel and follows The Doloriad (2022), a similarly post-apocalyptic tale of a mutated family ruled by a tyrannical matriarch, which won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and was shortlisted for the First Novelist Award. Despite The Doloriad’s dystopian and speculative leanings, and Williams’ respect for science fiction and fantasy world-building, she claims that she “knew from the beginning that [she] wanted no part of it,” crafting her apocalypses to be more concerned with “how it feels” to be living in end times rather than their exact shape. In a similar vein, The Vivisectors is a caustic and compelling bitter satire that captures how impossible it feels to try to exist and work meaningfully in this era of sector-wide financial uncertainty, endless churn of bureaucratic processes, and stale identity politics discourse.
Set within a city engulfed by plant growth Williams’ University relies on the work of the fractious Gardeners, whose practical work and worldview are in complete opposition to its abstract debates, to preserve it. The University is embedded in the City and yet sits apart, hunkered down in its enclaves reveling in abstract arguments about the nature of praxis and respectability and only reaching outwards to recruit enough international students to sustain itself—like a vampire enticing juicy young maidens to its castle to drain. The Gardeners are the ones toiling through vegetation, hacking it down to clear roads, keep the city running, and excavating walkways within the University despite the contempt it shows them. Our narrator Agathe notes that “as far as the university was concerned” nature “should be left to its own devices,” employing the Gardeners for their own aims while “elsewhere they thwarted them wherever they could with civil injunctions and Environmental Protection acts.” The university values labor only as far as it can prop up its own aims and beyond this the material world should be ignored, which is reframed as nobly “left to its own devices.” Agathe sees this all too clearly, stating that the university insisted “what was material was secondary, distracting” and “the world that mattered” was “the world of thought.” It is a somewhat heavy-handed and extreme rendition of the usual acrimonious town-gown dynamic and the kind of institutional solipsism in which interest in the material world is only ever piqued when it is in pursuit of funding, represented here by the international students on which the University “increasingly relie[s]” and increasingly alienates.
Williams presents a brutally realistic rendition of a university system reliant on inflated international student fees, one that feels particularly apt for the current crisis in UK higher education. Agathe notes, “the only new money flowing into the city came from the international students who needed accommodation and meals, and only our parents with their properties could provide these.” In turn, these students feel duped by a University that promises rich “conversations about art and aesthetics, philosophy and music” but delivers “courses in which we are always denied places […] libraries that are closed to us.” These students criticize the “introductory lectures with student teachers in damp halls that could have been built by migrant labourers from our own countries for the sole purpose of keeping us separate from the real life of the city” and their increasingly obvious role as cash cows for a university desperate to stay relevant but refusing to change the fundamental ways it is run. Agathe is an alumnus of the University and once held dreams of working there, but must settle for being the ghost that performs all her boss’s work for none of the acclaim. “What choice did we have?” she laments, “there were no other jobs and there was no prospect of them either. The university was full – the rare entry level opening received hundreds of applications.” No more needs to be said for anyone who has recently been on the academic job market.
It’s easy to read the City and University smothered in foliage as a straightforward metaphor for late-capitalist institutional decay: the University strangled even as it shambles on. But the growing feud between the University and the Gardeners – and the subsequent conflict with international students after the accusations of racism and antisemitism – reveals a deeper symbolic clash between discourse and labor, between abstraction and materiality. This tension comes into sharp focus in the Adam–Jacob conflict, where the University’s inability to act beyond its own narrow discursive boundaries becomes fully legible.
The narrative’s central driving force is arguably the dispute between Adam and Jacob: a sharp exchange of racially charged words in the classroom which the reader is never given full access to. Despite the dispute’s ambiguous genesis, it incites Agathe’s boss’s tirades on cancel culture (which earned the novel its accusations of ‘trolling’ in The New Yorker) and Agathe’s re-entry into the University to keep tabs on Adam. The reader learns little about the actual content of the conflict between student and lecturer and anything we can glean about its political stakes can only be interpreted from vague assertions made by Agathe’s boss. But we can read this narrative reticence as Williams’s attempt to make a broader comment on the abstractions of cancel culture; that conflicts can tear apart institutions and reputations even when most people only know snatches of the truth. Indeed, the dispute’s abstraction serves to further emphasize identity politics as a key part of the university’s decline as endless time and energy is poured into an argument few even understand. Agathe’s boss’s monologues on the topic are characterized by their looping, caveated, self-correcting style which even direct questions cannot penetrate. She obfuscates with tirades on the nature of young people who, like the vivisectors of the novel’s title, analyze situations until they “had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape [their] scalpels.” Agathe can only learn that “in the process of strongly disagreeing with [Adam] Jacob had laughed at him. And then Adam had come back with something that Jacob had considered outrageous, and Jacob had told him to stop peddling conspiracy theories,” a poor choice of phrasing which escalates the whole conflict to institutional proportions.
Agathe’s boss tries, at least superficially, to inhabit multiple perspectives and resist the vivisecting she so abhors, yet every attempt at nuance collapses back into her own interpretive authority. Her claim that young people “constantly assumed bad faith” and dissect every utterance falls back into the very hermeneutics of suspicion that she attributes to others. Her account of the dispute is similarly circular: Jacob’s use of “conspiracy” was, she insists, “obfuscation of the worst possible kind,” but she also suggests he “hadn’t realised the full implications” of what he said. Crucially, the boss is not neutral: she is firmly on Adam’s side, and her attempts at balance are purely rhetorical. When she explains that in Adam’s community – a community they share – the word conspiracy carries “an entirely different resonance” because it echoes “a thousand years of their history” as a persecuted people whose suffering was dismissed as exaggeration, she appears to be offering a historically sensitive reading. Adam’s anger, she continues, was shaped by “the long and complicated history” the word invoked, yet she immediately reframes the issue through her own narrative of historical grievance, whispering that Jacob’s people “had been our vassals” and only recently achieved “something like equality.” She asserts herself as the arbiter of historical meaning by assuming she understands Jacob’s perspective through his identity, rather than actually speaking to him.
Williams frequently returns to these claustrophobic and dizzying enactments of the processes of identity politics as the conflict drags on without resolution. That she does so through a character that purports to abhor such politics just further reinforces the sense that the discursive norms of the university please nobody and go nowhere. There’s a terminal stasis to the whole conflict as its actors circle the drain of resolution yet eschew it in favour of endless intellectual and moral posturing, with students suffering the consequences. Agathe’s boss appears to believe that the conflict can scrape up some relevancy for the University, stating:
“If we were lucky, there would be a scandal; If we were lucky, that scandal would drag on and on; If we were lucky, the newspapers would find out about it and publish articles about it, and then strangers could analyse it and find within it a universality that might help them understand their own lives and oppressions.”
And yet, Williams’s powerful skewering of the entire culture industry seems to elide that a lot of what appears in the press about university disputes is viciously critical of universities and actively questions their very utility. What any scandal might provide in exposure and brief relevance would be snatched away in reactionary think pieces and calls for more funding cuts. Perhaps this is meant to show how out of touch with reality Agathe’s boss is, experiencing the world “so wholeheartedly through the lens of herself that there was no time left in which to scry out the material facts of other people’s lives, only their thoughts and feelings when they collided against hers.” However, when paired with the novel’s broader flattening of the nuances of precarious academic labour – as all university workers besides Agathe appear tenured and secure – this begins to feel like a willful simplification in the service of satire, or worse, an act of creating a convenient caricature to be outraged by no matter how much it differs from the world in which academia actually exists today. This is precisely where the accusations of “trollishness” take hold, as Williams seems to be both indulging in a glib critique of identity politics and ‘cancel culture’ and constructing a brutally ungenerous caricature of an academic. Despite incisive commentary on the damage identity politics may have dealt to academic institutions, William’s attempt to troll from two directions at once means that she slightly misses the mark on both, neglecting both why these cultural reckonings mattered and just how labor actually functions in the contemporary university.
Yet these accusations of trolling also overlook the novel’s own early instructions on how to read it: “to mix up the author and their narrator was the most cardinal of literary errors,” a reminder that much of the novel’s ‘cancel culture’ commentary is filtered through Agathe’s boss, whose ranting monologues are themselves at a remove from Williams’ voice and intentions as a satirist. We can’t know for certain where Williams ends and Agathe begins: the fun, and the anxiety, that the novel produces exist in that uncertainty.
Crucially, the seemingly endless discourse indulged in by Agathe’s boss is only possible because Agathe performs all the labour that would otherwise occupy her time. She can indulge in “endless, raving monologues” because Agathe writes the lectures, marks the work, and replies to the emails that keeps the academic machinery running. It’s a droll enaction of the popular belief that academics don’t really do anything but sit around pontificating on the latest bout of discourse, occasionally write some of it down, and offer absolutely nothing to the world that surrounds them. Agathe therefore exists in a form of precarious employment, spending “every single evening during term time, which in recent years has begun to take place in all seasons, as these days the university never missed a chance to make money” at her boss’s house. In her completion of all the material work it takes to maintain an academic position, Agathe ends up having more in common with the Gardeners than the academic whose intellectual life she props up. Agathe exists as a semi-insider to the university and is allowed within its hallowed halls because of an arrangement with her boss who grants Agathe access to keep tabs on Adam – embodying the double function many academic workers exist as researchers squeezing their work between institutional hierarchies and bureaucratic tasks. From this position she can access the vast repositories of knowledge while on the clock but cannot make use of them because of her instructions to watch Adam. Williams brilliantly captures the bind of much contemporary academic employment, in which one cannot engage in the work you might wish to pursue because you are endlessly engaged in justifying your access to the university, frequently in identity politics’ reductive terms, and trading access to the academy for something like dignity.
The novel’s humor depends on a neat division between the indulgent academic and the exploited assistant. Yet the real university – hollowed out by funding cuts, understaffed, and reliant on contingent labor – rarely affords anyone the luxury of the time it’d take to monologue anymore. In contemporary academia, figures like Agathe’s boss are also precariously employed, overworked, and subject to the same effects of casualization as Agathe. This interruption of the university’s lived reality undercuts the satirical shades of realism that animates the rest of the novel’s portrayal of the university – a realism that feels uncomfortably accurate despite the post-apocalyptic setting – and exposes a fissure between Williams’ institutional critique and the actual conditions of academic labor, inevitably casting doubt on the novel’s other provocations.
This strange relationship to reality is where William’s preoccupation with the behaviour that follows disaster is evident, as the novel neither chronicles the fall of higher education in marketisation’s Armageddon nor the ecological apocalypse the University exists within. For Williams’ ‘post-apocalyptic’ is not a genre but a mode of writing which expropriates institutions’ former justificatory narratives, leaving only the habits, rituals, and discursive reflexes that persist without their context. The Kafkaesque churn of academic labor – ‘publish or perish’ mantras, REF cycles, grant-writing marathons, the exclusionary monopolies of academic publishing – forms the novel’s backdrop, and Williams’ post-apocalyptic mode reframes this familiar exhaustion as something catastrophic. Marketisation, the collapse of public funding, the rise of managerialism, the casualization of teaching labor, the conversion of scholarship into metrics and outputs, are here treated as apocalyptic events. Just as ecological systems in the City have collapsed under unmanageable conditions, academia has collapsed under its own unmanageable pressures. Within this collapse, anything that distracts from the grinding reality of institutional ruin becomes enticing, and The Vivisectors makes clear that this is precisely why identity politics and scandal exert such a destructive pull on the University. As Agathe observes, “the drama in the department was a chance to escape the endless drudgery of pointless work, the ceaseless production of papers and monographs that nobody would bother to read. For some time, the morale of the university had depended on the relief provided by its internal schisms.” The University becomes a ruin animated only by talk, a place where scandal is a reprieve and flicker of excitement in a landscape otherwise defined by exhaustion and squabbling indignities.
The old style of scholarly life still survives in fragments: Agathe’s uncle and his circle meeting at her parents’ house to discuss literature and philosophy; Agathe’s memories of her grandfather teaching in the manner of an old-style professor, arguing, fiercely, over the minutiae of sentences but committed wholly to making someone better at what they do. These scenes gesture toward a form of academic life that has ended. In contrast, the University that remains is a hollowed-out institution no longer concerned with student learning. Williams stages what is effectively a double apocalypse, one for the City and another for the University, and the novel’s most striking achievement is how it binds these two collapses together. If an apocalypse gave the city proliferating vegetation, another gave the University proliferating talk which has exiled intellectual rigor from the seminar into the living room.
Williams’ debut novel The Doloriad, opens with the titular Dolores being pushed in a wheelbarrow to the edge of a forest by her uncle as part of the twisted Matriarch’s plan to sacrifice her to another survivor group. The wheelbarrow becomes a symbol of survival stripped of dignity: Dolores cannot walk, cannot escape, and cannot meaningfully consent to what is happening to her; she can only be hauled like debris and submit to the indignities the family forces upon her. The end of The Vivisectors stages the triumphant return of the wheelbarrow, as Agathe wheels her disabled mother out into an ornamental pond in a disturbing vision of apparent mercy – first dragging the wheelbarrow from beneath a heap of junk, then wrestling her mother’s limp body into it, limbs falling out, skirts sodden, before tipping her into the water to die and leaving the wheelbarrow “glinting in the sun like an ancient bronze tripod.” Both Agathe’s mother and the University itself are incapacitated and enduring undignified existences dragged along long past what Agathe sees as meaningful life. The question the novel poses is brutal: what could be more undignified than academia at this point? What could be more damning than toiling for an institution so eroded that it must be dragged through the tall grass of the City like a body awaiting disposal?
The novel holds up a mirror to the academy, but it is a fun house mirror that distorts, revealing a grotesque and sobering image of what stands before it. What Williams provides, then, is less a prophecy of a collapse than a record of the indignities that define academic life in the present, a portrait of a university already living in its own aftermath.
Natalie Wall is a writer and academic based in Liverpool whose research explores contemporary fiction, trauma culture, online reading communities, and the impact of algorithms and AI on books and reading. Her work can be found in Irish Studies Review, Feminist Media Studies, The Guardian, The Independent, Dazed, VICE, and more, and when she is not writing she can be found knee deep in an Wikipedia hole.
Article photo: Richard Deakin, Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and Descriptions of Four Hundred and Twenty Plants Growing Spontaneously upon the Ruins of the Colosseum of Rome (1855) via Public Domain Review