The Effect of Living Backwards, Heidi Julavits's second novel, is a mess--but a good mess, an ambitious mess. The title is taken from Through the Looking-Glass, and Julavits's narrator--named Alice--certainly wanders into a perplexing wonderland. She and her sister Edith are flying to Morocco, where Edith is to be married. The plane is hijacked by a charismatic, chubby blind man named Bruno. After a time, the hijacking appears to be an extended moral case study: Bruno forces his hostages to consider whether they would give their own life to save another. The hijacking, it turns out, may or may not be real; Bruno may or may not be blind; Alice may or may not be falling in love with Pitcairn, the hostage negotiator who's supposed to save them all. As she unspools her black comedy, Julavits displays a wildly discursive style; the book can seem overwritten. But as her plot gains momentum, so too does Julavits's writing, and her tortuous sentences begin to make sense: they reflect the awkward situation of the heroine. After a supper of candy and punch, Alice tells us she and her fellow hostages "suffered extreme intestinal discomfort, which made the lavatories more unspeakably filth-ridden, and tempers, whose foulness is always proportional to the decrepitude of a WC, began to fester." On one level, this is an unhappy sentence; on another, its very contortions are funny. So it is with The Effect of Living Backwards, which, in its patience-trying elegance, recalls the underrated novelist Nancy Lemann. This is a brave novel, aggressively intelligent and aggressively silly all at once. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
When contentious half-sisters Alice and Edith board a jetliner en route to Morocco, where Edith is to be married, they step unknowingly into a vortex of international intrigue when the jet is hijacked-or is it? As events unfold, the motives for this act of "terrorism," apparently a high-stakes stunt being pulled by one of two factions from the International Institute for Terrorist Studies, become ever more murky. In the futuristic and fantastical world of Julavits's second novel (after The Mineral Palace), which takes its title and epigram from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the political and familial machinations we recognize from our own contemporary lives scramble into a kaleidoscopic puzzle. Julavits's rambling surrealism is overlaid and intensified by a strong dose of paranoia … la Pynchon, and the political and the familial merge in the form of a game from Alice and Edith's childhood called "shame stories," in which others are convinced to tell their darkest secrets. These tales, told by the sisters' fellow travelers, are fascinating excursions, a blend of the bizarre and the everyday. But as Alice's wastrel father tells her, "People don't want to be surprised. They want to hear the same story. Tell them the same story and they'll listen," and Julavits follows this advice herself. Beneath its absurdist trappings, her larger tale is surprisingly conventional, its real focus the sibling rivalry between Edith and Alice, shadowed by the terrorism subplots and the veiled references to September 11, or the "Big Terrible." Neither the novel's imaginative framework nor Julavits's cool, unerring eye for detail can quite compensate for its curiously mechanical emotional trajectory.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Unconditional sisterly love gets a twisted boost of adrenaline in Julavits' novel. Two sisters go on a wild ride aboard Moroccan Air Flight 919, which results in a hijacking by a blind terrorist and his bungling crew of cohorts. Edith and Alice have traveled the world over with their eccentric parents and are far from a pair of innocents. In fact, perverted games of psychological warfare are an essential part of their naughty sisterly bond. They revel in what they call the "Shame Stories," and Julavits sends the mind reeling with these morally deficient excerpts of human debasement and vulnerability. The novel is such a potent melange of physical terrorism and sublime sardonic manipulation that its intricate layers become an all-consuming vehicle for pondering the human condition. Julavits' writing style is a sophisticated balance of suspense, humor, and intellectually stimulating prose, which produces a novel unfit for the easygoing reader because of its intense and profoundly dark undertones. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Alice and Edith are sisters, best friends, and archenemies. Alice, the "good girl," is everything the stunning, wanton, and morally whimsical Edith is not. Both have an unhealthy attraction to shame and disgrace, and both are expert manipulators - a power that is tested and exploited when the plane they are traveling on is commandeered by a blind terrorist in what may or may not be a hijacking." There's something decidedly strange about Bruno, the terrorist - not to mention his inept collaborators and his perverse methods. When Alice is chosen to communicate with the hostage negotiator, Edith decides to align herself with Bruno. Alice is inexplicably drawn to the hostage negotiator, even as it becomes harder and harder to distinguish allies from enemies in what begins to feel like an elliptical airborne game show. Trapped on the plane with a pill-popping pregnant heiress, archaeologists on their way to a reunion, a wealthy, womanizing Indian man, and a dog named Verne, Alice learns a few valuable lessons about sibling rivalry, about love and about discovering who she is - even while pretending to be someone else.

FROM THE CRITICS

Elle

...darkly humorous, acutely edgy tale of emotional psychological survival...

New York Times Book Review

...savage and funny...Julavits has transformed our paranoia into a grab bag of impieties, skepticism and levity.

The New York Times

Julavits's first novel, The Mineral Palace, was an atmospheric horror show set in the Depression-era American West. The Effect of Living Backwards is far livelier and less portentous. Alice's self-loathing and her complex relationship with Edith provide the emotional core of a story that is savage and funny. The book is improbable, sure, but so wildly inventive that you hardly care. — Taylor Antrim

The Los Angeles Times

The Effect of Living Backwards shows off a young novelist with talent to burn and a desire to push beyond the smug posturing of many of her literary peers. — Stephen Metcalf

The Washington Post

Heidi Julavits takes the title of her second novel from a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. "The effect of living backwards," the Queen tells Alice in that book, is that "it always make one a little giddy at first." For Julavits, whose first novel, The Mineral Palace, was published in 2000, the events of Sept. 11 seemed to create a kind of looking glass -- a tragedy so hard to comprehend that afterward we approached the world with a sort of giddy, guilty trepidation. — Alex AbramovichRead all 9 "From The Critics" >

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