“Bewildered girl in her mid-20s moves to the big city. “I’m living the dream,” Julia deadpans to an inquiry regarding her copious ingestion of prescription medications. In a jealous rage, Madame Ackermann - who eerily resembles Julia’s dead mother - inflicts a near-lethal psychic attack on her hapless stenographer, who then retreats into a pill-popping, zombielike existence in New York City. Madame Ackermann grows suspicious of these increasingly elaborate deceptions but soon discovers discrepancies in one of Julia’s tall tales that reveal her student’s emerging psychic talents. In part to spare her teacher the embarrassment of coming up empty, Julia begins to fabricate Madame Ackermann’s memories, telling her that “she’d spoken in the voice of an Argentinian-born psychotherapist living in London during the Falklands war, a woman who’d engaged in amatory adventures with her cabinet patients in order to acquire strategic military information for her brother, a commander of the Argentine Navy.” And so on. Except that the Queen of Divination’s trance states are a huge, yawning bore. Julia is chosen to be her idol’s stenographer, a job that entails transcribing the “regressions” for which Madame Ackermann has become famous in the occult world.

The novel’s narrator is Julia Severn, a talented young student at a renowned institute for psychics in New Hampshire, where she is acolyte to the narcissistic Madame Ackermann.

A Barcelona chair becomes a fully eroticized object - “the angle of recline, the shortened legs, the offered-to-the-sky cant of the seat, it was engineered perfectly for someone to give, for someone to receive” - while a pair of plastic surgery patients, “given their gigantic white head-bandages and the underwater slowness with which they moved,” resemble “very relaxed astronauts.” Nearly every page contains a showstopping description or insight. The author of three previous novels (“The Mineral Palace,” “The Effect of Living Backwards” and “The Uses of Enchantment”) and a founding editor of the literary magazine The Believer, Julavits is at her acrobatically linguistic best here. It is told in Julavits’s signature style: sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious. Beneath this hyperactivity, the novel deals, fundamentally, with the “economics of revenge” and a daughter’s search for her mother. The darkly comic world of Heidi Julavits’s latest novel contains warring psychics, missing people who’ve deliberately vanished themselves, twisted avant-garde filmmakers, absent mothers, striving academics, plastic surgery enthusiasts, Sylvia Plath obsessives - and the people who love to hate and pursue all of them.

The Mineral Palace by Heidi Julavits