Kate Zambreno

What would happen if Alice were playing croquet with the Queen, and really thought that the "off with her heads" threat was more than just a bluff? Or she thought it was a game, but didn't really know for sure?

A similar game of moral croquet unfolds for the characters in Heidi Julavits' deliciously perverse lookingglass story "The Effect of Living Backwards." Alice and Edith are best friends and sworn enemies, both masters of manipulations who collected others' shameful secrets as a childhood pastime (a sometimes provocative, sometimes distracting storytelling device Julavits employs after each chapter). Edith, the dry, droll, supposedly dumpy narrator, has always hid in the shadow of her scene-stealing sister, until their plane en route to Morocco gets hijacked by a bewildering group that resembles a tea party more than terrorists.

As the sisters struggle to defeat the equal yet somehow inept manipulators, like the blind leader Bruno, it's hard to distinguish what's real and what's not in this somewhat tense game of air-borne truth or dare, in which the passengers are pitted against each other. Besides the sister's name, also, notably, Julavits' title comes from a passage in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," in which the Queen argues with Alice about jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam to-day. It makes you giddy at first, living backwards, she says. As it does for Edith, who tells the story of the terrorist takeover while at the International Institute for Terrorist Studies, formed after the "Big One" (a futuristic nod to how fear will become part of society's framework after 9/11).

At this institute, truth is revealed as nothing more than postmodern construct through a series of hilarious role-plays in which Edith discovers the fluidity of her own identity in an epiphany that somehow parallels the end of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club." Is she Edith, the opposite of Alice? Or does she have some Alice inside her? Although the hijacking scenes are tautly structured, making for suspenseful moments worthy of a paperback thriller, most seductive is Julavits' portrayal of the bond between the sisters, loyal yet betraying each other at every turn, loving and hating on equally feverish pitches, able to destroy with a carefully chosen word.

The Effect of Living Backwards

By Heidi Julavits

G.P. Putnam's Sons, $23.95, 325 pages.

(2003-07-09)

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