Witchcraft was traditionally a form of occult knowledge: esoteric, hidden, available only to initiates. Now, though, with the widespread circulation of magic manuals, grimoires, and related compendia—with the recording, on paper, of words, spells, histories, stories—witchcraft has taken an irreversible step into the exoteric realm. The chain through which it once passed, from trusted person to trusted person, has been broken. Where the propagation of the mystery once required the presence and the consent of two people, the initiator and the initiate, we now have the reader, alone with the words on a page.
“The Witch” (Vintage), the new novel by Marie NDiaye, one of Europe’s most celebrated writers, is narrated by a woman, Lucie, who has decided to initiate her twelve-year-old twin daughters into what she calls “the mysterious powers.” These powers, as she describes them, appear both burdensome and nearly useless: contextless glimpses of the past and the future, minor divinatory visions accompanied by copious tears of blood. Although the girls view their heritage with disdain (“No offense, Mama, but it’s really all just so lame”), they acquiesce to long sessions of secret study in the basement, “away from their father’s eye.” The learning process involves no textbooks, no exercises, no memorization, no facts. Indeed, barely any words are exchanged. As Lucie puts it, “Their task was to observe me and, with all their being, with the whole of those little bodies born of mine, to internalize the arduous process of divination.” Eleven months later, the transfer of knowledge is complete, and the girls emerge from the basement, equipped with their new powers, just as their family falls apart.
One of NDiaye’s great strengths is her ability to establish an initial set of circumstances with such authority that the reader is almost powerless to question them. The terms of the story are fixed from the outset, and everything that follows must unfold within the ironclad limits they impose. In “My Heart Hemmed In” (2017), for instance, an entire community is gripped by a virulent hatred of two married teachers, Nadia and Ange. In “Vengeance Is Mine” (2023), the husband of the suspect in a high-profile murder enters a female lawyer’s office and asks her to take the case; she is certain they have met before, though he appears to have no memory of it. NDiaye’s commitment to these situations is unwavering. She wrings suspense from her characters’ efforts to navigate the bizarre circumstances in which she has placed them, while making no concession to the rules of our world in explaining how those situations arose. Opening an NDiaye novel is a little like coming to in the middle of a party after a blackout: the setting may be unfamiliar, but the action is under way, and all you can do is join in.
So, while the dutiful reader is still turning over basic questions about the nature of witchcraft, the girls are already hurtling up the stairs and out of the basement, and Lucie is crossing paths with Isabelle, a hostile neighbor. Isabelle’s sway over the other women in the neighborhood and her shocking cruelty to her young son, Steve, aren’t really explained; they’re simply facts to be accepted. A lesser writer might have spent a hundred pages laboriously establishing these conditions and gingerly coaxing us to believe them. NDiaye takes twenty. As the novel unfolds, Lucie’s powers, such as they are, prove useless against the unravelling of her life. Her husband leaves, her daughters slip beyond her reach, and she grows preoccupied with a forlorn, childlike fantasy of repairing her parents’ long-broken marriage.
If the story sounds bleak, it isn’t. For all the praise NDiaye has received, I’ve seen little mention, at least in English, of how funny she is. There are many pages in my copy of “The Witch” on which I’ve scrawled a cackling “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” The critic Nathan Scott McNamara, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, has aptly compared NDiaye’s writing to that of Shirley Jackson, and NDiaye herself cites Joyce Carol Oates as a strong influence. Her work plainly belongs to this lineage of witchy writers, women whose deliciously corrupted scenes of home and hearth produce fear and wild laughter at once. Take NDiaye’s treatment of Steve. In a move reminiscent of “My Heart Hemmed In,” all the women in “The Witch” have developed an intense aversion to poor Steve: his mother calls him a “little clot,” a “little slob,” a “little pest,” a “little crumb”; the girls say he’s “pathetic . . . just one big fail”; and Lucie chides them for their cruelty while herself referring to him as “snot-nosed little Steve.” (Jordan Stump’s English translation catches the bruising force of NDiaye’s French with verve.) The fact that all these bizarre attacks are directed at an innocent little boy who at one point wears a shirt that says “I LOVE MY MOM” is both so absurd and so awful that the reader has little choice but to laugh. The characters, though, never find the situation funny.
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