The Witch’s Magic Is Feeble, but Her Story Casts a Spell

THE WITCH, by Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump

There is nothing obviously magical about the life of Lucie, the beleaguered narrator of “The Witch,” Marie NDiaye’s latest novel to be translated into English. Moored in a dreary subdivision in a provincial French town, with a spiteful husband and a pair of self-absorbed adolescent daughters — “avid little animals” in Lucie’s fond description — she is unemployed and her single social contact is the neighborhood frenemy, Isabelle, who pops in unannounced, dragging her terrorized 5-year-old son, on whom she showers insults along with the occasional smack.

“No offense, Mama, but really, it’s all just so lame,” Maud, one of Lucie’s daughters, observes. As a verdict on her mother’s joyless existence, this is hard to beat, but Maud has something more specific in mind: Lucie’s supposed supernatural abilities. For Lucie is indeed a witch, though a middling one, her “gift” an inheritance passed down through her maternal line.

The gift has lately gone mostly underground, a casualty of disapproving men, like Lucie’s father and her husband, who can’t tolerate the idea of such extraordinary female power. Lucie’s attempts to instruct her own daughters in her art, over months of secret lessons in the family basement, leave Maud and her sister bored and unimpressed.

With effort, her cheeks stained with bloody tears, Lucie can see into the future and the past, and even locate people in the present. But her aim is off and her results murky, as if there is static on the telepathic line. What comes into view is merely trivia: “the color of an outfit, the look of the sky, a steaming coffee cup in the hand of the person fixed by my clairvoyant gaze.” As Maud herself might put it today, What good is magic, if all it picks up are vibes?

In fact, “The Witch” was originally published in France 30 years ago, when NDiaye was still in her 20s. Discovered at 17 by Jérôme Lindon, founder of the storied French publisher Éditions de Minuit, who met her at the gate of her high school with the contract for her first novel, she quickly rose to national prominence as an original and prolific talent and is belatedly acquiring a devoted following in English.

“The Witch,” artfully rendered by her longtime translator, Jordan Stump, is on the long list for this year’s International Booker Prize. Like much of her fiction, including her Prix Goncourt-winning masterpiece, “Three Strong Women,” it bears few time stamps tying it to the moment of its creation. NDiaye’s terrain is psychological; her preferred form a singular mash-up of horror, fairy tale and fable; her deliberately unsettling method to unloose more mysteries than she resolves.

In these respects, “The Witch” is classic NDiaye. Taut, spellbinding and strange, it unfolds with the disturbed logic of a fever dream, showcasing its author’s recurring preoccupations: the helpless intensity of maternal love, the suffocating encumbrances of family life, the distorting effects of emotional turmoil on the body and, perhaps most acutely, the reservoirs of tenderness and cruelty, compassion and selfishness, that bind us to other people.

Here, as in other NDiaye novels, the family is a source of love and protection but also of brutality and betrayal. In one early scene laden with portent, a stranger Lucie’s husband brings to dinner disappears over a hedge in their backyard rather than return home to his wife and son, whose intimate bond he furiously resents. Then Lucie’s husband disappears as well — with all of Lucie’s savings, a present from her father.

The devastations pile up: Lucie’s father wants his money back; her mother is living with a physically repellent new man; her husband seems to have acquired a brand-new wife and kids. Even the remorseless Isabelle manages to shed both husband and son, reinventing herself as a businesswoman and ensnaring Lucie in her new venture, a hocus-pocus perversion of actual magic — a scam.

NDiaye, a specialist in characters in extremis, chronicles Lucie’s mounting panic with exacting precision, her sentences charting a welter of feeling. Lucie’s sorcery may be feeble, but her true power, the author suggests, lies elsewhere. As the plot of “The Witch” unspools along ever more surreal tangents, its story lines intersecting and diverging, Lucie’s emotional courage remains a constant. This, it turns out, is her real gift to her children: a love strong enough to help them escape a life like hers.

With elation and dismay, she watches as her daughters’ witchy talents quickly surpass her own. Turning into birds, they take flight — a skill that all but guarantees that they, too, will leave her.

Gazing out a train window early in the book, Lucie spies the siblings aloft: “In a joyful swoop, they came back to touch their wings to the glass, and I smiled at them in relief. They stared at me with their cold scheming eyes — who was I to these crows?”

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