Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Spoilers!

If there are two qualities humans most want as we pass fleetingly through life it is to be seen and to be enough. V.E. Schwab captures such aching longing beautifully in her 2020 novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Addie makes a Faustian bargain with a devil who shrouds himself in darkness. She does this to avoid a forced marriage in her small French town in 1714, and to avoid dying in that very same small French town. Addie wants to experience the world, to live, and to leave her mark. Well, she gets two of the three through her Faustian bargain with the devil that becomes known as Luc (a sort ironic take on Lucifer). She will live forever, but be remembered by nobody.

To be remembered by nobody — she’s forgotten by people the moment she breaks eye contact with them (she can’t even verbally say or write her name because a name has power!), and by a similar token, she’s incapable of possessing anything permanently, including clothes and shelter — is the curse Addie carries with her on her first trip perilous trip to Paris from her small village (the most haunting scene in the book is Addie freezing to “death” on the streets and being loaded into a cart of corpses only to emerge still alive, of course) to Italy, Germany, and eventually New York City across three hundred years of war, revolution, technological advancement, and a tit-for-tat dance with Luc. Prior to the curse, Addie wanted the freedom as a woman to say “no” and it be heeded. Luc thinks he’s given her freedom. While she has the freedom, of a kind, to navigate the wonders of the world with invisibility, to never be remembered repulses that aforementioned aching feeling we have to be seen. Inadvertently on Luc’s part, though, he has given her the power to say “no” and it be heeded: she repeatedly will say “no” to his bid for her to surrender her soul to him.

Addie thinks herself invisible, rootless, and untethered, given the nature of the curse, but because she has a memory, she is still tethered to Villon-sur-Sarthe, her home in France, and to Estelle, the woman who seeded the rebellion of her mind. The scenes when Addie returns to Villon-sur-Sarthe to see her ailing mother, the change in her hometown, and even the death of a tree she long associated with her home, are heartbreaking. Everything changes and ends. Except her, at least as it pertains to the latter.

One day, in 2014 New York City, Addie meets Henry, who is the first person to utter those three words she’s longed to hear, “I remember you.” In Henry, Addie has found someone she can tether herself, too, someone who is more than a fleeting present; he is full of roots, with friends and family and a life, while she has long navigated the world with “only branches.”

It turns out, Henry made his own Faustian bargain with Luc quite literally on the precipice of his suicide. He wants to be enough — to his parents, to his more successful older brother, to lovers, like the woman who turned down his proposal, to his friends, to himself. So, Luc “makes him enough,” to where everyone Henry meets, projects onto him the perfect son, brother, friend, and lover. He’s “enough” for everyone he encounters, but it’s not real; it’s an illusion. Worse still, he only gets this illusion for a year before Luc will come to claim his soul.

I started thinking of Addie and Henry in a similar vein to Pink Floyd’s, “Wish You Were Here Song,” with one of my favorite lyrics, “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl.” I was prepared to write in my review about how, fundamentally, all humans are cursed (by way of our fallibility and messiness) and it is through love manifest by the chance encounter Addie and Henry experience, that can bring two cursed people together to flourish and feel seen, loved, and remembered in spite of such fallibility and messiness. Unfortunately, Luc ruined that, too! Because he plopped them both in the fish bowl (to continue the Floyd metaphor) as a way to continue his tit-for-tat game with Addie. He’s been trying various methods for years to get her to “surrender” her soul to him and give up. She stubbornly will not, at least until she meets Henry. Addie is willing to sacrifice their relationship and herself so that Henry can live. Luc accepts the new bargain, not realizing Addie’s own “devil in the details” inclusion in the bargain, where she hopes to wear him down however long it takes until Luc casts her aside.

And because he lives and is curse-free, Henry is able to write the story of Addie LaRue in, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Everyone else think it’s fiction, of course, but at least her story lives on, as her mark did through artwork and songs for centuries. Because thoughts and ideas are more wild than memory, Addie learns.

Schwab’s book is a tour-de-force through the power of history, art, and human connection and emotion, warts and all. I’d happily continue swimming around the fish bowl of Addie’s life, especially to see if she eventually wins against Luc, who I felt ultimately did “win.” All that which Addie enjoyed through her long life up to this point — art, music, film, books, and indeed, Henry — have echoes of the darkness, of the devil bargaining souls, of Luc. Maybe there is something to be said for art manifesting out of darkness, whatever we analogize that darkness to, like the toils of being human, depression, addiction, or a soul ensnared for the keeping by a devil.