The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is the latest novel by V. E. Schwab released at the end of 2020. The hype around this book is real: it’s heavily reviewed, highly rated on Goodreads, and it’s talked about endlessly on YouTube. While its writing is strong, showing Schwab’s ability to turn a phrase, and the premise is rich with potential, the intricacies and details of its plot unfortunately fall flat. The Invisible Life does more than just miss the mark a few times; it inadvertently erases parts of history that it should’ve acknowledged.
The premise of the novel is that Addie LaRue, an eighteenth century village girl in France, has had enough. She doesn’t want to follow the path her parents are forcing her into: marriage, children, and never leaving her village. Addie wants more out of life, and so she makes a deal with a god that answers after dark, and trades her soul for immortality. But there’s always a kicker, isn’t there? Addie’s is that no one will remember her. Leaving a room and re-entering is enough to wipe the memories of anyone inside, resulting in her being unable to form lasting relationships, hold down a residence, or gain employment. The book follows 300 years in Addie’s extraordinary life as she learns how to cope with her blessing and curse, until she meets a man in modern day New York that is able to remember her.
Let’s start with the positives for The Invisible Life, because admittedly there are lots. The writing is smooth and rich, and offers something to sink your teeth into. The descriptions meander into moody and angsty, which I actually love for this type of novel. Addie has lost everything she ever knew, and continues to lose people she cares about daily. Schwab does an excellent job of letting us know exactly how that feels, and she also carefully considers some key aspects about the curse. For example, Addie has learned that she can easily steal whatever she needs, and as long as she’s able to quickly exit the scene, she can get away with it. She’s also discovered that she can leave her mark in other interesting ways, like by becoming a muse for artists throughout European history. Addie has been featured in famous paintings, had a hand in producing some well-known compositions, and has met notable figures like Voltaire.
Where I take issue with The Invisible Life is its lack of depth. With almost 450 pages, you’d think that Schwab would be able to fully flesh out the characters, the motivations, and the nuances of history — but it ends up being too much to accomplish. Aspects left unexplored are the fact that Addie is bisexual (we only get a few pages ever acknowledging this, and otherwise she almost exclusively seeks the company of men), what is the god/demon that traded for Addie’s soul and why does he collect them (he becomes particularly relevant to the plot later in the book), and what happened outside of Europe this entire time?
This last point is one that was especially noticed by book reviewers. We’re expected to believe that in 300 years, Addie never left the continent of Europe? Never interacted with a person of colour before 2014? Okay. But what about the serious political revolutions happening in Europe, like the French revolution in her home country? Glossed over. Important aspects like French colonialism and the conquest of French Indochina are never acknowledged either. But okay, maybe Schwab wanted to write a more light-hearted book that doesn’t centre around politics. I’ll give her that, but I think the plotline suffers greatly from it and in that case she focused on the wrong premise. Readers expect that if you’re taking them through 300 years of history, important events will at least be acknowledged.
Additionally, I think the plotline was ripe for diving into the complexities of being a woman in the eighteenth century. As you might expect, perfoming manual labor in a pre-industrial village while having children without modern medicine would have, pardon my French, fucking sucked. Not only that, but many women would have shared Addie’s feelings of being erased, invisible, or unseen by society (cough cough, the Atlantic slave trade?) — not to mention the accomplishments of women that were repeatedly downplayed. Where are those women in The Invisible Life, and why do they feel like a missing but natural part of this premise?
From my description up till now of The Invisible Life, you might not have suspected it was a romance, and that’s because that main feature of the plotline is also “meh” in terms of development and depth. Neither of the characters in the romance seem fully-realized or grow as people despite their unusual and extreme circumstances. It’s not really described what draws these two people together either — other than Addie being remembered for once. A third character forms a love triangle near the end, but that is also described in snippets where it’s unclear what his intentions are. And in the end, Addie’s lover goes on to have a life without her, but we never really see any of that either. As Cindy, a popular YouTube book reviewer said about the narrative, “It feels like watching an artsy indie film with sentimental white hipsters and a splash of magic, albeit written elegantly.” Oops.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a novel with great writing that suffers from a lack of depth. Its plot of a woman being forgotten in exchange for her soul and immortality is genuinely interesting and has a lot of potential, but it falls flat with its lack of acknowledgement of global events and examination of women throughout history.
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.
