My plan was to sit down with one glass of Grüner Veltliner and merely start reading The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits' latest novel. What happened, of course, was that "one" became "a few." I was transfixed from page one and needed do what it took to stay where I was, as the five-minute walk home would have been five minutes I wasn't reading further -- an unacceptable prospect.

Though "Julavits" has been a password in literary circles for years (who hasn't recommended The Uses of Enchantment to me?), this was my first time reading her. Ostensibly the story of Julia Severn, a student at a workshop for psychic development who suffers a psychic attack at the hand of her jealous mentor, the hook was enough to get me to hungrily open this book. But it was everything else I found that kept me devouring it.

The Vanishers is a supernatural thriller for adults. It jettisons the standard "gee-whiz, isn't [interchangeable paranormal force] fascinating?" minutiae and takes the existence of astral phenomena for granted. Effectively, this widens the novel's canvas while sidestepping restrictive childlike wonder. Unfettered, a bracing investigation into loss, emotional inheritance, and identity masterfully unfurls.

Partially as a way to attempt recovery from the psychic attack that has left her sickly, partially in the name of tracking a controversial feminist artist who has gone missing (and may have had ties to Julia's mother, who committed suicide when her daughter was only a month old), Julia falls in with an eccentric pair that trades in "vanishing." To vanish, we’re told, is to "reambiguate" oneself -- "leave and never go home." Imagine a witness protection program for the emotionally disenfranchised. To execute her charge, Julia vanishes as well, but her past and its dangerous questions are never far behind.

Teeming with striking philosophy about personal history ("The past is not the past if it is always present. Memory is an act of murder."), The Vanishers asks big (compelling!) questions about what we inherit from our forbearers and the value of a backward focus. As a novelist, Julavits is distinctly original, but I feel I gleaned a sense of her own inheritances while reading this novel. At times, wills-o-the-wisp illuminating shades of Woolf, Mann, and Brookner flashed, and Sylvia Plath's suicide is more explicitly used as a cryptic parable. But none of this renders The Vanishers derivative.

The discoveries that Julia makes about the past and how it truly relates to her present and her future are some of the most exciting surprises in the book, so I will leave them for others to find on their own. It's heartening while reading The Vanishers, though, to know that this heroine is in the hands of a writer with such faculty of the past she has inherited that you can feel the literary tradition coursing through her work, even as she pushes herself to an exciting level of originality.