Ottessa Moshfegh is the closest thing Americans have to a Michel Houellebecq. It isn’t that she traffics in provocative sociopolitical commentary. Nor does she possess a Cassandra’s uncanny foreknowledge of impending doom. Like any good American, she has adopted the fun parts of being an enfant terrible while avoiding the ones liable to get a body crucified. Her interviews tend to furnish a mildly inflammatory sound bite—e.g., self-quarantine is like solitary confinement—and convey an air of Olympian indifference to prevailing literary winds, even as she herself blows like a hurricane through the scene. Whether fan, skeptic, or hater, no one calls her “Moshfegh.” It’s always, familiarly, “Ottessa.”
She is like Houellebecq in another way: The cheapest shot against her is that she keeps writing the same book. Hence it is an event unto itself that the protagonist of Death in Her Hands, her new “experimental” or “meta” mystery novel, is not a depressive, self-loathing young woman but a depressive, confused, old one. Unlike My Year of Rest and Relaxation or the stories in Homesick for Another World, this book is seldom funny, largely devoid of the gross-out preoccupations that place Ottessa in a rich, putrid tradition running from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift to Johnny Ryan. Like My Year and Eileen, however, Death in Her Hands is very much concerned with psychology and behavior under conditions of isolation.
The book is set in motion by 72-year-old Vesta Gul’s discovery of a cryptic note while walking her dog, Charlie. “Her name was Magda,” it reads. “Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” (There is no body.) Vesta is a widow, a transplant to the depressed rural town of Levant, where she has used the life insurance policy on her late husband, Walter, to purchase a cabin. Wild speculation about this found note is to be her chief pastime and purpose.
Vesta is like Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher in the grip of cognitive decline. She is imaginative, up to a point, but illogical, prone to leaps that have no basis in the information available to her. Where a detective deduces, she simply decides, her fill-in-the-blanks process more storytelling than investigation. “Sometimes I felt,” she muses, “that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether. Walter had always said I was sort of magical that way, a dreamer, his little dove. Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way.”
This aside announces the book’s two fixations: how imagination, like water, finds its level when diverted and constrained by a lack of stimulation, and how imagination fertilizes identity and individuality, even in arid soil. The seeds of Vesta’s selfhood have mostly fallen on the proverbial stony places. Her marriage, we gradually learn, is to blame for her failure to thrive. Her husband was an arrogant academic who dismissed his intellectual inferiors as “peasants.” He mocked Vesta’s body. (“That was just his sense of humor,” Vesta reassures us, in one of many defensive postures.) He manipulated and controlled her: “Walter had always told me that when I got emotional, it put a great strain on my heart.”
In the wake of Walter’s passing, these “stony places” are the setting itself. Readers will recognize (if that is the right word) Moshfegh’s featureless, half-assed rural America from such stories as Homesick’s “Slumming.” In Levant, every store is a bait shop, “the only books at Goodwill were about knitting and World War II,” and there “were no covered bridges or colonial mansions, no museums or historical municipal buildings.” Vesta compares the “witty” murder note favorably with her “blue collar and dull” neighbors.
Is this attitude sincere? Is it the lingering influence of haughty Walter? Or is it the author’s? Moshfegh’s place names are well-suited to the Play-Doh constructions of a bored demiurge: the Old World presumption of “Levant,” the monolithic grandeur of “Monlith,” the generically Eastern “Maconsett,” and “Bethsmane,” with its fatalistic echo of Gethsemane. Much of Moshfegh’s humor, her uniqueness, her cult appeal, depends on this suggestion of being “over it”—of regarding most places, people, and perhaps life itself as Lenny Bruce regarded small towns: “Once you’ve seen the cannon in the park, there’s nothing else to do.”
What there is for Vesta to do in Levant is to pursue Magda’s “killer,” after the fashion of a writer desultorily erecting the framework of a detective novel. Some of the easiest and most perversely satisfying laughs in Death in Her Hands come as Vesta uses a library computer, and the defunct search engine Ask Jeeves, to seek answers to her mystery. That the note might itself be the rejected first lines of a novel is so insistent a possibility that Vesta needn’t point it out. For some reason, she does anyway.
In interviews, Moshfegh boasted of writing Eileen, an award-winning hit, by following exactly the sort of lame how-to-write resources that Vesta consults in Death in Her Hands. Moshfegh “wanted to write a novel to start a career where [she] could live off publishing books.” In fact, per a New York Times profile, she wrote Death in Her Hands prior to Eileen, and one wonders if she used the same approach. She must have known that its aggressive refusal to provide a conventional resolution was unlikely to make her rich or famous. Now that hers is a household name, she can count on critics to carry water for what otherwise might seem a deliberately frustrating and even gimmicky book.
It may be news to some of Moshfegh’s public that subverting expectations is to literary fiction what a few twists and a pat conclusion are to its commercial cousin. Moshfegh’s prose is as clear, stylish, and readable—one wants to say “as ever,” but then this is an old effort by a writer who has often been explicit about her desire for money and fame. It will suffice to say that the writing is good, that the character Vesta Gul is a vivid illustration of what becomes of dreams thwarted or put on pause. Still, it is one thing to use a conceit that a reader or critic can identify and subject to exegesis. It is another to use that conceit effectively to create a book that not only commands but also rewards a reader’s attention. Eileen, though structured like a conventional potboiler, was a greater success as both art and entertainment than this experiment, which might have been better learned from than brought to light.