Death in her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press, 2020
Review by Alexandra Trnka
Ottessa Moshfegh’s fictions are an exercise in relating to obscenity. Her oeuvre is united by her intentionally unlikeable characters, leading to the popular classification of her work as alien and otherworldly. Her protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin, 2019) is a passively wealthy and indifferently attractive unnamed woman who drugs herself into unconsciousness to avoid her daily responsibilities and emotional reality. Her debut short story collection, Homesick for Another World (Penguin, 2017), is likewise a survey of conniving figures who observe society with a cynical stance from the margins of their social worlds.
Moshfegh’s newest protagonist, Vesta Gul, is in good company. Recently widowed, Vesta waits out the end of her life in an abandoned Girl Scout Camp in small town Levant with her dog, Charlie, whom she feeds roast chicken and lentils. Though Vesta may arouse readerly compassion more readily than Moshfegh’s previous characters, she too harbours a deep suspicion and niggling hatred toward the horridly average people who populate the town in which she lives.
Moshfegh’s loyalty to first-person perspective is elemental to her method of showcasing unsavoury attitudes; the crux of her characters’ abjection emerges in their internal dialogues, where they project impulsive negative judgments on those around them.
Readers of Moshfegh’s fiction tend to fall into two categories: those who dislike her characters’ perversity and lack of relatability, or those who celebrate her work for this very same alienation. Moshfegh herself observes that her characters are routinely cast as unrelatable: “People don’t want to talk about how they relate to a character’s more unsavoury qualities,” she tells the New York Times, “so they’re like, ‘God, she was really gross.’” Considering this remark as an essential provocation for understanding Moshfegh’s work, a third option emerges: the ingenuity of her characters derives from how she allows readers to identify with their more deplorable characteristics.
Vesta spends much of her time in solitude. On Mondays, she drives to town and buys the same modest groceries (six bagels, two tomatoes, one onion…); on other days, she and Charlie walk the woods around their property. Her bubble of isolation is punctured when an ambiguous presence announces itself: Vesta finds a note, weighed down by rocks, on the forest floor—“Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” She surveys the area but the body in question is absent. Vesta sets to solve the mystery herself.
Vesta extrapolates a story from the note using an ambiguous genre of logic. “A good detective presumes more than she interrogates,” she tells us. A woman named Magda could not have been a local. She must have been a teenage girl, shipped over from Eastern Europe to work the register at McDonald’s off Route 17, who had “overstayed her work visa, and had been living off the grid, hiding, working for pennies under the table as a home nurse for some senile old man.” Vesta builds the rest of Magda’s murder plot impulsively as her fictions crystallize into fact under the pressure of her own belief in them. “This made perfect sense to me,” Vesta thinks, “and so it was decided.”
Though much of Magda’s story trips from Vesta’s brain with little external provocation, she also probes the internet at the local library for inspiration, first asking Jeeves “Is Magda dead?” before filling out a character profile questionnaire for aspiring mystery writers. Vesta’s answers to the questionnaire constitute the novel’s entire third chapter, in a metafictional nod from Moshfegh alluding to the process of writing. Though the narrative lingers on the cusp of becoming a trope about the authorial process in its first half, Moshfegh soon diverts our attention. While Death in her Hands is partly commentary on the role of imagination in authorship, it is also a novel about relation; Vesta dreams herself a friend––someone to whom she can relate––in a world in which she feels alien.
The note acts as a portal to a new social world, an invitation for Vesta to implicate herself in the lives of others in a complex and sinister mystery plot grounded in little but her own imagination. Vesta’s imagined narrative reveals an underlying desire for connection, if not an entirely wholesome one. Picturing a Levant police officer whom she has written into her story, she thinks, “it was exciting to feel so much spite for somebody. It inspired me; I almost felt like dancing.” She imagines the dark woods outside her small cabin bristling with “ax murderers and dead girls and strange invisible creatures limping through the pine woods” with a fear that belies a throbbing curiosity and frantic excitement. “I liked fear,” she admits.
Vesta’s investigation is a form of auto-fiction, driven by an urge to create a character in her own image. Like Vesta, Magda was an outsider to Levant. She, too, had an uncommon name that set her apart from others and a father “of average height, with a thick middle, in a paisley sweater and scarf, big cheeks covered in white whiskers.” She also happens to share Vesta’s disgust with the greater Levant population. Vesta imagines Magda as a kindred spirit, and regrets not having known her when she was alive. If she had, things could have been different: “she could have laid her head on my shoulder and cried, and I would have petted her silky black hair and told her everything would be all right, and then maybe she wouldn’t be dead now.”
Vesta’s relationship with Magda is an imperfect microcosm of the relationship between Vesta and Moshfegh, who was inspired to write Death in Her Hands in part by her own experience idling, alone and frightened, in a deserted Girl Scout Camp—this one in Maine, purchased by her mother in the 1990s. “I wrote it for myself,” she tells the New York Times. “It’s a loneliness story.” These affinities take shape as a chain of relation: while Vesta imagines herself a friend in her own image, Moshfegh too has created a character with whom she can relate.
The relational bond between Magda, Vesta, and Moshfegh implies that Death in Her Hands may in fact be a “relatable” novel, though not in the manner that relatability is routinely used as a marker of literary value. The merit of relatability as a character trait has been debated within contemporary literary criticism, as the desire to read relatable fiction may reveal a malevolent lack of interest in characters who exist outside of a reader’s immediate, recognizable framework. The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead surveys how the term relatable has become an uncritically accepted criterion of artistic merit, writing that the danger of inflating the value of relatability is that it “implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.” This urge to relate to a character assumes a positive relationality, a desire to see oneself mirrored in respectable qualities freely revealed in cultural dialogue. For good reason, then, relatability is no longer the desirable trait that it once, briefly, was.
Moshfegh unsettles this assumption about the relatable characteristic. Designating Moshfegh’s unlikeable characters as alien or unrelatable rejects the possibility that readers may recognize themselves in their abject qualities, as if Vesta’s impulsive negativity cannot be relatable by virtue of it being crude or offensive. Admitting a relation to Moshfegh’s characters requires reckoning with our own vulgarity. Though Vesta’s judgments may be distasteful, they are not alien. Here, as elsewhere in Moshfegh’s fictions, we find a character nestled in the gap between the relatable and the good. Relatability exists here not as a chance for readers to pride themselves on sharing a character’s integrity or courage, but rather as an opportunity for a more difficult genre of self-reflection.
Alexandra Trnka writes essays and fiction from a desk in Montreal. Her recent work has been published in Senses of Cinema and carte blanche.