Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh: A review

Her name was Magda. No one will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.

Thus begins the new novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, she of the mordant prose and biting sense of humor. I loved her last book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and had eagerly awaited this new one.  I learned that, in fact, Death in Her Hands was not new. She had written it earlier in her career and put it away. I'm not sure why. I'm just glad it is finally here.

Those words that begin the novel were written on a note that was left on a trail through some birch woods where recently widowed Vesta Gul, age 72, walks her dog, Charlie. The note is weighed down by some black rocks. Vesta finds the note, picks it up, and so begins her adventure as a murder mystery investigator. She determines to find out who Magda was, where her body is, and who killed her.

But there is no body, so what's an investigator to do? Vesta is an avid reader of Agatha Christie novels and she takes her cues from them. From her secluded cabin on a lake and with little experience in her sheltered life to guide her, she begins to imagine who Magda was, what she might have looked like, who her associates were, and how she might have come to her sticky end. What she doesn't do is notify the police about the note or discuss it with anyone else.

But then who would she have discussed it with? She has no friends and only minimal contact with her neighbors, none of whom live close to her. Vesta had moved to the cabin from across the country, after the death of her husband, Walter, and she's made no effort to become a part of the community.

Walter was a scientist and an academician and Vesta tells us in her first ruminations about him that he was a loving husband. But as the story develops and we gradually learn more about him, we find that he was actually a womanizer who preyed on his young female assistants and who belittled and psychologically tormented Vesta. He was a German with suspected Nazi leanings, and at one point as Vesta laments her misspent life, she cries that she wishes she had never met that "awful, deleterious, pompous man" who she describes as her captor.

Perhaps because her life has been so circumscribed, Vesta's imagination is vibrant. She experiences life through her imagination. Her only regular interaction is with her dog and her ventures out to buy food or go to the library. She has no phone, no computer, and so she goes to the library not only for books but to use their computers to find out about Magda and how to investigate her "murder." She visits a web page called "Top Tips for Mystery Writers" and fills out a questionnaire that is intended to help writers develop their characters.

When she actually encounters real, live human beings, Vesta's reaction to them reveals her utter snobbishness. She feels revulsion at overweight mothers who she sees shopping. She describes them as "dull heifers" and wonders if they are even able to reason. They appear idiotic to her, like cattle, half asleep and chewing their cuds while awaiting their slaughter.

In imagining Magda, we begin to suspect that Vesta may actually be composing a narrative of her own life. Magda becomes a dark presence who was a bully who routinely performed everyday vile cruelties and maybe deserved her death. Vesta begins to be consumed by that dark presence, imagining someone watching her from the woods or that someone has been in her house during her absence. Has Vesta lost her mooring to reality altogether?

This book would obviously not appeal to everyone. There are readers who require constant action in the narrative to retain their attention. (I live with one of them.) The action in this novel occurs in Vesta's mind and that would just be too tedious for those readers. Vesta's vivid interior life contrasts with the pallid person which others experience, as the constant frenetic activity of her mind is the antithesis of her dull routine inactivity.

I loved this book while I read it. I was fully invested in the colorful landscape of Vesta's mind. I love it even more now that a week has passed since I finished it. It has grown in my own mind as I contemplate its structure and the writer's vision. That's the kind of impact that a really talented writer can have and damn, Ottessa Moshfegh can write!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: A review

What a strange yet captivating novel. The unnamed narrator is a beautiful (as she frequently reminds us), privileged, blonde, skinny (size 2) woman living the life of many people's dreams in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is a recent graduate of Columbia and has an undemanding job at a hip art gallery, but she doesn't really need the job because all her needs are met by an inheritance from her recently deceased parents.

And about those parents: Our narrator was their only child but she was not close to either of them, and yet their deaths seem to have untethered her mooring to any sort of need to have a productive life or to be a part of a larger society. There has been a rip in the fabric of her soul and her essence seems to be leaking away in the year 2000. Both her parents were narcissists focused on their own needs and comforts and in this their daughter is very much like them. She sees herself as the focus of the world and everything that happens in it is a reaction to her.

"Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty."

As she faces the general unraveling of her life and an inability (or lack of desire and will) to cope with it, she makes a drastic decision: She will use the wonders of pharmacology and psychotropic drugs to sleep for an entire year, at the end of which she hopes she will be able to shed ennui and rebuild her life.

Her first step in fulfilling her plan is to find a compliant psychiatrist who will prescribe the necessary pills. She goes looking through the yellow pages of the phone book and comes up with Dr. Tuttle, who is possibly my favorite character in the narrative. She is a terrible psychiatrist! She is a bumbler who is all too easily led by her "patient" to provide the cocktail of drugs that she needs to achieve her plan to zonk out for a year.

This may sound like the premise of a grim and claustrophobic tale, but in fact it isn't. It is a bit of a page-turner. It is by turns disgusting and hilarious but never dull.

The writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, is of Croatian and Iranian descent and this is her second novel. She had previously written a novella and a short story collection. Her fiction typically features misfits and loners and, for that description, our narrator is a prime example. Her only sort-of friend is Reva, a young Jewish woman (size 4) who is envious of our narrator's thinness and blonde beauty, or at least that's what we are told. In the midst of the narrator's "year of sleep," Reva receives a promotion in her job and moves to her new office in the Twin Towers and, of course, we can see what is coming.

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”  

Finally, the narcissistic narrator is able to acknowledge that someone else is beautiful, even in dying. Now, perhaps, she, too, is wide awake.  

My rating: 5 of 5 stars