BOOKS WRITERS

‘I wanted so badly to touch the thing inside me, to punish myself and examine its horror first hand.’

Frequently Asked Question number 13: “Can I touch them?”

We are, as people, a pretty touchy bunch – from accidental elbows to most measures of affection and intimacy – it’s a feeling so often felt that it is just as easily forgotten: when grade school kids are asked to name the five senses, counting their catalogue on crusty fingers and chubby fists, touch is last to the little rhyme.

“Can I touch them?” is FAQ number 13 on the website for Bodyworlds – the globetrotting, jaw- dropping anatomical exhibition of inside- out human corpses that’s provoked widespread controversy in the scientific community since its debut. The answer to question number 13, in case you were wondering, is no.

In Homesick for Another World, author Ottessa Moshfegh’s characters prod things that’d make a cadaver blush. Porous and fickle and busted right up, her cast – from not-quite-necromaniac widower to nihilistic Catholic school teacher – glimpse the worst of our bests; the private costs of living a public life. Those masochists who enjoyed/ endured Moshfegh’s last sensory assault, her award- winning novel Eileen, will be violated all over again. Perversion comes to play in a way only Moshfegh can wrangle so effectively.

Each story’s narrator tells you who they are using characteristics we most commonly associate with identity: employment, lack of employment, locale, appearance; but it’s what they do, or don’t do, or do too much of, that tells you what they are – man, monster, murderer ( maybe), among other things. There’s a common brand of wit and wry humour bred into each character: not enough to make a single one of them likeable, but enough at least to make each bearable, and drawn with such frightening human familiarity that the collection easily puts a reading session into four-hour autopilot.

I fear picking favourites in the collection, mostly because of what that selection might say about me, but also because each story plays its own critical role in Moshfegh’s deliberately stacked and wellconstructed assessment of human relationships. There’s Mr. Wu, imagining a life with his would- be lover that’s both grandly romantic and utterly grotesque; Charles, who shares a cottage, and maybe a woman, with the meth- addicted brother we won’t meet; a not- unhappy girlfriend of a not- happening actor wonders if, and why, she might or might not leave him.

These aren’t stories built to satisfy so much as to stir. As in her previous work, Moshfegh’s writing is braceless and her style is raw, coarse – but sometimes that approach leaves a sense of things not quite settled, cosmic sketches that need one more scene to land their point. There’s a danger in taking short fiction to such cerebral heights, risking sober comprehension, and at least one story drifted too far to hit its mark.

Most fiction, even the barest fiction – and even a lot of non- fiction, really – is polished with some swipe of romance. It isn’t always heart-swelling or head-turning romance, but the sheen of something presented a little prettier than its otherwise ugly self- truth – say, a puddle of blood called ruby, not rust – makes those books readable, and some of them more likeable because of it. But if blood is rust in reality, it is rendered one step further in Moshfegh’s world: gooey and congealed on top, putrid and spoiling on the spot, belonging to somebody you love and would rather not bleed. Even her romance isn’t near to romantic.

Moshfegh’s writing isn’ t for everyone; it is so wretchedly private you wonder whether it’s written for anyone else at all. But fans who’ve already flogged themselves with the author’s brutal fiction won’t be disappointed. While Eileen demonstrated her downright acrobatic approach to language and startling ability to self-reflect, Homesick for Another World suggests that short fiction might be Moshfegh’s true calling. The form suits her frenetic style, close to seamless here in overall flow, and allows a flexibility that flaunts the Boston- born writer’s distinct talent deservedly.

I remember when the Bodyworlds exhibit came to Toronto in 2005. I heard the hullabaloo before I saw its first poster, and then I nearly soiled myself: a man, or maybe a woman, or maybe something from a Stephen King novel but worse, staring out at me from a blue-red crater in its face, carved through with white veins and surrounded by sinewy wax. Eventually I recovered my dignity and looked a little closer, reaching out for the advertisement instinctively, chickenshit but too curious to resist ponying up for a ticket that week. I wanted so badly to touch the thing inside me, to punish myself and examine its horror firsthand. Alas: Frequently Asked Question number 13.

You can’t touch the thing inside you, but you can read Homesick for Another World and have it drawn out, beaten, and masterfully exposed by Ottessa Moshfegh instead.

EVEN HER ROMANCE ISN’T NEAR TO ROMANTIC