Subsisting on dry bagels

Fever dream meets existential enquiry in Ottessa Moshfegh’s third novel. By Orlando Bird

‘LDEATH IN HER HANDS by Ottessa Moshfegh 257pp, Jonathan Cape, £14.99, ebook £9.99

oneliness clarifies,” said Philip Larkin, whose similarities with the American writer

Ottessa Moshfegh are not otherwise obvious. Moshfegh is one of the most original and astute young novelists working today. From her earliest stories, through her novella McGlue to her novels Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (a tale of selfisolation before it was cool), her preoccupations have always been clear and unapologetic. Her characters are oddballs – alcoholics, pill-poppers, twentysomething virgins – swimming and drowning in self-loathing, even as they cast a pitiless eye over the people around them.

Yet there can be something ennobling, even liberating, about their isolation (“I knew in my heart… that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn,” says the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with uncharacteristic sincerity). And despite Moshfegh’s hip, ironic idiom – her stripped-back sentences, her narrators’ worldweary pronouncements, which wouldn’t look out of place in a Vice article – there’s something defiantly idealistic about the way she sees her art. Fiction, she suggests, isn’t about timeliness or hot takes: it’s about freedom.

Like the noirish Eileen, Death in Her Hands comes tricked out with the tropes of a restrictive genre: the murder mystery. Our narrator is Vesta Gul, a recently widowed septuagenarian who’s just moved to a dead-end town in New England. She lives like a latter-day Puritan in a phoneless cabin on the outskirts, subsisting on dry bagels and unseasoned chicken. One day, while out walking her dog, she stumbles across a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”. But then the mystery mechanics grind to a halt: there is no body.

Nor does one ever turn up. And, during Vesta’s investigation, we don’t encounter many living bodies either. Instead, her speculation gradually takes over. Initially, she’s tentative (“Keep the imagination soft and happy,” she tells herself ). But after an Ask Jeeves session at the library turns up a list of “TOP TIPS FOR MYSTERY WRITERS!”, she grows bolder. Pretty soon, we have a backstory for Magda and the murder suspects, some of whom you could picture fixing a truck or dumping a corpse in Twin Peaks.

As Vesta ruminates on Magda’s life, filling the gaps through ever greater leaps of logic, she starts to look at her own more honestly.

Her dead husband Walter, a German émigré and epistemology professor, is tenderly invoked at first, but turns out to have been mean-spirited, lechy and domineering, sapping her confidence and shrinking her horizons. While fiction may be freeing, and loneliness may allow you to live on your own terms, nobody ever said they’d make you happy. By the end of the book, the real casualty appears to have been Vesta’s sanity. But she is no longer a type, “just a little old lady”: as she declares on the penultimate page, she has finally told her story.

If Death in Her Hands is part fever dream, part existential inquiry, Moshfegh is stronger on the first of those. As ever, she creates and sustains a tense, uncanny atmosphere, in a world like ours but not quite; and she wholeheartedly inhabits her narrator, rather than just using her to make a series of metafictional points (a relief). But the book mostly gestures towards the big questions: it feels at once unwieldy and slight. And there’s an aspect of Moshfegh’s writing that’s in danger of turning into a party trick. Her characters have always dealt, bracingly and hilariously, in disgust, but one target feels tired. Here they are again, the poor, the fat, the ugly, with their satellite TVs and McDonald’s addictions, like the punchline of a Ricky Gervais routine from 2009.

Of course, Moshfegh is not her narrator, and timid old people can have bad opinions, but it’s telling that Vesta starts to hit her stride when she lashes out at “heavy women, big as cows, whose thick ankles seemed about to snap as they tottered up and down the aisles with their huge shopping carts filled with junk food”. A writer as gifted as Moshfegh should feel free to move on from this one.

UNCANNY Ottessa Moshfegh