‘Homesick for Another World’: Imperfect stories from a gifted artist
If there’s one fact the protagonists in “Homesick for Another World,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s impressive collection of short stories, would agree upon, it’s that love and relationships are difficult to perfect. This is true under any circumstances, but it’s especially true for the assortment of characters depicted here. Marriages fail, dates don’t pan out, prospective partners have quirks as unsettling as they are unanticipated. And fate is always ready to make a sad situation even more fraught with uncertainty.
If you’ve read “Eileen,” Moshfegh’s debut novel, then you’re not only aware of Moshfegh’s skill at portraying the dark side of life but prepared for the darkness on display in this volume. A book that collects such misfits as a man in China who frequents out-of-town prostitutes and pines for a woman who runs a video arcade, a lonely unemployed fellow in California who dials random phone numbers to chat with whoever answers and a divorced woman who buys her “little foil-wrapped turd of drugs” from the “zombies” in the restroom of a seedy bus depot might sound depressing. But most of these stories are like beautiful sculptures of unpleasant figures: You may not like the subjects, but you’ll appreciate the artistry.
Unlike much of contemporary short fiction, the works here don’t necessarily show a protagonist with traditional literary wants. Rather, they show the protagonist as he or she is. Take “Slumming,” with that divorced woman who patronizes the bus-depot restroom. She drives to her summer bungalow, picks up a hitchhiker, stocks up on recreational drugs and buys groceries at a shopping center, where “the fattest people on Earth could be found buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs.”
Later, a pregnant girl from the town shows up at the bungalow to offer housecleaning services. The power of this story lies not in the mystery of its resolution but the small details that reveal character: the zombies in the depot, the obese townswomen “oozing slowly toward death with every breath” and the protagonist’s reaction to events surrounding the girl. The same is true for most of the other works. Among the highlights are “Bettering Myself,” in which a young teacher prepares seniors at New York’s Ukrainian Catholic school for the SATs and goes clubbing with her cocaine-snorting friend in a Barbarella wig; “The Weirdos,” with a woman whose apartment-manager boyfriend tells her he sees “a private message from God in the silvery vortex” of her left pupil; and “An Honest Woman,” a portrait of a 60-yearold widowed “Alabama boy” who refers to women as gals and sets up a date for his adult nephew with the 30-year-old woman next door, only to discover that he, too, wouldn’t mind getting to know her better. Moshfegh uses a Hemingway-esque staccato style throughout. A typical sentence: “He went to the arcade and stood in line and paid for his time and smelled her hair and watched her count the money and his heart ached.” Prose such as this adds to the rawness of these stories and accentuates their painful realism.
But for all of the pieces’ assuredness, there’s a lot of repetition. Most of the protagonists smoke joints, take meth or drink to excess. Three of the 14 stories feature descriptions of characters squeezing their pimples. Two others mention white flecks of underarm deodorant. Worms and flophouses make more than one appearance. Almost every story deals with sad sacks who have been unlucky in love.
It’s fine for an author to explore a theme repeatedly or, when crafting a story, to kickstart the process by inserting details he or she has used before. Some of Moshfegh’s beautiful sculptures, however, have armature poking out of the clay: they’re still accomplished, but you wish the stabilizers had been either removed or better concealed before exhibition.
Yet the stories in “Homesick for Another World” are unquestionably the work of a gifted artist. Only one, “Nothing Ever Happens Here,” about would-be actors in the “Three’s Company” 1970s, is sketchy and relies on stereotypes. All the other pieces are fresh and vividly rendered.
Some of the passages are heartbreaking in their economy, as in “The Beach Boy,” in which a wife dies on her sofa after a “sudden excruciating pain in her head,” and her husband, thinking she has fallen asleep, smoothes her hair before salting the popcorn he made and putting on a movie. One perfect detail follows another, as when the dejected protagonist of “Bettering Myself” “dipped a finger in my beer and rubbed off my mascara.” If there’s one fact that readers of “Homesick for Another World” will agree on, it’s that Ottessa Moshfegh is a talent to watch.