San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: Murder mystery trades dead bodies for delusions.
Perhaps Magda’s body will turn up. Vesta thinks she knows who the killer is.
The new Ottessa Moshfegh novel, “Death in Her Hands,” is really an old Ottessa Moshfegh novel. She wrote it early in her career and stuck it in a drawer. Now that drawer has slid open.
Moshfegh made her name with thrillingly mordant books, including the story collection “Homesick for Another World” and the novels “Eileen” and “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” Tonally, “Death in Her Hands” is quite different. It’s much more flatly written. Occasionally it verges on the poky.
On its simplest level, “Death in Her Hands” is a murder mystery. The recently widowed Vesta Gul, 72, is walking her dog in the woods when she finds a crisp note pinned under rocks. It reads: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.”
Yet there’s no body. Who was this Magda? Who killed her? Where’s her corpse? Vesta, who reads Agatha Christie novels and lives in a secluded cabin on a lake, has lived a sheltered life. Here’s her chance to enter a whodunit, to plunge into brewing drama and into the sticky marrow of life.
The novel begins to explore what poet Kay Ryan calls “the small plop ordinary lives make,” and the rage against that smallness.
The first thing you will notice about “Death in Her Hands” is that, although Vesta purchases a groovy allblack ninja bodysuit, not much actual sleuthing gets done. Most of the action takes place in her teeming mind. She invents elaborate scenarios around Magda’s ostensible killing.
Vesta starts seeing things. Is someone high in the trees watching her? Who’s been in her house? Is that cop a demonic deity? Her thoughts make you remember that when you meet your enemies in your mind, it’s always on a narrow bridge.
You sense her coming unstitched. Or is someone malevolently toying with her? Vesta has recently purchased her lake cabin. One recalls the primal lesson of “ScoobyDoo” cartoons: Beware real estate agents. Perhaps someone has filled Vesta’s woods with the equivalent of the Ghost Army in World War II, with its inflatable tanks meant to frighten the Germans.
As you debate Vesta’s sanity, it becomes plain that she is working out some issues. Her late husband, Walter, belittled her and preyed on his young female assistants. There’s a hint that he approved of the Nazis. Vesta cries over her lost life and wishes she had “never met that awful, deleterious, pompous man.” She refers to him as “my captor.”
She’s a brutal class snob. She stares in revulsion at the overweight mothers, “the dull heifers roaming the SaveRite.” She thinks: “Did they even think things to themselves? Why did they look so idiotic, like domesticated animals, chewing their cud until the slaughter, half asleep.”
Perhaps if she’d not married Walter she would have been an artist. “Death in Her Hands” becomes a kind of allegory for the work of a novelist. “Since his death, I’d grown to be more poetic in my thinking,” Vesta says. “Too much magic was dashed by cold logic.”
On a library computer, Vesta visits a web page called “Top Tips for Mystery Writers.” She fills out a questionnaire meant to help writers flesh out their characters. “I heard her voice in my mindspace,” she says about Magda. “I loved her the way I loved the little seedlings soon to sprout in my new garden.”
Vesta and Magda. In “writing” about Magda, is Vesta rewriting her own life? Magda takes on a presence of her own — it’s an increasingly dark one, like a wing blotting the sun. Vesta’s cruelties are internal. Magda, in Vesta’s mind, performed wicked acts. She tainted an enemy’s toothbrush with urine. She was a schoolyard bully who laughed and pushed unpopular kids down into the mud. She abused the elderly man she was paid to care for.
Perhaps Magda’s body will turn up. Vesta thinks she knows who the killer is. “People feel so special, so wise, when someone they know drops dead,” Moshfegh wrote in “Homesick for Another World.” Maybe Vesta knows Magda better than she thinks.
Like a soso vacation that ripens in your mind and begins to look quite rosy in retrospect, I liked “Death in Her Hands” more after it was over and I’d let it sit a few days. It has an afterlife in your mind. From a distance, you can savor its trap doors.
If I sometimes wished I were sneakreading one of the author’s other books under the table, well, I am a fool for that high Moshfegh style.
Vesta has a vast interior life, but life has reduced her. She’s like an ornamental shrub that’s been ruthlessly espaliered. She put me in mind of critic Seymour Krim’s comment that so very many people never find “the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”