Moshfegh’s new novel is an old murder mystery

MYSTERY

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’s 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 first thing you will notice about “Death in Her Hands” is that, although Vesta purchases a groovy all-black 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?

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 Save-rite.”

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.

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 so-so 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.