Meta mystery
The real puzzle of Ottessa Moshfegh’s murder story is its lonely protagonist, writes Barbara Speed
Vesta Gul is a lonely, older woman who lives in a hut outside a nondescript American town, with little purpose in her life. That is, until 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.” On finding it, Vesta transforms into an eccentric Miss Marple figure, heading to the local library to “Ask Jeeves” who did indeed kill Magda, and alighting on suspects.
Murder mysteries offer a simplicity of plot: we always find out the truth in the end. But in her third novel, Ottessa Moshfegh disrupts this framing to say something more complicated. The book is about loneliness: like Moshfegh’s female protagonists in Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Vesta is isolated, forming obsessions to fill the voids in her life. But the story also seems to be about the process of writing.
Moshfegh says this book was written before her other novels, in a period of “mourning” after finishing a collection of short stories, when she herself was isolated. In the same way that Moshfegh starting to write again to deal with this loneliness, Vesta also sets out to create a story. When she finds the note, she comments: “Her name was Magda. What kind of opening was that? An editor would deem the note too dark to publish. Too much too soon, they’d say.”
Her research after finding the note includes reading up on how to write, rather than solve, a murder, and how to create your cast of characters. Later, she fears that her story is flagging: “I was often tempted to abandon books if they flailed along too slowly.” It’s unclear who she’s creating this tale for. Perhaps only herself.
As the book progresses, Vesta falls deeper into her own delusions, ignoring the significant discovery that her neighbours are planning a murder- mystery event, which could explain the note. In the telling, Moshfegh seems to be enacting the struggle she has with her subject matter: creating a novel involves imposing a narrative on life, which is so often formless, unappealing, unattractive, and resistant to the shape we try to impose on it.
The creation of story is shown as a lifeline to Vesta, but also a total delusion, one which highlights the unfairness of her life, in which her husband mistreated her and faced no comeuppance, and in which she faces a sad end. Moshfegh seems to be asking what the point of her own literary endeavours really is: can art give life meaning in a way that isn’t misleading and over- optimistic?
This chimes with Moshfegh’s frustration that her protagonists and their proclivities are often described as “disgusting.”
“People don’t want to talk about
how they relate to a character’s more unsavory qualities,” she told the New York Times in April, “so they’re like, ‘ God, she was really gross.’” Moshfegh believes that she’s showing life as it is, with all our quirks and dark secrets; yet the world responds as though her creations are extreme, other, outside the norm. She forces us to pay attention until we recognise ourselves in her characters.
Death in Her Hands is less developed than Moshfegh’s previous novels. Its insistence on mystery doesn’t allow space for full interrogation of Vespa’s mental disintegration. Where it stands out, however, is in offering a glimpse into the mind of its hard- to- pin- down author. Read in conjunction with her other work, it adds to the impression that Moshfegh is not just an engaging and unique writer of fiction, but someone who has given a lot of thought to its purpose, as well as the lines between entertainment and brutal reality.