Death and the creative process: Ottessa Moshfegh's new genre-defying novel «Death in Her Hands»

23.08.2020
Death and the creative process: Ottessa Moshfegh's new genre-defying novel «Death in Her Hands»

By James Ley



Ottessa Moshfegh is one of the most intriguing American writers to have emerged in the past few years, in no small part because she is one of the spikiest. The unreliable narrators of her first three novels McGlue, Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are all young, misanthropic and damaged. They are consumed with self-loathing and brimming with contempt for humankind’s foolishness and hypocrisy.

The sardonic intelligence of Moshfegh’s novels is backed up by her ability to craft smartly conceived and carefully layered narratives with a facility that would seem to border on outright precocity. She claims to have written Eileen – a grimy and effective psychological thriller with overtones of Hitchcock and Du Maurier – by following to the letter the instructions set out in a book on how to write a novel in 90 days.

Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel acquires mythical and personal resonances.


Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel acquires mythical and personal resonances.CREDIT:ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


Like Eileen, Moshfegh’s fourth novel, Death in Her Hands, makes use of of some familiar generic conventions, which it seeks to push into some dark and complicated psychological territory. It begins with the narrator, an elderly widow named Vesta Gul, coming across a handwritten note as she is walking through the woods with her dog Charlie. "Her name was Magda," the note reads. "Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body."

Except there is no body. The solitary clue sets Vesta’s mind spinning. At first, she wonders if the note is a prank. She puzzles at its oddly precise phrasing. As she struggles to think of possible explanations, she starts to imagine the backstories of the murdered Magda and the writer of the enigmatic note, whom she decides to call Blake. Then random occurrences start presenting themselves as possible clues, so she incorporates these coincidences into the narrative she is constructing, even though she is aware that the story is the creation of her own mind and that the impulse to see meaningful connections everywhere could well be a form of paranoia.

On this level, Death in Her Hands is a novel about the creative process itself, about the way in which an entire narrative can be spun from a single evocative detail, almost as a formal exercise.

In what could be read as self-referential joke, Moshfegh even sends Vesta to the local library, where the budding sleuth and surrogate author looks up a webpage titled "TOP TIPS FOR MYSTERY WRITERS" and scoffs her way through the proffered advice. "Composing a mystery was a creative endeavor," Vesta decides, "not some calculated procedure."

The self-conscious element of generic ambiguity is a defining feature of the novel. Vesta becomes increasingly aware that her imagined murder-mystery is not of the solvable Agatha Christie variety. Instead of a "little cozy whodunit", she finds herself in the midst of a self-generated narrative replete with unanticipated meanings.

As Death in Her Hands unfolds, it acquires deeper resonances, both mythical and personal. It becomes apparent that there is something dreamlike about Vesta’s story, an underlying fairytale quality. There are recurring references to being a witch. Her unusual surname – her married name, which her provincial neighbours are apt to mispronounce – is played upon to evoke ghouls, ghosts and God.

One of the themes that runs through Moshfegh’s work is trauma. The protagonists of her novels are invariably seeking to escape themselves. They want to leave behind the damage and the pervasive sense of disgust that blights their lives.

In her previous book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh combined this theme with an exploration of the idea that art holds out the possibility of a unique kind of understanding – that true art can reach places nothing else can reach.

Death in Her Hands is an attempt to develop these twinned themes. It represents an interesting maturation of Moshfegh’s work, not simply because Vesta proves to be a more sympathetically and subtly drawn character than the jaded misanthropes of the earlier novels (Moshfegh has referred to the Oblomovian narrator of My Year, not unreasonably, as an "asshole"), but because the novel’s more restrained tone admits an element of pathos, one that respects the fact that Vesta is closer to the end of her life than the beginning and gives an appropriate weight to her feelings of loneliness and regret.

                                                                                               


Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh review – whodunnit and other questions https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/18/death-in-her-hands-by-ottessa-moshfegh-review-whodunnit-and-other-questions


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