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2022 reads, #37. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the novels by hipster-lit It Girl Ottessa Moshfegh, right in a row until I'm done, because of recently noticing a growing amount of my friends at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ starting to now describe other surreal novels by young female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me having a desire to know exactly what they mean when they use a term like this. I've been through two of her books now, 2015's Eileen which I hated, and then 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I loved; but unfortunately her third novel, 2020's Death in her Hands, is much more like the former than the latter, which means I'm back to hating it again.

The problem here, just like Eileen, is that Moshfegh is utterly uninterested in turning in a three-act story, giving us instead a 300-page plotless character study about The Second Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (the aforementioned Eileen of course being the most unpleasant woman in human history), essentially what it would look like if you took and played her for drama instead of laughs, and then slowly revealed through one odd sentence every 10,000 words that she's in fact insane and that you can't trust even a single word coming out of her mouth. That's interesting as a concept, but fucking unbearable as an actual reading experience, just pages and pages and pages and PAGES of tedious minutiae from our put-upon unreliable narrator's daily life (she walks in the woods, she makes some dinner, she pets her dog, she goes to bed, she gets back up, she takes a shower, she walks in the woods...), just for Moshfegh to randomly insert exactly one weird sentence every 30 pages that makes you stop and say, "...Wait, I'm sorry, what was that?"

She's definitely on-brand here with what I've come this summer to think of as the typical Moshfeghian Hero (namely, that dishwater-dull mousy doormat who works the receptionist desk at an insurance office and who no one on the planet ever gives a second thought to, just to reveal that she's actually much crazier than anyone ever suspected, and that today is the day she's decided she's had just about enough of your fucking bullshit, thank you very much); but while such an anti-villain is irresistible when paired with a bizarre, hilarious, JG Ballard-like pitch-black surreal storyline like in the case of Relaxation, our Moshfeghian Heroes are just barely tolerable when put in a go-nowhere MFA hipster circle-jerk character study like here or in Eileen, and I have to confess that after absolutely loving the former (Relaxation will definitely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list in December), I detested the latter, and gave a huge sigh of relief when I finally made it to the end of this endlessly droning disaster of a book.

That finally brings us to Moshfegh's fourth and latest novel, Lapvona which was just released a couple of months ago; and I've been told that that's actually a historical novel, taking a typical Moshfeghian Hero and plunking her into a Medieval village where strange and possibly evil events are afoot (think The VVitch), so please keep your eye out my review of that in just another week or two.