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2022 reads, #44. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! Regular friends will remember that I'm reading all four of the novels (so far) by the beguiling Ottessa Moshfegh this summer in a row, after seeing a growing amount of friends start referring to books by other female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me wanting to know what that means. As we've examined in the other three books, that basically boils down to, "Stories about that mousy dishwasher-blonde receptionist at the insurance company whose existence no one pays attention to, who's actually much crazier than anyone has given her credit for, and who today has officially reached her fill of your unending fucking bullshit, thank you very MUCH;" and so that's why other high-profile novels like Nightbitch and A Touch of Jen have been receiving this "Moshfeghian" label recently, because they too delve generally into the subject of the put-upon overlooked bland mousy women in our society, and how in fact they might actually be much more insane than you thought them capable of.

So that's what makes it all the more a surprise to learn that her fourth and newest, the just released Lapvona, is not Moshfeghian in nature whatsoever, and that there isn't a put-upon Moshfeghian Heroine in sight. Instead, this is a straight-up horror story, set in deeply religious Medieval times, the same sort of milieu where Robert Egger's The VVitch takes place. Or perhaps I should say the kind of Medieval milieu where Ben Wheatley's A Field in England takes place, or Aleksai German's Hard to Be a God or perhaps Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon: for Moshfegh's Middle Ages central Europe is a harsh and bizarre place, a land that cuts no one a break among a society that's barely still out of stone tools, where you're lucky to live to 50 without dying violently and painfully in a pool of your own blood and pus. Moshfegh pulls no punches here, and you deserve to know that we get rape, torture and cannibalism all before even the first half is over, to say nothing of the image of a 13-year-old boy greedily sucking on the tit of a naked, shrivelled-up 96-year-old woman who serves as the village's local shaman and sex magic purveyor (i.e. she gives all the young men of the village handjobs using a jar of her own urine that she says is a "magic potion," YOU'RE WELCOME).

Moshfegh is deliberately reaching for cartoonish terribleness here, sometimes to the point of absurdity; so like we've talked about before, this is the latest and strongest sign yet that she's a big fan of Postmodernist nightmare creator JG Ballard, in that this book often resembles (especially during the long, surreally violent drought in the middle of the page count) Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels like The Burning World . This is an out-and-out nihilist tale to be sure, in which not a single character is redeemable whether they're presented as a traditional "goodie" or a "baddie;" Moshfegh wants you to feel bad about the human race by the time you're done here, just like Ballard wanted you to do too. And that's why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5, because Moshfegh is more interested in being miserable here than in delivering a satisfying three-act plot; think of this more as her saying, "Humans were shockingly cruel to each other for the entire thousand years of the Medieval Era, and here's a random two-year period where we watch the cruelty in detail." There's not really a satisfying ending to this, other than, "Yep, proof positive that all these people are just going to continue on in this miserable way the entire rest of their lives;" but that misery is expressed in such strange, crisp, disgusting detail here, you can't help but admire it for what it is, and consider the book mostly a satisfying experience until you get to the underwhelming end.

I'll take that, given that I've out-and-out hated two of Moshfegh's four novels now; and more importantly, I admire Moshfegh's decision to deliver against "Moshfeghian" hype, and do whatever kind of freaky-ass weirdo cannibalism storytelling she wants without worrying like others do about how it might fit into her "existing canon" of work. This is just in general one of the things I admire about Moshfegh the most, that she seems to give less of a fuck about what the public thinks of her than just about any other commercially successful contemporary fiction writer these days; and I kind of love that right at the moment she's becoming this sort of intellectual feminst hero for writing these books about strangely executed female empowerment, she decides to pivot into left field and deliver a piece of fatalist historical fiction with no female heroes at all, one written in a style I suspect many of her current female fans will find too disgusting to even get through. The book itself is alright, but it's much more enjoyable as a statement of defiance by Moshfegh against both the literary industry and her existing fans' need to put everything they like into these neat little boxes, and then insist that the artist deliver nothing else but that the rest of their career. I look forward in another few years to seeing what newest left turn she'll have for us next.