Ottessa Moshfegh
Homesick for Another World
Penguin
People like to write dramatic headlines about Ottessa Moshfegh. Vanity Fair made a big deal of her mysterious, purist un-Googleable status (read: she deleted her Twitter). And The Guardian pursued a clickbaity line on how Moshfegh wrote her Booker-nominated novel Eileen just to be famous (scandalously, she expressed hope that the book would make her some money).
Efforts to contrive a sensationalist buzz around the author are not surprising. But Moshfegh needs no extra edge. Her works make enough of an impression, and they are exceptional: dark, violent and grotesquely intelligent. This new story collection, Homesick for Another World, is probably her most accomplished work to date, and it does not scrimp on obscenity, on esoteric rituals, or on harsh, uncomfortable realities. Moshfegh’s edge – cruel, sharp, painful – is both the greatest strength of this collection, and also its deepest failing.
These stories give a birds-eye view of various humans falling apart. Moshfegh’s characters are wildly varied messes. Her voice convincingly ranges across geographical worlds, from East Coast to West Coast; all the way to China, and unspecified exotic islands). We hear of a high school teacher who vomits as her morning routine, takes drunken naps in a cardboard box at lunch, and tells her students of the joys of condomless sex and anal play. At home alone, though, she feigns reading while chugging vodka, just in case God is watching: ‘”All good here,” I pretended to say. “Just bettering myself, as always.”’
Just as bleak is the story of Mr. Wu, who leads a ‘stinking’ solitary life, punctuated only by alternately frigid or sadistic sex with prostitutes, and his profoundly creepy sexual pursuit of the woman at the video-game arcade.
The Mr. Wu narrative opens what I think of as the book’s sad men section: a series of male-perspective stories that tell of repulsive loners who ogle or prey on women. The best of this series is ‘An Honest Woman’, where an older man with a skin condition tries to manipulate his young neighbour: Moshfegh delicately toys with the reader’s impulses towards pity and disgust. The worst is ‘No Place for Good People’, in which protagonist Paul attempts to bring the profoundly disabled men he cares for to Hooters, taking time along the way to reflect on his greedy, greasy dead wife, and to express his revulsion at his charges’ crude physical habits. Paul is clearly awful; the book doesn’t side with him. But Moshfegh oscillates uncomfortably between smugly condemning Paul’s ignorance and joying in his non-PC thoughts: the story exudes a kind of showoffy pride at setting forth the unacceptable things that people may think (but know better than to say).
This makes for disquieting reading in provocative and even productive ways, but it does highlight a worrying tendency in the book to equate disability with abjection, to use physical and mental conditions as shorthand symbols for aberrance. This blind spot is surprising given Moshfegh’s unusually nuanced awareness elsewhere of the ways that vulnerable groups get disempowered or fetishized; the story ‘Slumming’ , for instance, skillfully and piercingly skewers the hipster aestheticization of poverty.
The book’s fierce intelligence occasionally gets lost in the relentless, in-your-face stream of blood, excrement and broken taboos. But overall these stories paint a stunningly unique picture of contemporary disenchantment that goes beyond glassy-eyed millennial ennui. Moshfegh’s characters do little, they are decaying – but they are never inert. In the rot of these stories, there is evidence of a vital force, a ‘great power’, life’s terrible, beautiful hum.
Words – Gill Moore
