Penguin Press, 2020
272 Pages
ISBN 9781984879356
Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist known to dive headfirst into the depths and often disgusting aspects of human physicality and sometimes “insanity.” Insanity is subjective, though, isn’t it? Can isolation, guilt, and loneliness provoke it, poking at the mind like a sleeping bear until it wakes, angry, and ready to eat? Death in Her Hands, Moshfegh’s newest novel follows the little old narrator, Vesta Gul, who finds a cryptic note in the woods while walking her beloved dog, Charlie.
“Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.”
The note is the beginning of a spiraling mystery that will not end in a murderer wearing handcuffs. Instead, Vesta Gul’s intense loneliness, caused by the recent death of her late husband, Walter, and new life in slow-paced, rural Levant, begins to manifest in an obsessive search for Magda’s killer. She invents characters, motives, and an imaginary story that follows the guidelines of a who-dun-it plot that soon becomes Vesta’s entire reality and purpose of being. She befriends Magda in her “mindspace,” imagining her face and the pitiful circumstances leading to her death. While Vesta falls victim to her mind’s trickery, the previous admiration she’d displayed for her late husband, Walter, dissipates, and Vesta’s self-proclaimed beautiful life and marriage is a reality revealed. Eventually, her grip on reality unravels, and even Charlie cannot save her.
Vesta is a woman of class. She is not exactly an anti-hero, but neither is she incredibly likable. The novel unfolds as Vesta’s image of self-importance deteriorates. She gives in to her “mindspace”: a place where she can access imaginative worlds and circumstances, even conversations with the dead—ignored for most of her life due to its entrance being blocked by Walter throughout her marriage. Her invention of Magda may be Vesta’s exploration of self, a mismatched character of Vesta’s secrets and desires. Magda is a vessel for Vesta to explore her past. Magda is a reason to pass her problems: all of the self-loathing and angry thoughts that she’d been left alone within the woods’ silence, onto somebody else. But Magda also represents the person Vesta wishes she allowed herself to be, with a life filled with escape, drama, and utter romance.
As it becomes evident that Vesta is losing her grip on reality, she releases the hold Walter had over her life, revolts, and grows wild. While Magda’s existence or lack thereof is left a mystery, the ending of this novel leaves a simultaneous sadness and satisfaction, which is entirely thanks to Moshfegh’s pure literate power. A talent that is evident in not only this novel, but Moshfegh’s previous work as well.
Moshfegh has repeatedly demonstrated her mastery of repulsion in published works such as Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, McGlue, and her profound collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World. She is a hold-no-punches, unrelenting descriptor who has received both praise and criticism for her realistic depictions of human bodily functions and anti-hero narrators. To most, this is the exact appeal of her novels, the draw that generates mass audiences to anticipate and wait for her next book like the countdown to Christmas morning.
Death in her Hands, is a standout novel in Moshfegh’s portfolio because unlike the others, it is a short, sometimes slow-paced stream of consciousness. There is a lack of dialogue due to the narrator’s lack of interactions with others. The isolation Vesta thrusts upon herself is inescapable, and the building mania is inevitable from the beginning, leaving an uncomfortable foreboding throughout the novel's entirety. Moshfegh’s signature style, visceral, ever-real moments of shock, horror, or disgust is a rarity in this novel. Or at least it’s not used as extensively as it is in previous work like Eileen. But the shock value of sinister narration within the “anti-hero” is still sprinkled throughout the novel and satisfyingly so. Vestas’ inventive ideas are often too wicked for the fraudulent, “refined” and frail woman she claims to be.
Throughout the entirety of Death in Her Hands, we are waiting for Vesta to finally snap, and she does. Gloriously so. The novel is simply a fall from grace—a descent into utter aloneness. Vesta Gul is an example of what loneliness, guilt, regret, and boredom can do to the human psyche, and watching her unravel is a pure pleasure.