Readers of Moshfegh’s fiction tend to fall into two categories: those who dislike her characters’ perversity and lack of relatability, or those who celebrate her work for this very same alienation. Moshfegh’s loyalty to first-person perspective is elemental to her method of showcasing unsavoury attitudes the crux of her characters’ abjection emerges in their internal dialogues, where they project impulsive negative judgments on those around them. Though Vesta may arouse readerly compassion more readily than Moshfegh’s previous characters, she too harbours a deep suspicion and niggling hatred toward the horridly average people who populate the town in which she lives. Recently widowed, Vesta waits out the end of her life in an abandoned Girl Scout Camp in small town Levant with her dog, Charlie, whom she feeds roast chicken and lentils. Moshfegh’s newest protagonist, Vesta Gul, is in good company. Her debut short story collection, Homesick for Another World (Penguin, 2017), is likewise a survey of conniving figures who observe society with a cynical stance from the margins of their social worlds. Her protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin, 2019) is a passively wealthy and indifferently attractive unnamed woman who drugs herself into unconsciousness to avoid her daily responsibilities and emotional reality. Her oeuvre is united by her intentionally unlikeable characters, leading to the popular classification of her work as alien and otherworldly. Ottessa Moshfegh’s fictions are an exercise in relating to obscenity.

Death in her hands review