Death In Her Hands. By Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Press; 272 pages; $27. Jonathan Cape; £14.99
THE RISE of Ottessa Moshfegh (pictured) testifies to an appetite for female protagonists who address the reader with deadpan candour and vituperative misanthropy, qualities once the preserve of bad-boy writers such as Michel Houellebecq. The American author’s evident sense of mischief in front of a dictaphone helps, too. When her noir-tinged psychological thriller “Eileen” was shortlisted for the Booker prize, she distanced herself from the novel—and its admirers—by saying she wrote it to give readers “the commercial crap that they’re used to”. She has also claimed that “the full truth” about the attacks of September 11th 2001 is not known, nor “who, in this country, was involved”.
Conspiracy theories are the subject of her latest book, “Death in Her Hands”, a masterclass in suspense. It is narrated by Vesta, an old woman living alone in the woods in Maine, widowed after 40 years of marriage. Walking her dog at dawn, she stumbles upon a cryptic handwritten note that says a woman named Magda has been murdered and that no one will ever discover the killer.
In the days that follow, Vesta concocts an ever-more elaborate theory to explain the note. With help from a website for aspiring mystery writers, she decides Magda must have been a fast-food worker from Belarus with a high-school boyfriend who has something to hide. “A little horror story,” Vesta tells her dog. “Gets the blood flowing, right?”
Until Vesta’s imaginings start to mingle with her real-life interactions, the stakes of this parlour game remain unclear. But as she opens up about her late husband—a controlling philanderer who was twice her age when they met—the story emerges as a study of a mind unbalanced by grief. This has echoes of Ms Moshfegh’s previous book, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, which followed a New Yorker who sedates herself after the death of her parents.
The author’s almost comical determination not to play nice results in some typically discomfiting moments: Vesta rants about overweight women who wear cheap fabrics, and “sad mothers with nothing to do but eat and fold laundry with tiny, stubby fingers sticking out of their huge bloated hands”. In seeking to kick back against the fatuous (and no doubt gendered) assumption that a novel’s protagonist ought to be sympathetic, Ms Moshfegh is perhaps guilty of overcorrection, but she has always divided readers. Those new to her work should start with “Eileen”—the writing of which appears to be a coded subject of this meditation on storytelling as a conjuror’s trick.
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