Life is gross ain’t that divine?ĭeath in Her Hands leaps into action immediately: “Her name was Magda. It’s less a form of Stoicism than an inversion of the old saw that puts cleanliness next to Godliness. So it’s hard to know what to make of her newest novel, which posits rejection as the path to the holy. Rejection is her belief you might call it nihilism. It rises above the trillion other hard-luck stories out there and indicates a talent ready to operate within and outside the norm.Moshfegh’s novels, uninterested in the dominant modes of contemporary fiction-the genteel tale of middle-class concerns, the politically engaged social novel, the self-aware meta-text-represent a riposte to her near-peers (Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, et al.). It had its highs and lows, but I can recommend the book to anyone with a strong stomach and a pulse. I appreciated the frank and telling depiction of life’s gruesome hardships and felt the struggle of a woman trying and failing to make something of a depressing life. We live vicariously through characters like this. It is not concise or overly elegant, but it does its job of carrying the reader through the typical scenarios with verve. Alcoholic fathers and dying mothers have become cliches, but what works best amid the unremitting bleakness of the setting is the strong voice. Moshfegh came off as genuine in her portrayal of a sloppy woman, living messily, in a messed-up world. The sub-genre of this also mix in race relations and historical atrocities, just to add fuel to the fire of suffering and distinctly human cruelty. I return to and rephrase the question: Why do we like to read about miserable people who sadly shuffle through meaningless existences? Franzen and others help us tackle this difficult quandary in countless iterations of men and women cheating on one another and making fools of themselves in public. The titular main character was more realistic in my opinion. Contrasted with my recent read of Liar, Dreamer, Thief, I much prefer this book, which did not talk down to its reader. It was a tad more intimate (grosser) than average, and had a quick pace and compelling voice. This is the first thing of hers I’ve read, and it was standard 1st person literary fiction. But unlike Roth or Updike, I feel like her work is more fluid, less samey.
I see that Moshfegh manages to impress literary readers while also capturing a large audience, ie, being a bestseller.
I ask myself this whenever I try to define the difficult term “literary fiction.” I think of Philip Roth and John Updike most readily.
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