![]() I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn’t thought about making it. Early in the novel, he remembers landing in New York with Johnson, who gushes ‘this is where the money is and this is where I want to make it … you’ll make it with me, right?’ McGlue does not want to make it: McGlue projects an inchoate and indiscriminate revulsion his repudiations are impulsive, excessive, grotesque. It is a work of jagged expressionism, all rancid atmosphere and grisly imagery. But the novel does not overly trouble itself with the psychology of trauma or addiction. By the time he was in his early twenties, he thinks bitterly, he was already so ‘hammered down’ that he knew he was ‘doomed’. The drinking that has punched black holes in his memory and scrambled his sense of chronology - and which makes him smell like ‘a dead horse’s ass’ - is motivated by a desire to obliterate his wretched past. As he travels toward this reckoning, he attempts to reconstruct events with what’s left of his ruined mind. The novel opens with him locked in the reeking hold of a ship that is returning him to his home town of Salem to be tried. McGlue has been accused of murdering his only friend Johnson, but has no recollection of doing so. These themes are established in Moshfegh’s scabrous first novel McGlue, which is set in 1851 and told from the shattered perspective of an alcoholic sailor. They are uncomfortable with their own embodiment they neglect their physical wellbeing (even maintaining minimal standards of personal hygiene would seem to be too much of a concession to the world’s phoniness) they cultivate self-destructive habits and seek solace in oblivion. Her characters recoil from a hateful reality, but they have also internalised its hatefulness. ![]() ![]() For Moshfegh, negative emotions always possess this double-edged quality. And this recurring note of fascinated distaste makes it hard to disentangle their misanthropy from their self-loathing. She revels in the grubbiness of the human body, splashes the ordure around like a preschooler in a muddy puddle. Her work has a corporeal, rebarbative, scatological quality. What makes Moshfegh an uncommon writer is that beneath the scorn and the dark humour there lurks an authentic Swiftian disgust. There is a special satisfaction in being invited to share the exquisite isolation and ennui that result when you are the only person smart enough to have realised that people are idiots and everything is a sham. Their caustic observations perform the same seductive trick: they draw you into an intimate alliance against the hypocrisy, absurdity and ugliness they see around them. The narrators of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation have a knowing air that is at times reminiscent of that archetypal world-weary adolescent Holden Caulfield, even though both of them are in their mid-twenties. Moshfegh is well aware that there is something a little jejune about this kind of sweeping contempt. It was the same thing I had about skinny people: I hated their guts.’ A fourth features a man who admits to having ‘a thing about fat people. A third story is narrated by someone who thinks the ‘entire world is stupid’. In another, a teacher complains that all she ever does is ‘contend with stupidity and ignorance’. ‘I hated almost everything,’ declares the narrator of Eileen ‘I was unhappy and angry all the time.’ Her dissatisfaction is shared by the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who feels like ‘a baby being born - the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile … the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.’ In one of the fourteen short stories collected in Homesick for Another World, the central character observes that people are ‘so dishonest with their clothes and their personalities’. Ottessa Moshfegh’s protagonists are, as a rule, unimpressed - with society, with their families and acquaintances, with life in general.
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