piousness, ottessa thought, was weird and gross

i endure lapvona (book) and eileen (movie)

i wasn’t acquainted with ottessa moshfegh through her work or her interviews. my only exposure to her was from a seething and highly amusing profile on vulture by andrea long chu—who is, for reference, a book reviewer that won a pulitzer prize for criticism.

“In writing, I think a lot about how to shit,” she once advised her fellow fiction writers. “What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat.”

This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Even if such readers exist, there is no reason to write books for them—not because novels are for the elite but because the first assumption of every novel must be that the reader will infinitely exceed it.

Fear of the reader, not of God, is the beginning of literature. Deep down, Moshfegh knows this. Yet the novelist continues to write as if her readers are fundamentally beneath her; as if they, unlike her, have never stopped to consider that the world may be bullshit; as if they must be steered, tricked, or cajoled into knowledge by those whom the universe has seen fit to appoint as their shepherds.

— Ottessa Moshfegh Is Praying for Us

the argument chu makes is that while moshfegh has been hailed as a high priestess of filth, the extent of her literary merit lies in her “ability” to purify her readers. and that purity promptly shines through the asshole.

lapvona is said to be the most extreme iteration of moshfegh’s writing style. opening the book to the epigraph “i feel stupid when i pray, demi lavoto,” let me know from the start just how deeply unserious ottessa is (we’re moving to first name basis).

the story follows a shepherd boy named marek that is so addicted to suffering that he constantly seeks out punishment and distorted acts of love. it’s about civility and savagery and something vaguely religious, but ottessa doesn’t know how to sow dissent through the plot. she writes purely for vibes, disguising her obsession with disgust as an exploration of moral depravity. for all the shit that she throws around these pages to make a point, none of them really land.

pain was good, marek felt. it brought him closer to his father’s love and pity… but jude’s piety was a kind of violent urge and not the love and peace it ought to be. he had forgotten purity. it had been brushed aside and replaced with a desire to please.

ottessa loves the gross and weird, but she has no respect for it. for pages, you sit through incest, a thirteen year old boy sucking the tit of an old blind woman (grow tf up marek), gore, a servant girl forced to eat grapes previously shoved up the anus, cannibalism, sexual assault, and so much shit that every scene proved andrea long chu right. ottessa writes these things with a monotone reverence and the inability to treat themes purposefully. she remains curt and uninterested and pious in the exact ways she says jude is not.

her prose is short and redundant. there’s no substance to her statements, and more often than not, each sentence sounds like an observation she’s made about herself to project onto others.

and yet he didn’t see the hypocrisy of his disdain, as he was stupid, too.

i can only contextualize this sentiment from lapvona in particular: ottessa writes like her readers are stupid. she won’t give space for anyone to come to conclusions of their own. to my knowledge, ottessa never claimed to write satire, and her politics begin and end with human depravity. but she isn’t good at making a commentary out of anything either.

he was an innocent, he told himself, a child. if some stray impulse had resulted in horror—a simple rock was all it was—someone should be comforting him, in fact.

i have it on good authority (reem) that ottessa is a serial self inserter. i’m going to go one step further and diagnose her with a big ick of mine. there’s a difference between character voice and literary style. ottessa lacks the tact to make a much-needed distinction. even with all of her experience and prizes and awards, it is ottessa’s handle on craft that ruins my appetite. not the content or the characters or the unnecessary piles of shit.

i hate how she uses thought, which is so minuscule and pretentious of me to point out had she used the specific phrase once or twice. it’s not a stylistic or narrative critique. it’s elementary. ottessa holds the hand of readers who don’t need her. actually, scratch that—she keeps her readers on a leash. we’re already reading this character’s perspective, why not let the writing and context speak for itself?

every writer has crutch—a cheeky repetitive thing added subconsciously (too many like’s or just’s or very’s)—that a good editor would point out and remove if it exists in excess. she must not have a good editor.

this is ottessa’s crutch: [sentence fragment, they thought, sentence fragment]. it was tiresome in isolation while reading lapvona (46 times. 46). but then i picked up death in her hands and two pages in the offending crutch was there in plain view. having seen eileen adapted (evan held me at gunpoint), i will say that ottessa’s world translates better into film. in that same vein, it exposes another persistent little crutch of hers. this time, one that is thematic.

villiam liked grotesque topics of conversation, nasty comedy always conveyed as colloquially as a passing fancy. he liked to be entertained. he was dogged in his pursuit of diversion and it of those around him.

society rebukes and fears pleasure. in ottessa’s literary canon, the act of seeking pleasure for yourself is not relief or release or masturbation. it is molestation. here’s where that distinction between character voice and literary style could have saved ottessa from this criticism. an excuse to give her grace because character does not have to align with author. that’s not what this is. reading it in lapvona is one thing, hearing anne hathaway using molestation to refer to pleasuring oneself immediately after is another.

novelists have recurring themes that show up in all their work, all the time. i’m not critical of what she writes (well!), but more disillusioned by how she writes it. ottessa’s thematic crutch is sick language in favor of ruining connotation, of proving that humans dirty our hands for pleasure and desire and that makes us beings beneath God—except the higher power she insinuates is herself, not thou who art in heaven.

a writer that relies on shock factor to entertain does not have an impressive handle on craft. i may be of the minority that is not moved by saint!moshfegh, but i’ll stand by taste alone.

one of these days i’m going to pick up a proclaimed masterpiece and genuinely enjoy it. today is not that day. if this is ottessa at her most extreme, i don’t care to read works at her tamest.