OTTESSA MOSHFEGH Death in Her Hands. Reviewed by Lou Mentor
Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel is an unconventional mystery that walks a fine line between reality and existential fantasy, probing the nature of memory, identity and loss.
Vesta Gul is not your typical little old lady. At 72 years of age she lives a hermit-like existence on the outskirts of the unwelcoming blue-collar township of Levant. Her lakeside house is an old Girl Scout cabin built on the property of the old Girl Scout camp that she bought for a bargain price after the death of her husband, Walt, and the sale of their old home in Monlith. It is a solitary way of life she has chosen for herself, but her scrupulously negative opinion of the township of Levant does make you wonder. She is restless, in thought and mind.
Her main problem with Levant is what it is not:
…That was the problem in Levant. Nobody was restless. Everything was set in its ways. Anything that was out of the ordinary was tossed out or ignored. Nobody had bothered to make friends with me on the lake. I had neighbors half a mile around the shoreline. They had waved just once when I passed them in my rowboat. And the way they’d waved was as if to say, ‘This is our property. Get away, go.’ I just wanted to explore a bit. I just wanted to know how they kept things up over there …
Her only companion is her retriever, Charlie. While out walking Charlie through the birch woods that surround her remote home, she stumbles across a strange note that appears to confess knowledge of a crime:
Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.
There is no dead body. There is no missing girl called Magda. There is just the note. But it becomes the catalyst for Vesta to embark on an investigation into the truth behind the missive and the identity of the dead Magda. Her quest doesn’t take the usual shape of most detective novels. Rather, it is a meandering review of her own inner life, merging past, present, and future, that informs her inquiry. Her thoughts create seemingly random connections between the monotony of her routines in Levant – these include a weekly expedition to the neighbouring town of Bethsmane to stock up on groceries and exchange library books – to her daily care of Charlie. She is utterly alone. A woman prone to wild supposition, her paranoid inner ramblings fill the lonely days with accounts of often menacing characters: Henry the badly disfigured Levant storekeeper, Pastor Jimmy on the radio calling for religious conversions, and her lost husband Walt, who was an epistemologist of German heritage and a keeper of secrets.
She explores the possibilities of the note obsessively, her inner soliloquies sweeping from the general to the minute, pondering the nature of thought itself:
… was there a separate mind I kept for myself? Whose mind was now at work, thinking of the note, imagining, debating, and remembering things as I walked down the path through the birch trees? Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether…
Behind it all, her febrile imagination and deep-seated mistrust of the unknown spring from wells of guilt and regret. Binding it all together is an ironic sense of humour that the reader cannot help but be swept along by as she continues her crazy quest. It leads her to ask the Bethsmane library computer’s search engine: ‘How does one solve a murder mystery?’
Its answer is a formulaic questionnaire to determine a list of potential suspects. Vesta diligently applies herself to the task, aided by her febrile imagination that happily engages with questions about her victim, Magda. Who was she? How old? Relationship status? Favourite foods? Strongest positive personality trait? ‘…Resilient. Self-reliant. Manipulative…’ Strongest negative personality traits? ‘Rude. Secretive.’
There is a sense that Vesta unmasks parts of herself in creating this profile of her victim. Her investigations into the crime behind the note create a kind of metafiction, as sophisticated as it is alarming. And when she is lured by clickbait to purchase a black camouflage bodysuit – a splurge for her after the years of frugality decreed by her late husband – the sense of imminent danger comes to the fore.
Imagined players in the murder of Magda spring to life and Vesta is thrown into situations remarkable for their happenstance. But then, with Vesta, who knows what’s real and what’s not? Or maybe that’s not the point. Maybe there is no difference. And that’s where the fear gets real.
An unusual murder mystery with a dark heart, Death in her Hands is a different approach to revealing a story as disturbing as it is entertaining.
Ottessa Moshfegh Death in Her Hands Penguin 2020 PB 272pp $29.99
Lou Mentor is a screenwriter and script editor, and co-writer of the feature film Pimped (watch the trailer here). You can connect with her on LinkedIn here.
You can buy Death in Her Hands from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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