"Death in Her Hands" by Ottessa Moshfegh

Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

A Review

When I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation I was impressed with the novel … and with how obnoxious its protagonist was.  Then I came across some interviews with the author and her tone was so similar to the character she created that I started to suspect that Moshfegh’s public persona was part of an elaborate game she was playing with her readers.

This playful element is certainly present in her latest novel – Death in Her Hands.  The first line presents us with a challenge or a puzzle: Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.  

This enigmatic confession/defence is anonymously handwritten on a note left in a path in the woods, outside the New England town of Levant.  It is discovered by Vesta, a seventy-two-year-old widow who has recently moved to a cabin in the area, following the death of her husband Walter.  Vesta Gul (pronounced “like the ocean bird”) leads a solitary life, her only company being her dog Charlie.  The note – with no body to go with it – sparks Vesta’s overactive imagination. She starts building theories as to who “Magda” might have been and who might have killed her. She gives Magda flesh and blood and a backstory.  As Vesta becomes increasingly confused, the divide between reality and Vesta’s imagination becomes increasingly blurred, as the characters she invents step into the novel itself.  

The result is, at one level, a witty piece of meta-fiction which borrows and satirizes the tropes of crime novels. There is a brilliant scene in which Vesta uses the “Ask Jeeves” search engine on a computer terminal at the local library:

“Is Magda dead?” I Asked Jeeves. What I found were 626,000 web pages, the first dozen devoted to a tragic story of how a young British fan of what seemed to be a highly successful all-boy band…dropped dead one morning waiting for the school bus.

Vesta later asks “How does one solve a murder mystery”.  The search results are close to advice on writing a crime novel….  “Make a list of suspects. Ask each suspect outright “Why did you murder [victim]?” Base your strategy around finding the liar.”   Indeed, Vesta soon stumbles upon a website with “top tips for mystery writers” although she is dismissive of what she finds there:

“Reading lots of mysteries is essential.”  That seemed like ridiculous advice. The last thing anyone should do is stuff her head full of other people’s ways of doing things. That would take all the fun out. Does one study children before copulating to produce one? Does one perform a through examination of others’ feces before rushing to the toilet? Does one go around asking people to recount their dreams before going to sleep? No. Composing a mystery was a creative endeavour, not some calculate procedure. If you know how the story ends, why even begin?

The real mystery is Vesta herself and her role in the novel:  is she an investigator, a sort of eccentric Miss Marple, or is she a "conceptual" author figure, making up the story we’re reading?

Vesta increasingly reveals details about her former life as the wife of Walter Gul, a German epistemologist of Turkish descent who, it seems, treated his wife as merely a pretty decoration to take to parties, whilst bedding a succession of young students.  We learn about her daily hurts, the decades of being treated disdainfully and patronizingly, a life of suspicion and lies.   Although, of course, with a narrator like Vesta, we can never be sure of where truth ends and fiction begins.

In true “mystery” fashion, Moshfegh throws several red herrings into the mix. Except that in the case of this novel, these do not relate to the plot, but to the meaning behind the novel itself.  There seem to be certain autobiographical elements (Vesta has Croatian roots and Moshfegh herself is half-Croatian), references to the poetry of Blake and Yeats, as well as puzzling religious references:  the murder victim is called “Magda(len)”, there is a town called Bethsmane (Bethlehem + Gethsemane) and one of the potential suspects is a policeman called “Ghod”.   All this seems to point to some obscure gnostic truth.  But my view is these are all games which Moshfegh likes to play.   She has herself described her novel as a “loneliness story” – and perhaps that’s the kernel of the book.  Behind the black comedy and the stylistic pyrotechnics, this is a strangely touching novel about the loneliness of a long-suffering woman.

Kindle Edition, 272 pages

Published April 23rd 2020 by Vintage Digital