The Power of Invisibility: A Review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands
Death In Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press
June 2020
ISBN: 978-1984879356
272 pages
Reviewed by Samantha Neugebauer
Death in Her Hands, the third novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, begins when Vesta Gul, a seventy-two-year-old recent widow, moves to a rural town and finds a note during her usual walk in the woods. The note, like so much in this metafictional story, is spooky. Readers learn a girl named Magda has been killed. “Here is her dead body,” the note says. But no dead body is in sight. In these first pages, Vesta claims, “No I didn’t see her body. Just the note. I left it there, of course.” Wheels start turning: is Magda implying that she left the note there for a moment or left it there for herself to find? Or is this Moshfegh showing her hand—Moshfegh did leave us this note, after all. In her new novel, Moshfegh is our M.C. Escher, and Death in Her Hands is a literary double of his lithograph Drawing Hands: we experience Vesta creating Magda while Magda creates Vesta.
Toward the beginning of the novel, Vesta explains her rationale for moving to an isolated cabin in the woods: “My mind needed a smaller world to roam.” Her late husband Walter had been a larger-than-life figure, and a man well respected in his scientific field. Still haunted by their marriage, Vesta compares him to Harrison Ford, but the comparison is too flattering. It becomes clear that Walter is like a different sort of fading, twentieth-century man: Ted Hughes. Like Hughes, Walter was tall, mercurial, and brilliant. It’s not a surprise Vesta’s other reason for her new start is that she wanted “only to do exactly what I wanted.” This includes, possibly, creating a murder mystery. In her new town, Levant, Vesta doesn’t spend time making friends with the locals, and this is where her haughtiness shows most. She explains, “Most people were blue collar and dull.” The narrative takes place over a short period and the structure’s hyperfocus on Magda’s inner monologue in her house and her quick jaunts to other locales (the library, the food store) is reminiscent of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Both novels begin in medias res with their protagonists grieving the loss of family. Vesta’s loyal dog Charlie plays the part of Reva, the fawning best friend from My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In both novels, Moshfegh has made her protagonists wealthy enough to afford not to work.
After the symbiotic relationship between Vesta and Magda has been established in Death in Her Hands, Vesta muses, “Maybe I was the only one who cared that Madga was gone.” Vesta may mourn her own youth through Magda, but she also revels in her new existence, which is more playful and more free now that she doesn’t need to live in Walter’s shadow. Vesta’s previous life consisted of being a good housewife and a hostess to Walter’s colleagues. In the essay collection How to Disappear (2019), Akiko Busch examines the pressure to be public and the power of invisibility, especially for older women. She claims, “As women become older, they entertain a wider set of choices about when and how they are seen.” In Death in Her Hands, Vesta takes full advantage of this.
Some early reviews have pointed to similarities between Death in Her Hands and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated 2018). Janina Duszejko (Tokarczuk's narrator) and Vesta are both unreliable narrators. They are both amateur detectives past childbearing age of Eastern European origins, and both cherish disappearing dogs and majestic deer, riff on William Blake, and muse about death. “Death was hard to look at, after all,” Vesta tells us, while Duszejko remarks, “Death is at the gates.” Death in Her Hands, a novel with Southern Gothic aesthetics, spends a good amount of time playfully winking at its reader and guessing at what that reader may be thinking: “‘Madga. She’s strange,’ they’d say.” In comparison, Tokarczuk’s book adheres closer to a mystery-novel structure and is filled with quirkier and more amusing secondary characters. In their respective kitchens, Vesta imagines the knife that kills Magda, and Duszejko imagines being a utensil. “I am a madwoman,” Duszejko pronounces, evoking none other than Dostoyevsky, while Vesta says, “It depressed me to think about existential issues.”
At their cores, the women are different: Duszejko thinks the sky can enter our bodies and our souls are like “a little ball of glass, if they exist at all.” Vesta has her own theories about the soul, which she calls “mindspace.” In her awing account, souls in a shared space can mix and mingle. For example, in bed at night, couples’ souls can leave their bodies and dance together. Souls can mix over the Internet too, which is less beneficial in Vesta’s estimation. On the Internet, “one’s mind can go anywhere…the mind becomes lame when it is connected to something so consuming.” Moshfegh doesn’t say it, but there’s an echo of this consumptive experience when writing or reading fiction too.
On the surface, one main difference between Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands and Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is the presence (or lack of) dead bodies. The deeper distinction, however, lies in how the two protagonists choose to use their invisibility. In old age, Vesta is devoted to herself, to her imagination and personal storytelling, while Duszejko appears devoted to others, to her animal activism, and making sense of the world through her chosen framework, astrology. Duszejko also works for a living, which keeps her connected to other humans and new experiences, while Vesta’s money stops her from needing to invest in others.
Like her character, Moshfegh has chosen invisibility too. In addition to being a brilliant writer, she is a marketing savant. While most younger writers have embraced social media, Moshfegh has absconded. Readers don’t get to witness Moshfegh engage in praise or outrage culture on Twitter. We see editorial photoshoots of her creepy “Casa de Pájaros” in Pasadena rather than shots of its interior on Instagram. And because her author biographies never mention it, we forget Moshfegh graduated from a coveted fully funded MFA program and afterwards was awarded a prestigious Stegner Fellowship and all the networking opportunities that are coterminous with those spaces. When she does speak, her words cultivate a certain mystique. “I know when I’m going to die,” Moshfegh said in a recent interview. This is the kind of line that could have been plucked from Duszejko’s lips, though Moshfegh has also said she forgets almost everything she reads.
In an echo of Moshfegh’s visibility, Busch, author of How to Disappear, has chosen to live in a rural part of the Hudson Valley. She has said about her work and her life: “I’m not promoting myself or personal identity, but what I’m trying to do here is advance an idea.” If our image in the public realm has increasingly become a mirror we use for our own ideas about ourselves and what groups we do and do not belong to, Moshfegh and Busch’s relative anonymity make them today’s rare birds. Moshfegh, in particular, is more often identifiable (and defined) by her work than her work is elucidated by her public biography.
Moshfegh’s retreat from the public doesn’t mean her work isn’t without elements of social critique. For example, Death in her Hands explores the link between rural poverty, obesity, and boredom. Vesta is repulsed by fat bodies—“even their children looked prematurely aged, so worn and bloated”—but she is astute enough to acknowledge the real failing is with the state, not the individual: “There were no outdoor recreation for kids…no playground…no jungle gym.” She feels grateful for the public parks in the richer neighborhood she shared with Walter. In this sense, both Vesta and Duszejko are cognizant of how we treat people who live on the fringe.
Like Vesta, Moshfegh appears dark, solitary, intelligent, and dare we say—witchy. In Kaitlin Phillips’ profile of Moshfegh in The Cut, the journalist describes the author’s signature mole as “halfway between a beauty mark and a witch’s mark.” In Death in Her Hands, Walter covers the top of Vesta’s face with a book, and asks, somewhat admiringly, “Who is this witch and where has she buried my wife?” And yet, repositioning the book to cover the lower half of her face, Vesta is beautiful.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller.
Samantha Neugebauer (@s_neugebauer105) is currently an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins University. She serves as an editor for The Painted Bride Quarterly, and is a co-producer for the podcast Slush Pile. She has worked in the UAE, China, Italy, England, Germany, Greece, and elsewhere. Her fiction, poetry, and reviews can be found in The Offing, Ploughshares, Columbia Journal and Singapore Unbound, among others. Connect with her at samanthaneugebauer.com.