Human, All Too Human
Death in Her Hands explores the world inside and outside of its narrator’s head—and sometimes blurs the lines between the two.
Review by Schuy R. Weishaar
I don’t mind admitting that I had no idea who Ottessa Moshfegh was when I agreed to review her novel, Death in Her Hands. Such an admission may make me appear uninformed about the young hotshots of contemporary American fiction (which is true), but it also gives me some objectivity. I did google the author and scan through the thumbnails of the results on my phone (which, maybe, limits the aforementioned objectivity). Here’s the takeaway.: Moshfegh is a hotshot indeed. Among other prizes and nominations, she won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; she was a fiction finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. I also saw a New York Times article entitled “Ottessa Moshfegh is only Human,” the first line of which refers to her as “the author-provocateur.” So there’s a lot I don’t know about Moshfegh (and, apparently, about the world—like how to get someone to hyphenate “provocateur” into a description of your vocation, as well as how to convince people that you may not be human). However, I found Death in Her Hands very human indeed.
The novel is not in a hurry to get anywhere, and it is nearly plotless, or at least not worried about its plot. The narrator-protagonist of the novel is Vesta Gul, a recently widowed woman in her seventies, who, a year before the action of the story, had bought a cabin sight-unseen in the woods by a lake outside a scuzzy little town, and moved there out of the blue after adopting Charlie, a dog, her only companion. Her life is quiet and dominated by sameness and routine (seasonal chores, walking Charlie, cooking, wine, errands). At the beginning of the novel, Vesta finds a note in the woods. It says the following: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Except there’s no dead body, just the note and some little stones. Vesta’s mind clamps onto the note and won’t let go.
She seems to slide from reality to memory to delusion without distinguishing one from the next, which means the reader is along for the ride.
In an odd way, the book reminds me of the Wallace Stevens poem, “Anecdote of the Jar.” The poem begins:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The “placement” of the jar changes the world around it; to “place” an object reorganizes everything in its proximity because everything is thrown into relation with the “placed” object. By the end of the poem, Stevens writes that the jar “took dominion everywhere.” This is how the “found” letter impacts Death in Her Hands: once it shows up (whether “placed” or “found” or both), Vesta’s thoughts go reeling, and the story begins to take shape around the letter’s possibilities. Vesta, however, isn’t an organized thinker. She spins off in a hundred directions, thinking through how to take each word (a kind of textual analysis), inventing personalities and characteristics for this “Magda” and the letter-writer. At the public library, she reads webpages about solving murders and writing mysteries. She will do anything to better understand the situation she has found herself implicated in, so she begins sketching it out, constructing characters and developing possible motivations. And then she begins to run into these people, as if all she had to do was imagine them, commit them to writing, and they would materialize, fully formed but independent of their creator.
This overview makes things seem far more linear and contrived than the novel actually is. There is nothing contrived about it—and it’s only linear in the sense that a couple of days go by from the moment Vesta finds the letter to the time the novel ends. The plot, though, emerges from Vesta’s monologue, and the developing plot surrounding the letter from the woods is really only half of the novel; the other is Vesta’s own development, her reflection on her past, her marriage, her beauty, her regrets, her unlived life, her untapped potential. She seems to slide from reality to memory to delusion without distinguishing one from the next, which means the reader is along for the ride. There are moments when the mere mention of a possibility, a passing thought, or a remembered criticism, becomes a reality in the present that wasn’t there before, as if she’s dreaming changes into existence through the sheer force of her imagination (or of her delusions). But she does develop. As she ticks through this or that part of her mystery, she finds connections in the lives of her invented characters to her own long-repressed feelings, and they return to her present and emerge into the world. The two “sides” of the novel, the “suspense thriller” and Vesta’s diving into her own “mindspace,” are never wholly separate, but they do become inseparable by the end.
There are a lot of reasons to read this novel, not least of which is its ability to illuminate our idea of existence through a portrayal of a woman alone with herself.
Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands takes risks. It reminds me of the single-take, single-shot, feature-length film by director Alexander Sokurov, Russian Ark. Death in Her Hands gives the reader the sensation of a “single-shot,” though there are chapter divisions (but they’re largely unnecessary): Vesta finds the “Magda letter” in the woods, and then she never stops until the end. The book reminds me of the film in another way, too. They both look back at you. There are a few seconds in Russian Ark where one minor character looks right down the barrel of the camera, and there are moments where something seems to be looking out at the reader from within the book. The author? The reader’s own projection? (Perhaps I’m becoming delusional.) When Vesta’s characters literally leap off her pages, out of her imagination and into her life, it’s hard not to see the author looking back at you. I don’t mind this sort of thing, so long as it isn’t “cute,” so long as she isn’t winking, and I didn’t see Moshfegh winking.
Death in Her Hands is a personal book. I don’t know anything about how personal it is for the author. But it feels personal. Vesta herself becomes real as you listen to her meandering thoughts, her explorations of the “mindspace.” Vesta is human. Sometimes she’s horrible; often she’s funny. She’s definitely on the edge of herself; she’s largely opaque (and she likes it that way). But she also presents banalities of life in ways that remind you of their magic: black army coveralls as a “darkness suit” which one might use to hide from God, the complexities of a relationship with a dog (there’s so much depth on this one), the way past relationships never go away even when the other is dead. And then there’s the “mindspace” itself (Vesta’s word for whatever it is that encompasses one’s own thoughts and consciousness itself—it can be shared and leaks out through dreams). There are a lot of reasons to read this novel, not least of which is its ability to illuminate our idea of existence through a portrayal of a woman alone with herself. The novel demonstrates, for better and for worse, that the boundaries of the self are porous, even when we are alone. Even in isolation, Death in Her Hands seems to say, the “mindspace” bridges boundaries between us; it opens channels to “others.” Whether those “others” are human, or even real, is, however, a question the novel leaves open. But Moshfegh is more interested in leaving questions open than in answering them conclusively because, after all, she is at least human enough to know that conclusive answers to impossible questions ruin the fun to be had in thinking about them.
Schuy R. Weishaar is assistant professor of English at Trevecca Nazarene University. His most recent book, Doctor Nobody and the Lower Animals, was a finalist for the 2020 International Book Award in the novella category. His other books range from ground-breaking to award-winning. He lives in Old Hickory, Tennessee, where he also builds skate ramps for children in his free time.
Death in Her Hands was published on June 23, 2020, by Penguin Press. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
