{"id":2818,"date":"2021-01-27T20:52:12","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T20:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=2818"},"modified":"2021-01-27T20:52:17","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T20:52:17","slug":"death-in-her-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/01\/27\/death-in-her-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"Death in Her Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Human, All Too Human<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Death in Her Hands<\/em> explores the world inside and outside of its narrator\u2019s head\u2014and sometimes blurs the lines between the two.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Schuy R. Weishaar<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I don\u2019t mind admitting that I had no idea who Ottessa Moshfegh was when I agreed to review her novel, Death in Her Hands. <\/em>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\u2019s the takeaway.<\/span>: Moshfegh is<\/em> 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<\/em> article entitled \u201cOttessa Moshfegh is only Human,\u201d the first line of which refers to her as \u201cthe author-provocateur.\u201d So there\u2019s a lot I don\u2019t know about Moshfegh (and, apparently, about the world\u2014like how to get someone to hyphenate \u201cprovocateur\u201d 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 <\/em>very human indeed.<\/p>

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: \u201cHer name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn\u2019t me. Here is her dead body.\u201d Except there\u2019s no dead body, just the note and some little stones. Vesta\u2019s mind clamps onto the note and won\u2019t let go.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In an odd way, the book reminds me of the Wallace Stevens poem, \u201cAnecdote of the Jar.\u201d The poem begins:<\/p>

I placed a jar in Tennessee,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

And round it was, upon a hill.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

It made the slovenly wilderness\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

Surround that hill.<\/p>

The \u201cplacement\u201d of the jar changes the world around it; to \u201cplace\u201d an object reorganizes everything in its proximity because everything is thrown into relation with the \u201cplaced\u201d object. By the end of the poem, Stevens writes that the jar \u201ctook dominion everywhere.\u201d This is how the \u201cfound\u201d letter impacts Death in Her Hands<\/em>: once it shows up (whether \u201cplaced\u201d or \u201cfound\u201d or both), Vesta\u2019s thoughts go reeling, and the story begins to take shape around the letter\u2019s possibilities. Vesta, however, isn\u2019t an organized thinker. She spins off in a hundred directions, thinking through how<\/em> to take each word (a kind of textual analysis), inventing personalities and characteristics for this \u201cMagda\u201d 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.<\/p>

This overview makes things seem far more linear and contrived than the novel actually is. There is nothing contrived about it\u2014and it\u2019s 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\u2019s monologue, and the developing plot surrounding the letter from the woods is really only half of the novel; the other is Vesta\u2019s 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\u2019t there before, as if she\u2019s 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 \u201csides\u201d of the novel, the \u201csuspense thriller\u201d and Vesta\u2019s diving into her own \u201cmindspace,\u201d are never wholly separate, but they do become inseparable by the end.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Moshfegh\u2019s Death in Her Hands <\/em>takes risks. It reminds me of the single-take, single-shot, feature-length film by director Alexander Sokurov, Russian Ark<\/em>. Death in Her Hands <\/em>gives the reader the sensation of a \u201csingle-shot,\u201d though there are chapter divisions (but they\u2019re largely unnecessary): Vesta finds the \u201cMagda letter\u201d 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<\/em> 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\u2019s own projection? (Perhaps I\u2019m becoming delusional.) When Vesta\u2019s characters literally leap off her pages, out of her imagination and into her life, it\u2019s hard not to see the author looking back at you. I don\u2019t mind this sort of thing, so long as it isn\u2019t \u201ccute,\u201d so long as she isn\u2019t winking, and I didn\u2019t see Moshfegh winking.<\/p>

Death in Her Hands<\/em> is a personal book. I don\u2019t 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 \u201cmindspace.\u201d Vesta is human. Sometimes she\u2019s horrible; often she\u2019s funny. She\u2019s definitely on the edge of herself; she\u2019s 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 \u201cdarkness suit\u201d which one might use to hide from God, the complexities of a relationship with a dog (there\u2019s so much depth on this one), the way past relationships never go away even when the other is dead. And then there\u2019s the \u201cmindspace\u201d itself (Vesta\u2019s word for whatever it is that encompasses one\u2019s own thoughts and consciousness itself\u2014it 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<\/em> for worse, that the boundaries of the self are porous, even when we are alone. Even in isolation, Death in Her Hands<\/em> seems to say, the \u201cmindspace\u201d bridges boundaries between us; it opens channels to \u201cothers.\u201d Whether those \u201cothers\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Schuy R. Weishaar<\/strong> is assistant professor of English at Trevecca Nazarene University. His most recent book,\u00a0<\/em>Doctor Nobody and the Lower Animals,\u00a0was 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.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Death in Her Hands <\/em><\/strong>was published on June 23, 2020, by Penguin Press. You can purchase a copy from the publisher <\/em>here<\/a>.<\/em>
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Death in Her Hands explores the world inside and outside of its narrator\u2019s head\u2014and sometimes blurs the lines between the two. 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