A Review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona

I chose this novel as my first review because a conversation about it was what initially sparked the idea for the review series. This is the first of many planned reviews and interviews about transgressive writing by women authors. I’ll be looking for more books to include in the series and would love to hear from other fans of transgressive writing about books they think deserved to be covered.

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A friend of mine said Moshfegh writes like a man. I don’t disagree, and I’m reluctant to admit this, but it’s probably one of the reasons I liked her novel, Lapvona, so much. I often find myself drawn to women writers who, for lack of a better descriptor, write like men. They have a frankness and write in an unselfconscious, unabashed way that I connect with. Their lack of concern for propriety, modesty, or social mores comes across as indelicate, indecent, and sometimes even brutal, but to me feels honest in the way a lot of other writing doesn’t.

When I read writers who use pretty euphemisms and gloss over all the untidy parts, I can’t help but think, but that’s not how life really is. Life is gross, unseemly, and very often quite brutal. Why should any artist feel compelled to present such a neat and sanitized version of it?

This might be why reading Lapvona for me was such a singular and arresting experience. Moshfegh’s ability to tap into the worst aspects of human nature—and her total and complete lack of reservation about sharing those things with us—makes her a bit of an outlier. The characters in Lapvona are often complex and sympathetic, but are, to the man/woman, entirely irredeemable. There are no good guys in this novel, and it is through witnessing her characters imperfect humanity that we are forced to engage with our own. In this strange novel about a crippled and abused shepherd boy who becomes an unlikely figurehead, no subject is taboo or shied away from, no act too depraved to be depicted. There is one scene in Lapvona with a grape that is such an unnecessary and casual abuse of power—I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say, it is so thoroughly disgusting that I think it may have turned me off eating grapes for life. It is this ability to get deep under the reader’s skin that makes Moshfegh’s writing so powerful.

It’s easy to dismiss small indignities and abuses couched in pretty language or tacked on as footnotes, or to think of them as entirely other when committed by monstrous or unsympathetic characters, but while the characters in Lapvona are generally quite vile, they are fleshed and human enough to elicit sympathy from the reader. Their actions seem if not at all good or virtuous, at least somewhat logical given their circumstances. Moshfegh leaves us wondering: given the same terrible conditions would we really behave all that differently? She binds us to her characters and forces us to suffer with them and then documents a myriad of abominations in the most revolting detail, ensuring there is no overlooking the cruelties and horrors she describes.

Much of the current commercial fiction offerings are moralistic and incredibly didactic in what feels to me like a very patronizing way, so I was very surprised to stumble on a commercial novel that didn’t try to sanitize or moralize any of the awful things it depicted. And by a woman writer, no less! While the current moral panic has been stifling to everyone, I do think Women are uniquely primed to worry about how what they write will be perceived. I wonder if the tendency for us to sanitize stems from a feeling of self consciousness. I know I often have to push through a sense of being judged by some looming hypothetical critic bent on intentionally misunderstanding my carefully considered thoughts while writing things I know will make others uncomfortable. Women are taught from an early age what is and isn’t “nice” and expected to uphold a level of decorum that men simply aren’t. All women have at some time been subjected to double standards regarding decorum. Maybe we’re told our brother’s farts are funny, but ours are unladylike, or the slick woman chaser is a chad, but the girl who openly enjoys sex is a slut. These behavioural standards are internalized, and I suspect result in a lot of unconscious self-censorship. Censorship that often bleeds through to what we write.

Of course, because woman are held to a different standard of decorum it can be social suicide to breach the unspoken rules of nicety. Not giving a fuck frequently comes at a cost to female artists. To be too candid or explicit, to lack self censorship, is to risk social alienation. And of course those that flout moral convention are often classified as peddlers of smut or not taken very seriously as writers.

To counter this some authors cloak their more provocative work in fantasy. Speculative fiction, a thriving genre, remains a safe outlet for tales of the dark and the deviant. There is less personally at stake if the monsters aren’t real. Unlike with realist writing, where the author risks being conflated with the actions and views of their characters, no one mistakes a fantasy character’s actions for the inclinations of the author. This is an interesting aspect of Lapvona. While there are some minor elements of magical realism within the story they are so infrequent as to be almost incidental. The story is set in medieval Europe, not some far flung fantasy realm, and the monsters in Lapvona all feel incredibly human. The transgressions they commit are not born of monstrous appetites or grand sweeping bids for world domination but instead result from strife, festering psychological wounds, loneliness, boredom, self preservation, and general human self-centredness. As strange as Lapvona is, it still feels very grounded in a plausible reality.

Other authors chose to wrap transgression in euphemism and layers of pretty language. Something to soften the ugliness; round off any hard edges. They may also shy away from writing unsympathetic female characters. The exception, of course, being the female antagonist. The archetypal mean girl, mother-in-law, or stepmother. These characters are mostly a foil for the long-suffering protagonist (who embodies virtue, even if they do stumble occasionally on their path to righteousness). Because these antagonists lack real depth the author and reader are not presumed to sympathize with them. Their clearly defined role as the bad guy safely marks them as “other.”

I wonder if this is why historically many of the most iconic best-worst female characters are written by men. Complex and complicated characters such as Emma Boveray, Lady Macbeth, Becky Sharp, Mildred Rogers, Blanche Dubois, Miss Havisham, and Anna Karenina all come to mind. There are of course exceptions, Scarlett O’Hara and Catherine Earnshaw for instance—and I should add that it is far more common to see these types of characters in independent literature where the expectations of morality are less stifling—but it seems like they are vastly outnumbered by their male-written counterparts in popular fiction. And for every bad-girl literary character written by a woman, there are a dozen or more think pieces on how the author is a bad feminist for choosing to represent problematic behaviour.

Moshfegh again subverts this trend by not just giving us complicated bad-boys or antagonists, but also presenting us with incredibly complex female characters. In Lapvona some of the woman we encounter are outsiders, navigating difficult circumstances with little else but their wits. A blind woman who lives in the woods and acts as a midwife and wet nurse, used, and neglected. She utilizes the few things available to her to ensure her own self preservation in the midst of devastating famine. Or a runaway teen mother who abandons her deformed child to the cruel man who raped her, then later rejects her child once more without remorse. Other female characters are complicit in their own oppression in order to maintain their tenuous social positions. A maid who routinely participates in her own abuse and is made to serve the person who killed her lover, and a village woman who become privy to the amorality and excesses of the nobility while her townspeople suffer and chooses to remain quiet rather than be singled out as the spark of unrest. None of these women feels particularly heroic or aspirational in any way. Most wouldn’t even garner a label of antihero. Our sympathy for them stems not from any desire to relate to them, but more from a sense that whether we like to admit it or not, we all have some innate selfish drive for personal preservation. We are left wondering what terrible behaviours we ourselves could be driven to and what inhuman suffering and indignities we could be made to endure.

Maybe I am an outlier, but I believe there are more women like me. Women who crave complexity and who find a lack of frankness in writing to be a bit too tidy. I think this is evident in the strong demand for erotica and speculative literature that deals with darker topics, but I would like to see more nuanced work like this that doesn’t feature fairytale monsters or in novels where storylines that don’t directly involve sex are purely incidental.

I’m not sure if this is a sexist thing to do, to compare a woman’s writing to a man’s, or even simply just to have this sort of personal inclination. To want more stories by women that deal with complex subjects and that don’t shy away from the explicit. I can’t help but wonder how much of what women chose to write about is innate aesthetic preference and how much of it is socialized. I suppose we can’t know so long as fear of reprobation exists.

I realize that making this kind of feminine/masculine comparison might come across as unsupportive of woman writers. But I suppose the best any of us can do is present our ideas in an honest and well-intentioned manner and hope they are received with equanimity. I do think that acknowledging the complex feelings I have about the art that I engage with is more important than any dissonance I feel about being right or wrong or holding perfect opinions. In fact, I think it’s the act of exploring biases and sitting and engaging with things we find uncomfortable, something Moshfegh does in Lapvona exceptionally well, that allows us the truest insight into the contradictions inherent in our own humanity.