Death and Despair in the Dark Ages: A review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Lapvona”
Graphic by Breah Johnson
To read the works of Ottessa Moshfegh is to understand, perhaps, what composer Gioachino Rossini meant when he stated, “Tous les genres sont bons, Hors le genre ennuyeux.” All genres are good, except the boring one.
In fact, if nothing else, the ever-changing genre and writing material are the only constants in Moshfegh’s work. “[She] is the OG ‘never let them know your next move,’” writes one TikToker of Moshfegh’s vast catalog of work. As I-D’s profile on Moshfegh suggests, “Those who came to Ottessa via “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” may find themselves somewhat out of their depth in “Lapvona” (2022), a book that often feels like the diametric opposite of her most famous work.”
However, as Moshfegh admits in the interview, that was always her plan - “I always want to do something that’s completely different.”
“Lapvona,” Moshfegh’s latest novel, is set in a medieval fiefdom and follows the life of Marek, a disfigured, whiny, “motherless shepherd boy” and a slew of other chaotic and unappealing characters. One is an elderly, blind village witch and wet nurse, Ina, who nurses infants and adults alike with her miraculous milk, including Marek, whose mother, while pregnant with him, Ina once coached through a failed abortion attempt. Marek’s father, Jude, self-flagellates himself each Friday night in an attempt to reach God through his suffering. Though God-fearing as with the rest of the village of Lapvona, he is greedy and cruel, often taking out his anger on Marek through brutal beating. “…Jude’s piety was a kind of violent urge and not the love and peace it ought to be,” Marek remarks.
Lapvona, the village, is overseen by the selfish lord and governor, Villiam, who, unlike the common people he controls, lives lavishly in his hilltop manor, far away from the droughts and violence plaguing the village. When Marek murders Villiam’s son, Jacob, under mysterious circumstances, the fathers (and long–lost cousins) Jude and Villiam decide on an eye-for-an-eye exchange, and Marek is brought into the estate to live as the lord’s surrogate son and heir. “Then Jude was gone, carting off Jacob’s stiffening corpse, not a word to the boy he had raised for thirteen years.” With Marek now in Villiam’s familial circle, the curtain behind the lord’s sadistic curation of the village’s “natural” disasters, encouraged by the manor’s faulty priest, Father Barnabas, is pulled. “If the Lapvonians had any sense” thinks Villiam, “they would have noticed long ago that the bandits only raided the town when there were rumors of villagers hoarding food-stuffs after a plentiful harvest.”
During the “Summer” famine and drought portion of the novel – making up the second quarter of the stories seasonally titled four sections – Moshfegh’s title, the Priestess of Filth, á la critic Andrea Long Chu’s ruthless takedown of the author, came into focus in gruesome clarity. The villagers, all on the brink of death and disease, spend their days gossiping about the food they can no longer uncover from their depleted soils. Desperate for anything and devoid of any resources, they have resorted to extreme measures. Eating, as Jude remarks, “dead bees, bats, vermin, worms, dirt, and even old, desiccated cakes of animal dung had filled their bellies.” After saving a dying villager from the hands of his starving neighbors, undoubtedly on the brink of cannibalism, Jude is encouraged by Ina, whom he visits in her cave, to eat the dead man. In one of his sympathetic moments, Jude asks: “What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?” “It doesn’t matter,” she said. I won’t know anyone.” Eventually, after he “prayed and cried for himself and licked the tears from his palms,” Jude and Ina roast the man on the fire.
“By nightfall, all that remained of Klim was his head, neck, and torso. Jude had first eaten the man’s narrow bicep, his first ever taste of meat, and it had ignited in him the hunger and the strength to go back out and chop the man’s leg from the pubis and roast it, foot and all, on the fire…”
Readers of Moshfegh should not be entirely taken aback by the brutality in “Lapvona.” Her previous works encompass a similar, yet lesser degree, of the grotesque. Eileen, the titular character of Moshfegh’s 2015 novel, is a prudish, 24-year-old prison clerk with “hard mounds” for breasts, a laxative addiction, and an innate interest in her own bodily secretions. After getting fired from her art-gallery job, the narrator in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018) defecates on the floor and stuffs her toilet paper into the mouth of a dog sculpture. Undoubtedly, however, Moshfegh’s previous novels are a far cry away from the graphic depictions of rape, murder, cannibalism, and incest which appear in “Lapvona.”
While such descriptions do seem excessive at times - readers of novels like Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” (1991) may be reminisced by the obscenity - I do not believe, in rebuttal to several reviews of Lapvona, that these inclusions are simply for shock value. Instead, Moshfegh’s commitment to the gore and the depravity of her characters is telling in her sentences themselves. They cut like a knife, leaving the villagers of her novels begging for more or turning their heads in fear. This is not budget horror film jump scares. The tale of “Lapvona” is not the things of nightmares or of those unmasked figures that go bump in the night. It is the stuff of reality, albeit a metaphorical reality set in a fictitious village hundreds of years ago.
One needs to admit some bias as a review. And I would be remiss for me not to make clear that I believe Moshfegh is the smartest writer of our generation. However, even in that regard, it is hard to debate on Moshfegh’s behalf during particularly disturbing scenes which do little to move the enigmatic plot forward. Critics have not been wary of pointing this out. In short, it seems many of them can not get past the brutality or at least struggle to understand why one would craft a novel so inherently disgusting. “…it soon becomes clear that this plot, like the medieval setting, is secondary to the pulsing, quivering tissue of incident and carnality that it facilitates,” wrote Rob Doyle for The Guardian. Likewise, The New York Times conceded that “Lapvona” has the odd effect and episodic quality of ’80s-era VHS slasher movies, made for an audience that wanted an endorphin rush of terror coated in knowing genre tropes and gory slapstick.” In Chu’s nearly 5,000-word review of the novel, she suggested that “Moshfegh may be a cynic, but she has never been a proper satirist,” based on her opinion that that role requires “an idealogy.” The New Republic kept it simple, calling “Lapvona” a “relentless gore fest.”
In many ways, what they’re saying is not wrong. “Lapvona” is not a novel I would recommend to friends. I, as probably most of us, don’t unusually read novels with explicit details of child sexual abuse and eagerly pass it on to the next eager reader. Who wants to read things like this? But like the vast majority of young people who sit through A24 films with graphic face-smashings and beheadings and tweet on the rawness and edginess that sets the studio apart from other old-timer Hollywood houses - there is something to be said about Moshfegh’s dedication to making art for art sakes. Like A24 movies, Lapvona’s characters are irrevocably complicated, with the level of insanity and ills of our society turned high enough to give the reader the feeling that they are, in fact, reading something that has not been done before.
Moshfegh’s novels are daring. There is no resting on her laurels or churning out novels for the sake of adding another to her repertoire. There is an innate sense, through her dissection of societal and cultural behaviors, that Moshfegh is not writing to please an audience but to assist herself in understanding the world around her. In a 2017 interview, after “Eileen” won the PEN/Hemingway Award and cemented Moshfegh as a promising young writer on the publishing front, she discussed her reaction to her success and the purpose behind her writing, reexamining her first novella, “McGlue” (2014).
“ . …nobody wants to talk about McGlue because it’s too far away from the commercial crap that they’re used to reading. So I knew I needed to write something that was going to be reminiscent of the crap that people are used to, so it wasn’t going to threaten them so much. I needed a way into the mainstream because, you know what? How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos.”
After succeeding in her goal of reaching commercial success, it seems Moshfegh may be back to the experimental. Perhaps it is time for readers to be threatened, to read a novel that makes them think, whether those thoughts are in support of or against the work. I, for one, am glad to see someone trying something else on in the literary sphere.
