Ottessa Moshfegh has built a career as one of the preeminent chroniclers of the unsettling, and thus it is no surprise that her most recent novel, Death in Her Hands, begins with a spooky note. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”, reads the note found by Vesta Gul, a mid-seventies widow on a walk with her beloved dog in a quite New England town. Vesta, who has recently moved from the midwest to this tiny rural town to live all alone, becomes immediately obsessed with solving the mystery of Magda’s death, despite the fact that there is no sign of the dead body or any other evidence. Vesta begins spinning her own mystery novel out of these simple sentences, imaging the note being left by Blake, a local floppy-haired teen who didn’t kill Magda but cared deeply for her. She imagines that Magda, a young woman who had recently immigrated from Belarus and worked at a McDonald’s on the highway, lived in Blake’s basement, rented out to her by Blake’s cold and poor mother. She imagines Magda’s family back home in Belarus, entirely unconcerned with her whereabouts. She even imagines some murder suspects, including a handsome local man, a “Harrison Ford-type” (who sounds a bit like a projection of Vesta’s deceased husband, Walter). Vesta uses the internet at the local library to concoct a mystery surrounding Magda’s death, supplementing her “Ask Jeeves” queries with inventions of her own imagination.
Vesta becomes obsessed with her investigation, she is constantly suspicious of the locals whom she runs into, and is always on alert for clues or messages for her from the murderer. Vesta’s active imagination seems not just a product of her boredom, but actually a product of something much darker: her crippling loneliness. As Vesta reflects further on her life and marriage, it is clear that Walter is not the wonderful man she initially described him to be, and he was in fact an abusive husband and a cheater, who isolated Vesta with his abuse. Vesta’s invention of Magda’s traumatic and isolating existence, with virtually no family or friends to speak of, seems like a projection of Vesta’s own past.
Central to the novel is Vesta’s conception of her other-ness, something that brings her closer to Magda. When she first learns of the victim’s name in the note, she remarks, “This was not a Jenny or Sally or Mary or Sue. Magda was a name for a character with substance.” As a child of immigrants, Vesta is conscious of the way her name stands out in the homogenous rural town of Levant, and a crucial part of her immediate connection with Magda is their shared identity as outsiders. It seems that Vesta feels a kinship with this Magda whom she has conjured a backstory for, lamenting her loneliness and inability to belong in town due to her foreign-ness, things that Vesta herself is struggling with as well. Magda becomes a projection of this loneliness, an outsider who shares many of Vesta’s traumas, and as Vesta plunges deeper into the mystery of Magda’s death, it is clear she is also looking for herself.
The conclusion to the novel is absolutely devastating, unravelling the narrative’s entire significance to a single desolate thread of loneliness. While Moshfegh makes it immediately clear that Vesta is an unreliable narrator, the full realization of her delusion is still deeply moving and eerie. While Vesta is a mostly detached and somewhat thorny narrator, as most of Moshfegh’s narrators are, she is also a sympathetic character. Isolated following the death of her husband, it begins to feel as if Vesta’s loneliness is a self-imposed response to the trauma she faced in her marriage. In the end, Moshfegh has crafted a haunting narrative without much room for hopefulness, which she has somehow managed to suffuse with a deep sensitivity to female loneliness.
Further Reading: Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are both wonderful novels, and Moshfegh’s story collection Homesick for Another World offers some excellent bite-sized spookiness.