You can’t help but trust her skills completely. Uncharacteristically bland and with a paltry plot that leads nowhere, the novel has to be one of the most bitterly disappointing releases of the year.It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again: When reading Ottessa Moshfegh, one gets the distinct impression that she’s a writer capable of anything. In her attempt to subvert the murder mystery genre, Ottessa Moshfegh has produced a pretty limp work. Even Yeats’s The Second Coming makes a brief cameo.Ĭould all these be clues to some great hidden meaning behind the novel, or are they simply a palimpsest of an earlier draft? There is genuinely no way of knowing. The next town over from Levant is Bethsmane, which, interestingly, if you try to Google brings up a “did you mean Gethsemane?” option.

The town where the novel is set is called Levant. Some are obvious, such as at one point a character mistakenly hearing the name Magda as Magdalene. St Sebastian, c’est moi.īut is Death in Her Hands all that it seems? Strangely, woven through the messy plot are some frayed threads of an apparent religious theme. Every disparaging word is like an arrow through my flesh. Therefore, it comes as no easy task to discuss Death in Her Hands. To read My Year of Rest and Relaxation for the first time is to burn all your possessions, shave your head, and pledge your soul to the divine Miss M – the Barefoot Ottessa. Moshfegh is one of those rare things: a great American writer. Perhaps my reaction to Death in Her Hands would not be as strong if I didn’t view it as such a personal disaster. Coincidences are regular and convenient, the purposeful haziness of the narrative just leads to confusion rather than ambience, and the minimal plot and characters makes the prose feel bulky, as if this were a short story that got out of hand. At worst it suggests laziness on behalf of the author, a sort of laziness that smothers this whole novel like sulphur. Whether this is Moshfegh’s way of slyly winking to the camera or not, having the main character of your not-so-great murder mystery novel literally consult a guide for writing murder mystery novels reads as myopic at best. By simply making up a backstory for Magda and inventing possible motives, Vesta believes she can hone a list of suspects and edge closer towards solving the case.

Early on in her investigation and with absolutely no leads, Vesta decides to consult an online questionnaire that is intended to help novelists flesh out the characters and motives of their murder mystery novels.

Death in her hands novel