RaveThe Irish TimesShe has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders, most of them women, and for their uncomfortable and often unpretty inhabitance of their bodies ... there is a great deal more layered compassion than there is boring transgression ... Moshfegh pushes it to a gleeful extreme ... The trudging banality of a character’s quest to sedate what is unbearable, and to come out the other side into some cleansed and emptied new reality: this, paradoxically, is the fun of this strange and obstinate narrative, and it is where it strikes its sharpest, clearest truth ... Along the way, there’s a lot of detail to enjoy ... Moshfegh writes brilliantly, and very funnily, of a certain kind of spoiled, affluent New Yorker ... This kind of simultaneously horrifying and devastating glimmer, a scoop direct from the places to which the human mind plummets in private, is what makes Moshfegh’s prose so arresting, so original ... This is a novel of immense and yet very ordinary human sadness. That is a lot to achieve.
