... hilarious, poignant, controlled, a little nihilistic, and often disgusting ... Moshfegh’s work resists being read as an allegory. The novel has the texture of a fable—the characters and scenarios are at times broadly drawn—but contains no lesson ... How historically accurate is any of it? It doesn’t matter. Lapvona is not trying to dazzle you with its verisimilitude. There’s no lavishing on of period-appropriate detail. For the most part, it’s blithely free of the attention to fabrics, furniture, custom, or quotidian life that usually characterize a historical work. There is a valet named Clod, a venal and brainless clergyman named Father Barnabas. Pious servants eat only cabbage. The pointless, unrelenting cruelty seems true to life at the time, but the way everyone talks has the zip of modern speech ... just enough anachronism here to amuse without irritating ... Still, your moment-to-moment enjoyment might depend on the strength of your stomach ... I wondered, as I always do with Moshfegh: Must it be this gross? ... The ending of Lapvona seems designed to shock. Perhaps it will if you’re unfamiliar with Moshfegh’s style or have not paid close attention to the lawless world she’s created in the novel. Either way, the ending is, without a doubt, the book’s most repulsive creation. If you’re like me (soft), you might long for a hint of redemption. You might long for some reassurance that people are not so base, so doomed. But then that’s what’s great about Moshfegh: She doesn’t care what we want.
Ottessa Moshfegh has a glittering intellect and an unquenchable dark turn of mind. Only the latter is on display in Lapvona, her fourth novel. It’s a pungent book but a flat one, narrow in its emotional range, a bleak, meandering and muddy-soled mix of fairy tale and folk horror ... Atrocities pile up. It’s easy to lose the thread ... It’s especially easy for concentration to wander because no one is quite who they seem to be, and because little that occurs has much in the way of resonance. I’m peeking at my notes to write this because it all blurred in my mind ... vigorously if bluntly written. The sentences seem to have been composed in lead type and locked into a letterpress. What’s gone missing is Moshfegh’s destroying wit ... the novel lacks an attitude, a stance toward this material ... No one tattoos the page with food horror quite like Moshfegh ... Moshfegh is one of the most interesting writers alive, but Lapvona is a gloomy, punishing and curiously flavorless banquet.
As I began reading I kept asking myself: 'What’s she up to? What skin has she got in this game?' Three hundred pages later, I still didn’t fully have my answers, though by then I’d realised that the (pseudo) historical setting wrenches us out of history and into a timeless, interior landscape of drives, impulses and cravings ... Lapvona’s grotesque, shameless world shows us not how it used to be, but how it’s always been ... 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 ... Particularly in her morally neutral scenes of physical and sexual humiliation, Moshfegh seems to write from a shady confraternity that includes the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille and Angela Carter ... In the past, Moshfegh has trollishly floated the notion that she might be a bit of a hack, but Lapvona confirms that such ploys served the author’s deeper agenda of getting the weird shit in front of a mass audience. What impresses here is not so much Moshfegh’s abilities with character or narrative, or even her language (which excels more in her short stories), as the qualities Lapvona shares with a Francis Bacon painting: depicting in blood-red vitality, without morals or judgment, the human animal in its native chaos.
Ottessa Moshfegh has, over the course of four previous novels and a short story collection, emerged as a singular American writer. She likes freaks and outsiders, drunken sailors and cranky old women, characters who are defiant and sometimes monstrous, sprawled in the gutter, too bored or wasted or cynical to look up at the stars. Her voice, laconic, flip, with an edge of cruelty, is always entertaining, and in the medieval setting of Lapvona, she’s able to indulge her interest in the grotesque. The novel is a canvas for enthusiastic descriptions of every kind of human degradation, usually played for laughs ... Moshfegh’s considerable gifts as a stylist give these cartoonishly revolting scenes a visceral punch, but the further the reader travels over the rutted cart tracks of Lapvona, the more uncertain the terrain becomes. The novel is medieval in the way one of those village-building computer games is medieval: not a portrait of a particular time or place, a complex culture with a cosmology and a recognizable system of feudal obligations; but a fantasy genre setting in which medieval things can happen ... even taken as a postmodern exercise, the world building is perfunctory ... The novel seems neither wholly ironic, in that it sincerely wants to shock, nor fully committed to the reality of its world, at least not in a way that would allow its shocks to form a circuit with anything else. It’s hard to know what to do with such scenes as the one in which Jude either rapes or imagines raping Agata, a woman he once kept as a child sex slave who is now a nun ... has the odd affect 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.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Rape, incest and dismemberment are all recounted with the eye for nauseating detail and the unflinching detachment that has turned some readers away from Moshfegh’s previous novels. Yet the violent and arbitrarily cruel world of Lapvona is arguably more suited to her talents than her usual contemporary settings. Particularly compelling is the way Moshfegh’s compulsive fascination with all that is most abject and grotesque in human life is set against extraordinarily lyrical evocations of the natural world ... Less wholly successful than the change in setting — and, indeed, genre, this being a kind of medieval fantasy novel — is Lapvona’s shift in narrative focus. Where Moshfegh’s other novels were all narrated in the first person by a single female protagonist, the third person narration of her latest moves between the perspectives of a relatively large cast of colourful character ... Moshfegh exhibits a previously untested facility for swiftly immersing readers in each character’s deeply idiosyncratic ways of experiencing the world ... The novel moves so quickly between its extraordinarily eccentric characters that it is difficult to become particularly invested in their (usually horrific) fates. It seems that Lapvona is simply less interested in individuals than in depicting a community’s peculiar social ecosystems ... It is as unlikely to put off her devoted readers as it is to appeal to those who found her previous novels simply too much to stomach ... Moshfegh’s bold venture beyond her comfort zone in Lapvona is a welcome promise of how much more she has to offer American literature today.
The setting feels like a way for Moshfegh to widen her exploration of human depravity ... Moshfegh, not usually one for plot, manages to cram in more action than all her other books put together – only the story reads as if she’s making it up as she goes along. There are a few delicious moments of black comedy. But it adds up to little more than a sequence of stomach-churning provocations which – as with the Marquis de Sade – soon becomes dull and repetitive ... Perhaps more damaging for Moshfegh’s intent, I found the setting and characters alternately reminiscent of the animated movie Shrek and JK Rowling’s kingly romp, The Ickabog. Such are the perils of a thinly-realised medieval setting peopled with archetypes. You set out for a realm of transcendent horror à la Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. You end up in Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom ... Then there are the moments that feel more millennial than medieval ... fails to rise above the platitudes to become a work of moral seriousness. It’s neither an insightful depiction of the way power corrupts, nor a droll depiction of human behaviour at its most abject. As with Death in Her Hands, it’s hard to see what Moshfegh is trying to achieve other than notoriety. Even the torture, rape and murder feel inconsequential. There were times when I was so bored and disconnected, I felt like I was reading the novel through the narcotic-induced haze of one of Moshfegh’s numb, amoral protagonists. I couldn’t summon the will to care.
Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass. Like the Hebrew holy of holies, the anal canal has two veils—an outer sphincter and an inner—and its interior is known in formal anatomy as a lumen, the Latin word for 'light.' More than ever, Moshfegh wants to illuminate us. The question is if we’ll fit ... This is the pleasure of reading Moshfegh at her best: letting her plunge something sharp down your throat before you have a chance to gag ... At first glance, Lapvona is the most disgusting thing Moshfegh has ever written...Yet Moshfegh’s trusty razor can feel oddly blunted in Lapvona. In part, her characteristic incisiveness is dulled by her decision to forgo the first person, in favor of more than a dozen centers of consciousness. This diminishment is also a curious effect of Lapvona itself ... Lapvona is the clearest indication yet that the desired effect of Moshfegh’s fiction is not shock but sympathy. Like Hamlet, she must be cruel in order to be kind. Her protagonists are gross and abrasive because they have already begun to molt; peel back their blistering misanthropy and you will find lonely, sensitive people who are in this world but not of it, desperate to transform, ascend, escape ... This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Even if such readers exist, there is no reason to write books for them—not because novels are for the elite but because the first assumption of every novel must be that the reader will infinitely exceed it. Fear of the reader, not of God, is the beginning of literature. Deep down, Moshfegh knows this....Yet the novelist continues to write as if her readers are fundamentally beneath her; as if they, unlike her, have never stopped to consider that the world may be bullshit; as if they must be steered, tricked, or cajoled into knowledge by those whom the universe has seen fit to appoint as their shepherds ... It’s a shame. Moshfegh dirt is good dirt. But the author of Lapvona is not an iconoclast; she is a nun. Behind the carefully cultivated persona of arrogant genius, past the disgusting pleasures of her fiction and bland heresies of her politics, wedged just above her not inconsiderable talent, there sits a small, hardened lump of piety. She may truly be a great American novelist one day, if only she learns to be less important. Until then, Moshfegh remains a servant of the highest god there is: herself.
Moshfegh is one of our most thrilling chroniclers of the abject—she is a delighted documentarian of all the excrescences and defilements of the body which force us to reckon with our inevitable decay, or what the French philosopher Julia Kristeva might term our future-deadness. Perhaps the great evolution at hand in Moshfegh’s ongoing corpus is the fact of Lapvona’s rather full-throated politicism. This is at heart a fable of haves and have nots, of the ways violent psychologies and apparatuses of exploitation—of the poor, of resources, of women’s bodies, of the land and earth itself—constitute a significant stratum, if not the very bedrock, of the human condition ... This is in its way Moshfegh’s comedy of errors: boundaries of class, gender, physical ability, and faith between subjects are tested by the plot’s rapid-paced orchestration of narrative musical chairs, revealing such divisions to have always been, if not materially illusory, certainly not a matter of metaphysical substance. The particularity of any given human in Lapvona is null; even Villiam is in the end poisoned by a richer lord, with Marek installed in turn in his place ... A cynical conclusion for cynical times, perhaps. Preparing for this review, I confess I found unanticipated sympathy with the haters, in rationale if not in feeling. Crowded into the same basket, the novels all together do seem hostile, do have a certain smug encounter with the reader who looks to fiction for pleasure or beauty, do engineer an encompassing philosophy that at the very least pals about with nihilism. Moshfegh’s characters and narratives insist, in the end, that humans are, at base, a rotten, self-involved sort, handmaids to our own annihilation because we are unable (or worse yet, do not care) to parse the interests of the individual from the wellbeing of the collective...Hers is surely a hard-eyed view. But the fact of her cynicism is not reason alone to dismiss her sly achievements, the revelations wriggling beneath the rock of her fictional hells ... Lapvona is a witty, vicious novel, frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to indict all the worst habits and orientations of our contemporary ... allows Moshfegh to sidestep the imaginative failures which have scarred so many present-tense literary “political” novels. It instead refracts its representations of class inequality, climate catastrophe, reproductive rights, and #metoo through ever-so-slightly defamiliarized shapes. Our terrible modernity looks back at us as if from the face of a convex mirror: recognizable but not dated from the jump, not beholden to the inverse politics of the reactionary or the cringe-purveyor, not cloyingly obligated to the logic and language of social media ... Moshfegh isn’t rooting about in her bag of tricks to reveal a lighter touch; her fairy tale hews nearer the horrors of the Grimm than the moralities of the Anderson lineage. Most fascinating is that, as Moshfegh yet refuses to adjust her set, the world seems finally to have caught up with her darkness ... It isn’t, Moshfegh insists, that we can’t do anything to reverse our imminent doom; it’s simply that we are too fucking monstrous to try.
... with the studied boredom of a teenager using swear words, Ms. Moshfegh piles on the barbarisms ... This stuff doesn’t even have the cheap integrity of the gross-out; it’s simply too puerile and dumb to excite any reaction beyond impatience. It’s normal for children to go through phases of insolence, but Ms. Moshfegh is on her sixth book, so what’s her excuse?
Moshfegh’s latest effort reveals the limitations of an approach that trades less in human drama than in seething shocks, quick to titillate and quick to expire ... These characters enact a plot that sounds more exciting than it feels ... Lapvona is written in the flat, schematic tones of an allegory – but if it is a fable, it has neither moral nor message, a void on which Moshfegh apparently prides herself. Right before she kills off almost all of the book’s characters, she writes tauntingly, 'right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by. So find some reason here' ... But why should the reader care about characters who care so little for each other, or for anything at all? ... Perhaps Lapvona could be read as a parody or at least a deflation of the breathless gothic mode – and indeed Moshfegh’s refusal of sentimentality, along with her many visceral descriptions of mutilations and other abominations, is one of her strongest suits ... it does not take long for the unmodulated peevishness of Moshfegh’s creations to become tiresome, if only because the stakes of their vexations are so low. The inhabitants of Lapvona are so uninvested in their own lives that even their deaths are inconsequential. They are not just unlikable but doggedly, one-dimensionally so. In Lapvona, life is stupid, people are stupid, love is stupid, embodiment is stupid and piety is stupid ... Being a sensible person, I agree that most things are stupid, but their stupidity is of interest only because there are at least a few things that ought to be exempt from otherwise universal contempt. Stupidity matters because it threatens those treasures that aren’t stupid, or at least the few things that we manage to care about despite their stupidity. Making a fetish of unlikability is more novel than making a fetish of affirmation, but ultimately, it represents no more than the same gimmick in reverse.
Moshfegh’s fiction tends to focus on one person, but here she has a groaning cast list. The trouble is, the many characters rather resemble one another: they’re all disgusting, immoral, selfish and kinky; they all deserve, more or less, the more or less terrible fates that await them. Moshfegh has said that reading her books is ‘like seeing Kate Moss take a shit’. The experience of reading this one is like being stuck in a room with about 20 people defecating, but none of them is Kate Moss ... The novel is extraordinarily violent and disturbing, featuring child molestation, cannibalism and worse. But extreme as it is, it’s not much else; it has sweetly reasonable points to make – for instance, about power (that it corrupts) and about capitalism (that it corrupts). Moshfegh is a beautiful writer – some of her sentences dazzled me so much I had to put the book down and sun myself in the light of her prose for a moment – but no amount of raw skill can make up for the fact that the ideas undergirding the book aren’t that interesting. And though it may be old-fashioned to crave tenderness in a novel, I missed it here: the characters are so awful to each other it becomes sapping ... The book isn’t without merit. At its best it’s like a twisted reworking of A Hundred Years of Solitude; and some readers will no doubt relish its icy intensity and Old Testament grimness. But if a writer with less star power than Moshfegh had written it, I suspect publishers would have laughed in disgust, pinched their noses and thrown it on the slush pile.
... the sort of book that makes you wish you could have been there when the manuscript landed at the publishing house. What did they make of it, really, all those agents and editors and publicists? ... truly unique ... If there were an eating contest and you consumed, say, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, seasons 1–4 of Game of Thrones, a few high-octane episodes of Neighbours, a Nativity play and a children’s edition of The Canterbury Tales, you might just vomit out Lapvona ... is this yet another clever exposé of the fictiveness of fiction? Or a parable, perhaps, about how desperate we all are for our parents’ love? Or maybe the prose is just so brilliant that it doesn’t actually matter what it’s about? ... Hold on, I can answer that last one. The prose, as elsewhere in Moshfegh’s oeuvre, is occasionally vivid, but mostly lazy ... Moshfegh struggles, not for the first time, with narrative shaping; and, unlike in the other three novels, she doesn’t have a compelling central character around which to yoke all the random, repetitive episodes ... perhaps she really does believe in her own genius. Or perhaps … perhaps Ottessa Moshfegh is a literary hack who just wants to shock people. But she’s successful. She knows how to operate.
The events it documents take place 'hundreds of years' after the birth of Christ, but Moshfegh’s prose style makes few concessions to historical verisimilitude—bewilderingly, some of the only affected words she uses are “sheath” (meaning vagina) and 'pubis' ...These events are only a prelude to the greater brutality to come. Misery, in Moshfegh’s novel, is as ubiquitous as it is arbitrary ... These scenes are nauseating on their own, and all the more so for how inert they feel: The suffering accrues, but to no real end. By the time Jude belches up an old man’s undigested pinky toe, the effect of such outrageous images is more tiresome than provoking: almost adolescent ... The degradation in Lapvona is notable not just for its intensity but for how contrived it feels—as if Moshfegh has populated an entire medieval world just to subject her own creations to monstrous experiments. It is only late in the novel that she gestures toward justifying this sadism, voicing a kind of defense of authorial cruelty through the elderly Grigor ... Rather than pulling off a theory of inhumanity, Lapvona makes an unconvincing scapegoat of organized religion ... Any critique of the role religion plays in justifying barbarism and oppression, however, is muddled by the fact that those who can sense the ruling class’s worldliness and corruption hardly come off better. Most of the characters in the book simply disdain other people, period ... Moshfegh doesn’t owe us a tidy sermon in the shape of a novel. But in the absence of anything fresh or even particularly coherent to say about human cruelty, spiritual poverty, or the hypocrisy of the church, there is little else to recommend Lapvona, a grim slog to a conclusion even more obscene than the one that polarized readers of My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Taken alone, such instances don’t call so much attention to themselves, but in their unfailing recurrence, Moshfegh’s fixation on filth starts to feel superfluous and silly. In earlier books like Homesick for Another World and Eileen, her portrayal of people’s ugliest, most disgusting proclivities was sharp and charged, integral to their characterization. Now, with the writer’s sixth book, it reads as a mindless compulsion, one that flattens her subjects rather than enlivening them ... In this, Moshfegh’s first full-length book in the third-person, her diction evinces a too-muchness akin to someone’s eyes gleaming while telling a gruesome story ... She also tends to explicitly spell out her characters’ motivations and the significance of their acts ... Saturated with explanation, Lapvona leaves little room for the kind of ambiguity that might invite readers more fully into the story...Moshfegh’s grander concerns, namely religion and its corruptions, are just as plagued by her heavy-handedness ... This idea that religion is not a guiding light but a system that abets some of humanity’s worst impulses is not a particularly original one. It’s not improved by Moshfegh’s tack of shoving it in your face.
Having ratcheted her perversity up to an 11 in her fiction, Moshfegh cannot resist throwing everything she’s got at Lapvona ... Filth, famine, pillories, infection, crushed skulls, rape, hanging, self-flagellation, eyeballs detached, eyeballs replaced and a grape that makes its way from a rectum to another orifice. Also, murdered children all over the place. Yet somehow not an ounce of feeling ... As for plot, there’s plenty. It’s sprinkled on top, however, like the crumb on a cake, added for some crunch but ultimately not baked in ... What’s startling is how languidly Moshfegh can describe beauty when she wants to...But the balance tips so far toward darkness that even if we read this as a fallen paradise — salvation is the hope and prayer of every character, even the dimwit Villiam — it’s hard to see what message this world has for us except that life is hell. Lapvona is an endurance test, as if Moshfegh wants to break the reader to see if the novel can stretch beyond its audience ... I’m angry at the waste — not the ample human waste but the missed opportunities. Moshfegh is a brilliant chronicler of the absolute corruptibility of any small dose of power, and a medieval town on the brink of recognizing the violence inherent in the system (there are those Monty Python peasants again) is just the right place for her dispassionate wit.
The novel starts with bandits and slaughtering, but there’s more to Lapvona than death and gore. In it, the Middle Ages become a new container for old Moshfeghian themes: God, corruption, greed, sex, daddy issues, mommy issues, booze. The time period gives Moshfegh free rein to play with mystical characters like Ina, a blind wet nurse who breastfeeds the village children ... It’s a bleak, chaotic world where the rules mean nothing, and God acts like a cover for the lord’s lies. It should be exhausting (and sometimes it is, the bleakness teetering on horror), but Moshfegh leaves us her breadcrumbs of wit. You want more and more, hoping they’ll lead to a candy house of moral lessons. Reading Lapvona is like going to Medieval Times in Buena Park for a middle school field trip: you’re uncomfortable and confused, but you can’t look away. You’re not sure what’s a joke and you’re holding a turkey leg. The book’s epigraph is a song lyric by Demi Lovato ... This voice is blunt and brutal. Her prose is also uncomplicated. It retains a sense of distance while gently dipping into the characters’ psyches. The effect is almost folkloric.
... utterly odd, wickedly funny, and sharply satirical ... Moshfegh’s third-person narrative entity is rich in her trademark blend of arresting language and blindside humor as she triangulates truth and thought amongst several characters ... The playfully incisive voice of the narrative entity propels the swift and resonant plot through these principle perspectives with technical ease, making her approach all the more effective ... Third-person narrative voice, that foundational element of fiction, is a weapon in Moshfegh’s hands. Lapvona, despite the centrality of temporal-geographical setting to its success, has no time or need for tedious exposition or whitewashed backstory. The reader is immediately immersed and instantly comfortable with the storyline and central premise, a testament to Moshfegh’s viselike control of her narrative entity, even as the book reads with a deceptively casual tone. Here is the skill that has been on display throughout her career, and is the defining characteristic of an oeuvre that thrives in a succession of slightly left-of-center worlds and actors ... Behind Lapvona’s strange hilarity and smooth prose is a scathing lampoon of society’s fundamental social-economic inequality — divided along lines of class, gender, and religion — a portrait of haves and have nots all the more apt for the damning parallels the book draws between the world within its pages and the one without — modern America, indeed, is all too fitting an avatar for a deranged medieval wasteland reeling between famine and plague. Moshfegh has made a remarkable career out of technical skill, narrative audacity, and dark humor, and in many ways, her latest effort is her strongest. Lapvona is at once thoroughly entertaining, meticulously crafted, and unsettlingly thought-provoking, and it seems a bit much to ask any more of a novel than that.
... a sublime work in the truest sense – mighty, irrepressible and terrifying ... those calling it flat, or tedious, or excessive are, to my mind, entirely missing the point. Saying Lapvona is either flat or excessive is like saying the same of Robert Eggers’ The Northman (2022). Lapvona should not be read as a modern narrative, but akin to a fable, allegory or epic. More than anything, perhaps, it is a kind of medieval sci-fi, and, given sci-fi’s long history, perhaps what I really mean is a kind of myth ... the entire cultural flirtation with medieval aesthetics can be read as an attempt to grapple with the perverse conditions of today ... Moshfegh still has her eye firmly trained on the details of the current moment; on contemporary blindnesses, barbarity and fears.
... a gruesome experiment in historical fiction ... The characters bleakly reflect the worst in humanity, and grotesque antics dot almost every page—facts that compete with great storytelling and end up creating few opportunities for enjoyment ... Moshfegh has written a novel that’s not without humor, but is certainly grim and brutal. Everyone hates each other in Lapvona, with very few exceptions. The story examines the boundaries between savagery and stability, religion and desire, truth and deception, and Moshfegh delivers surprise after sinister surprise. The setting is quite a divergence from Moshfegh’s previous works, but her sharp storytelling and exceptional character studies are once again omnipresent in Lapvona.
Moshfegh has always been keenly interested in a certain ugliness of humanity, and her latest work takes that preoccupation to its most literal ends yet ... The work more squarely falls within the realm of fabulism, with period-specific magical realism flourishing the narrative. The author’s familiar, acidic probing of peculiar psychologies remains largely in place, but here such grotesqueries are not only interior but exterior ... The novel’s success lies in never explicitly committing to either blunt metaphor or cheap cock-and-bull storytelling, instead allowing Moshfegh’s facility with trenchant character development to remain at the fore ... At once immensely alien and deeply human, Moshfegh’s latest is a brutal, inventive novel about the ways that stories and the act of storytelling shape us and articulate our world.
The latest wicked tale from macabre master Moshfegh ... Sculpting an eerily canny fabular world of contrasts and evil, cartoonish cruelty, in her signature way, Moshfegh conjures a grotesque, disturbing story of gross inequality and senseless strife.
Gloomy ... The novel is constructed from familiar Moshfegh-ian stuff: dissolute characters, a willful rejection of social norms, the occasional gross-out. At her best, she’s worked that material into stark, brilliant character studies or contemporary satires. Here, though, the tone feels stiff and the story meanders ... The assortment of dim characters and perverse delusions does little more than repetitively expose the brutality of (as Villiam puts it) 'this stupid life.' A blackhearted but wayward yarn.
Deliriously quirky ... The narrative tosses readers through a series of dizzying reversals. Throughout, Moshfegh brings her trademark fascination with the grotesque to depictions of the pandemic, inequality, and governmental corruption, making them feel both uncanny and all too familiar. It’s a triumph.
For those of us with limited tolerance for this stuff, the fact that Moshfegh is such a vivid and inventive writer only makes matters worse ... the kind of novel that can make a critic like me sound like a scold; a knock-off of the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold, who demanded 'sweetness and light' in literature. But there is no enlightenment in these pages, and the only 'beauty' to be found is in the vividness of Moshfegh's language and the cleverness of her plot, which is an elaborate snicker at the gullibility of anyone who thinks ancestry can be reliably traced through birth records ... If that's enough for you, have at it! But, as the late medieval philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously said, life is 'nasty, brutish and short"'— and, for me, the life depicted in Lapvona couldn't be short enough.
Good news for fans of cannibalism and other grotesqueries: Ottessa Moshfegh serves up a smorgasbord of medieval ugliness...The equally good news is that this is a well-constructed and thoughtful novel that makes timely comments about inequality and despair ... may not be for all stomachs, but one of its pleasures is that, like many good novels, it takes narrative turns that will surprise and unmoor readers. This isn't a hopeful story, but readers will come away thinking that, if one squints hard enough, one can sometimes see pinpoints of light in the darkest times. And that's good news.
Whereas the extent of Moshfegh’s previous narrators’ own delusion has been ambiguous or slowly revealed, Lapvona gives away its secrets fast and for free. A barrage of forthrightly narrated insider knowledge, attributable to no one, leaves the reader with an unshakeable sense of how stupid, deluded, and misguided its characters are, how little they know of themselves and their relationships to one another ... doesn’t push the reader to feel much else for this tragic cast of characters ... This unrelenting cruelty and borderline sadism undoubtedly make for an interesting, if difficult, reading experience, and Moshfegh certainly pushes the boundaries of how much of it she can enact from her godlike perch ... the novel itself is revealed to be largely beside the point, its readers stupid for reading it. Throughout, Moshfegh lobs pointed comments at the creators and consumers of entertainment, to the extent that one wonders whether she is parodying the critical reception of her work ... A glimpse of the gutter would unnerve the best of us, but falling into it, fully, ought to devastate. Lapvona leaves the reader cold ... This is a novel that wants to—and succeeds—in alienating its readers, even the 'good' ones. This is not because its characters are unsympathetic, or because of the farce it reveals itself to be, but because Moshfegh wields a crude power in her omniscience, at the expense of elegance. Lapvona’s narrator apparently knows everything, and the truth they deign to tell us is that everyone is delusional, stupid, and disgusting. There is admittedly something difficult about this truth, but the harder truth is that even delusional, stupid, and disgusting people are not devoid of their humanity.
I’m aware that Moshfegh’s work is an acquired taste. If you’ve previously bounced off her earlier novels, Lapvona is unlikely to change your mind. But for those, like myself, who appreciate the excesses of Moshfegh’s fiction, her forensic examination of our flaws and misanthropic tendencies, then Lapvona certainly hits the mark.
