From the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen. In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test.
... 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, 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.
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.
