Then Jude brings Jacob’s corpse to Villiam’s lavish manor, where the lord insists on exchanging sons. These characters enact a plot that sounds more exciting than it feels. Meanwhile Ina, the obligatory village witch, prescribes herbs for maladies, communicates with wildlife and serves as a wet nurse for the town’s infants – many of whom continue to suck at her breasts well into adulthood.
When Jude punishes Marek, the boy is “heartened by his father’s renewed disdain”, which makes “God love him more through pity”. The two pride themselves on their pains and privations, as if suffering were a competitive sport. Jude, a cranky shepherd, raises a whiny son, Marek, who has a “spine twisted in the middle so that the right side of his rib cage protruded from his torso”. Moshfegh makes few attempts to move beyond a crude caricature of medieval life, and the residents of Lapvona proper are unpleasant in a host of formulaic ways. The frivolous Lord Villiam lives in a manor on the hillside with his estranged wife, Dibra, and their pampered son, Jacob. Lapvona is set in the medieval village of its title, where impoverished peasants work to support a greedy nobleman. Lapvona is written in the flat, schematic tones of an allegory – but if it is a fable, it has neither moral nor message These forays into negativity and repulsion provide welcome respite from a culture otherwise submerged in pep and positivity – but 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. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist takes designer pharmaceuticals to stay unconscious, while in Eileen she binges on laxatives after every meal and fantasises about patricide. These are the questions posed by Ottessa Moshfegh’s petulant corpus, which is populated almost uniformly by wastrels and wantons. Are characters who are defiantly disagreeable for the sake of sheer perversity preferable to their more approachable counterparts? If we shouldn’t read about someone solely because he would make a respectful college roommate, always taking out the trash and tidying the shelves, should we read about someone solely because he would make a bad cohabitant? Less frequently lamented but perhaps equally perilous are the pitfalls of concentrated unlikability, elevated into an end in itself. In a forum on the subject in the New Yorker in 2013, Margaret Atwood warned that “the qualities we appreciate in a character are not the same as those we would look for in a college roommate”. O nce a provocation, it is now a commonplace to lament the thinness of likability as an aesthetic criterion.
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