I’ve heard the hype around Ottessa Moshfegh for a few years as a new voice for the messy woman trope, hyped up in particular by both BookTok and my students but validated by some of my esteemed readerly friends. I was very kindly gifted Death in Her Hands as my introduction to her oeuvre. I’m told it’s her worst work, but even so I found it a really interesting project.
The book starts with a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” A compelling opening. Ripe for an unfolding murder mystery. But instead Moshfegh draws from and subverts the mystery genre in equal measure to a really interesting effect.
The investigation reads more like a dream sequence that would feel at home in a Murakami novel—or more accurately, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the central character is perpetually waylaid by half-formed plots and doubtful illusions. Each step of the journey—or in this case the investigation—seems to be interrupted before reaching completion, never quite circling back into coherence. A vital clue is found only to be interrupted by her dog going missing; the quest for a missing dog is interrupted by a fainting spell, and so on. From the first pages of the book I trained myself to expect irresolution—and that is the best mindset to go in with; I don’t expect anyone who wants a whodunnit will close this book with a sigh of satisfaction.
That’s because Death in Her Hands is largely a book of possibility. At the level of the word, of the sentence, events are framed in the conditional while perpetually denying resolution. Consider this passage as emblematic of what the book achieves; I’ll take the liberty of bolding the words that point towards equivocation:
If any of them knew Magda, if they cared about her, they hadn’t noticed she’d been gone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Maybe she’d gone out, with Blake, I supposed, and they had gotten in some trouble. [...] What nerve he had, leaving Magda’s body all alone. He must have been involved somehow. I wasn’t an expert in crime, but I knew this much: Black was a suspect. He had contact with Magda’s dead body. He knew something. It wasn’t me. His denial only made him seem scared and paranoid. And if I knew anything about paranoia, it was that it sprang from guilt and regret. Always. I’d seen it clear as day in Walter when we were having our troubles. “You’re crazy,” guilty people say. They try to dismiss your inquiries. “You’re paranoic,” Walter insisted. Guilty people will try to divert your attention. “Vee vere just talkink! I vas just helping her!” he said. Nobody will ever find her. Blake was guilty of something, whether of murder or neglect or stupidity, I didn’t know yet. If there were any actions to be taken, the first would be to find that boy. I had little to go on. But then again, the town was small. He was literate, that Blake. I knew that at least. And he had enough common sense to know if someone was alive or not. He must have felt Magda’s wrist or throat. I wondered how long he’d waited, wishing or not wishing for her heart to beat. (62)
Look at the language here: “if”s, “or”s, “maybe”s, and if we’re feeling generous the speculative “must have.” There’s a vagueness and hedging: “I wasn’t an expert,” “I didn’t know yet,” “I had little to go on,” or “then again.” The mist of uncertainty permeates the novel.
As the story progresses, the central character, 70 year old Vesta Gul becomes a detective, using the search engine Ask Jeeves (RIP) at the library to search for tips on solving murders and writing detective stories. It’s somewhat comic, this elderly woman playing detective, but there’s a surreal and metafictional quality to the work. For example, in the lengthy passage I quoted above, she notes that “paranoia [...] sprang from guilt and regret” (62). In this section, she’s alluding to her husband’s adultery, which is later shown to be quite extensive. His gaslighting seems to be a contributing factor to her paranoia. Elsewhere, she also discusses how he was so good at solving murder mysteries and said how obvious the solutions were if you knew the conventions—the culprit was always the person just west of center. With these details, I myself was sprung into a paranoiac mentality: is Vesta gaslighting us and she really knows who killed Magda. Is her husband himself the person just west of center, guilty of taking the life of one of his student devotees?
The surrealism of the text is predominantly a result of Vesta’s strange relationship to narrative. Throughout the book, Vesta develops theories of who is involved in the mystery, developing a list of suspects from around town. She invents Blake, the young man who was trying to help the rebellious (but vulnerable) Magda. Magda ends up renting a room in Shirley’s house as a favour but Magda also works a job caring for an old man and maybe being romantically involved with his son and at least one other abusive man. It’s the kind of network of associations that would feel like Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks. The strange part, though, is that Vesta encounters these people as if they are real. In following Blake’s tracks, she finds a poem in William Blake’s poetry that has been underlined in a library book and then uses that to guide her. When a woman locks her car keys inside her car and asks Vesta for help, Vesta stumbles into the Shirley she invented. The creep at the gas station has the same name as the one she invented for one of her creeps. The coincidences abound, so much so that it can’t possibly be true. It’s as though Vesta enters in and out of the narrative she herself invented and it brings doubt as to whether any of this is real.
As a brief aside, I can’t help but notice that Vesta Gul continually corrects people on her name throughout the book. It is specifically not said as Vesta Gool but as Vesta Gul. Either way, it has an odd resonance with the word “vestibule” and I can’t help but feel that the central character of Death In Her Hands is in a similar kind of liminal space, both in- and out- of the stories she enters. When she’s filling in character sheets for the people in her mystery story (she was told she needs a list of suspects), she invents a “ghoul” for the story (again, oddly resonant with her name—implicating her, perhaps, in her own story). When she writes the name though, the ‘u’ and the ‘l’ blend together into a ghod combo and thereafter she names the unseen shadowy monster in the story as Ghod. Ghod exerts agency and chaos into her story—it’s only later that she encounters a police officer and equates Ghod with the law.
The encounters Vesta has with other characters often reads as stilted and awkward, which adds to the atmospheric oddity of the text. For example, at one point, Vesta discovers that her car won’t start and when she calls a repairman she discovers her wires have been cut. The repairman suggests maybe she cut her own wires. The conversation orbits the possibility of repair before the repairman gets metaphysical. She asks, “can you fix it?” and he says, “It can’t be fixed. What you have here is irreparable damage. Don’t you know there is no life after death? You know this it, don’t you? You aren’t going anywhere” (198). It seems to me a leap that no real person would make at that moment. As they continue their conversation, Vesta suggests she’ll walk if she has to and he responds with the ominous, “All I can say is that when you walk into that forest, that forest is all you’ll see” (198). It’s the kind of aphoristic line that could be translated into the Twin Peaks red room. There’s an uncomfortable communion between Vesta and her townsfolk. Vesta approaches a house looking for her dog and stumbles upon a death party for a woman who is not seeking cancer treatment and has invited her friends to gather for a last hoorah. The two talk about being neighbors (everybody mentions that Vesta lives on “the old Girl Scout camp”) and they share memories. The woman says she went there when she was little and had intended to buy it. She refers to the ghost story that circulated about it. Vesta is incredulous: “‘Ghost story?’ I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cackle” (207). The both of them seem to be ghosts themselves, in that liminal space between life and death. The woman says, “Ghod told us your name once. What was it again? He’ll be here later. We’ve cast him as the lead investigator with instructions to come dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But he’ll probably show up in his uniform, as always” (207). There are layers of fiction here: Vesta has invented the character Ghod, embodied him in the police officer, and now a new character is referring to him in the same way despite there being no way she would have that knowledge. Within this fiction, the woman is hosting a party in which everyone comes in disguise: a murder mystery party is its own fiction within the fiction.
There are several other motifs that play into this idea of guiding fictions. Early in the book we’re introduced to Pastor Jimmy, a man with a radio show offering religious guidance. Vesta listens to his fire and brimstone advice and internalizes his voice. She calls in to the show and struggles to express herself but Pastor Jimmy attempts some guidance; later, when she talks to the repairman later on, he reveals that Pastor Jimmy has been dead for years and that all the shows are reruns (198). Pastor Jimmy is presented as an illusion responsive to the inner workings of Vesta’s imagination. When her dog Charlie goes missing, Vesta considers enlisting (the maybe fictional) Shirley’s help and then the police’s help. From there, she imagines a whole scenario and uses it as justification for not following up. Again, the sentences switch to the conditional tense:
But I had no phone, and involving Shirley would only complicate things. I could imagine the kind of laughter I’d get if I called the police.
“Crazy old lady, the old Girl Scout, her dog went missing,” they’d say around the station.
“Wonder where he went.”
“Dumb old mutt.”
“Probably ran away. Who’d want to stick around with that old hag, that monster, that witch? Hansel and Gretel, is that the story? The crazy old hag who lived alone in the woods? Or am I thinking of Goldilocks? Whatever it is, she’s a bitch, that’s for sure.”
Brutes, those cops were, talking about me that way. Didn’t they know I’d been the wife of a scientist? Didn’t they know I’d worn the most elegant silk blend dresses, gone to dinners at the university? The wife of a state senator had complimented me on my hairdo. They’d printed my picture in the paper a few times. I’d sung in a chorus at college. I’d studied Japanese calligraphy. (187)
Vesta imagines what they would say. Even when she imagines what they say, even in her imagination they’re uncertain: the dog “probably” ran away. The way Vesta imagines herself in the eyes of others is pretty critical. She characterizes herself as the monster of a fairy tale before trying to counteract it with who she actually was. Also worth noting, though, is how often these assessments are all phrased as questions.
In fact, one of the novel’s key questions is that of identity. Who is Vesta? Who is Magda? Are any of these people actually people? Early in the text, Vesta narrates that “It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody” (17). She’s referring to the note she found, but there’s a doubling here. She continues to say that “there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank.” (17). She corrects people on her name “to avoid confusion.” There’s a motif of names and their implications—even her dog is named Charlie so that “when we were feeling regal, [she]’d call him Charles” (17).
A key aspect of the book is Vesta’s relationship with her dog. Her dog is somewhat emblematic of her own experiences. One day her dog Charlie brings her a dead bird. Despite an apparent disjointedness, there’s a clear parallel here. Death is brought to Vesta in the form of a note, but also in the form of a bird. Death is dropped at her feet: “That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths” (15). Vesta and Charlie are aligned through a compulsion to retrieve a dead thing. She recognizes the danger for Charlie, but ignores the danger for herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize her own compulsion even in the same moment: “I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself” (15). She also reflects on Charlie’s origin. She explains how Charlie was discovered two months ago in black duffel bag on the riverbank and how he was the only one of the litter that survived. She narrates, “I spent a minute piecing that together” (17). Vesta stitches reality into place. “From then on,” she says, “I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-coloured pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine” (17). She recreates the moment, a revisionist moment where she can reforge her relationship with Charlie and with her sense of self.
If I were to sum up the book’s core motifs, it’s about identity, imagination, paranoia, death, storytelling, and so on. In one moment, Vesta loads Charlie into the car and decides not to go lock her cabin door: “No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it?” (48). Vesta recognizes that suspicion invites danger—but can’t help herself but feel that suspicion everywhere she goes. She brings danger to herself while recognizing that if you “keep the imagination soft and happy, [...] only good things will come” (48). If this mystery is all a matter of perspective, Vesta might project a better outcome with a shift in her mindset. In that passage, she proceeds to list all the dead things out in the woods, starting with Magda and then working towards mice and rabbits that are never found and none of them were ever buried. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asks herself, “Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself” (48). There’s a strange distancing taking place where Vesta tries to downplay the death of a human being. Yet, she returns. She obsesses. She tries to find a solution that will bring coherence to this death.
Death In Her Hands is a dream sequence—perhaps more accurately described as a nightmare—where dream logic guides us through a series of detours. It creates an atmosphere of suspension and paranoia where not even Vesta is above suspicion. It’s worth noting that her beloved dog becomes terrified of her after it returns from being missing. The line between the imagined and the real blurs, leading to an irresolution that would not satisfy many readers, though it worked for me. The novel reads as almost an anti-mystery. The note points to a body, but ultimately we’re left without corpus delicti. As much as Vesta follows the rules, the clues never add up. So here we are. Adrift.
Happy reading!
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