"Homesick for Another World" by Ottessa Moshfegh

After teasing for weeks, I've finished Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection! The collection that I reacted to so strongly, I had to put it down twice in favor of the sparseness of Carver and the poetry of Greenwell. I've learned a few things. I don't like reading the same author back-to-back (just as I don't like binge-watching TV shows). For me, the magic of artistry falters when examined in repetition; the artist's skill becomes a trick exposed. I also don't like reading short story collections back-to-back. Stories demand savoring, yet a collection demands to be read as a whole. I find it hard to balance the needs of the individual story with the theme of the whole in a single collection, let alone three.  

But none of that ultimately says anything about Homesick. In most fiction, the characters’ emotions are relatable, even if their actions are not. I alluded to this as much in Greenwell's Cleanness. Though the protagonist and I have little in common, his feelings were something with which I could empathize. Moshfegh’s characters, on the other hand, exist very much on the periphery of human experience—little about them is relatable or understandable. They're scarcely believable as human beings half the time.

I tell my English classes that they can’t argue a character is “crazy” because it stops the conversation. “Crazy” (in literature, anyway) means meaningless, arbitrary. I don’t think Moshfegh crafts stories that are either, so what, then, to make of her undeniably “crazy,” delusional, and (as I put in my Greenwell review), psychotic characters? Characters who have no lucid grasp on reality or other people?

Beyond existing on the periphery, her characters are similar in many other ways. Moshfegh’s protagonists are united by a common revulsion for fat people, by disgust at the classless-ness of the poor. Yet they have a fascination with the human body at a base and visceral level. They’re the kind of people who casually use the word “retarded” or refer to gay people as “homosexuals.” They’re also arrogant and proud; their fringe existence confirms (for them and only them) their specialness.

The same type of protagonists occupy the two Moshfegh novels I’ve read—My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands—but isolated from other “crazies,” their protagonists’ actions can feel like a reflection of a crazed society. Placed together in a short story collection, however, the protagonists appear separate from society. Their psychosis seems to be about them, not a broader whole.

 So while I didn't see any larger meaning or message to the stories, there does exist within them a weird energy, a sense of life in their absurd characters. There's "The Surrogate," about a woman hired to play the attractive face of a business. It seems like a story that should take a dark turn, but it doesn't really. In "Dancing in the Moonlight," a man who spends all his money on luxury clothes but is essentially homeless decides he's in love with a woman who remodels furniture. He goes on a tragically comic adventure to convince her he has an ottoman that needs reupholstering. "The Beach Boy" maybe works best as a whole. In it, a middle-aged couple returns from a trip to Mexico; the wife's unexpected death leads the husband to reconsider everything about his marriage (in absurd fashion, of course). They're all unsettling and fantastical.

Ultimately I don't know what it all means, or whether it means anything. I wouldn't universally recommend Moshfegh--she's something to be taken in small doses--but there's undeniable skill in her craftsmanship of crazy.