The use of horror and the supernatural in literature, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is like the use of stimulants. In his famous hatchet job on The Monk by Matthew Lewis, a scandalous Gothic novel depicting a priest who sells his soul to Satan to commit rape and murder, Coleridge uses “stimulants” as a pejorative. Their cheap, low-brow, immediate effects “can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite.” Coleridge, more partial to both the opiate of the masses and literal opiates, wanted literature spiritually to ennoble and arrest its readers, to set them chasing the aesthetic dragon, and not to resort to the blood-pound euphoria of gore and crass theatrics.
But as anyone who’s been or spoken to an undergraduate recently can attest — or Gunna or Rue or Tik Tok advertisers — our own aesthetic present is laced with stimulants. It’s no surprise, then, that fiction writers might reconsider the use of literary stimulants. Everyone’s doing them. And there’s no finer laureate of medicated torpor than Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the PEN/Hemingway-winning Eileen and the New York Times best-seller My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which a woman aims to drug herself and sleep forever. Moshfegh’s novels have always been built on the horror and bodily degradation of its characters. In Lapvona, she adds to this an increase in artifice and an interest in spiritual and supernatural questions. It is a lurid, flamboyant work of violence and hatred, one which tramples on the pieties of historical fiction, a potent fictional high.
Thirteen-year-old Marek lives with his shepherd father, Jude, in the vaguely medieval village of Lapvona, ruled by the cruel Lord Villiam. Villiam’s son, Jacob, parades his wealth in front of poor Marek who, out of envy over Jacob’s new clothes and easy life, throws a rock at Jacob and kills him. As penance and punishment, Jude brings Marek to the palace and offers him to Villiam to live with him as his new son. Villiam, deranged by wealth and more fond of Marek than his late son anyway, gleefully accepts the trade. As Marek adapts to life inside the palace, we learn the cruelties Villiam and his priest, Father Barnabas, have been inflicting on the Lapvonians, ignoring the famine they’ve created for the villagers and torturing those within the palace walls. Meanwhile, in the periphery, Ina gathers power by manipulating and seducing Lapvonians into her own occult fertility rituals.
Lapvona is in some sense a departure in the Moshfegh canon. McGlue and Eileen, her remarkable first two books, created the recognizable Moshfegh protagonist: acid but likable, more funny than trustworthy, with at least one traumatic relationship and endlessly variate bodily nausea. In a collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World, her funniest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Death in Her Hands, Moshfegh dragged her protagonists through increasingly tortured physical predicaments. Lapvona removes focus from its protagonist and the strong first-person voice that animated her early fiction. Rather, it rests on Moshfegh’s sharpened skills as a storyteller and plotter, her attraction to and dexterity with twists and sudden reversals that make this bizarre world cohere as a narrative.
One primary reason for Lapvona’s divergence is its choice of Marek as protagonist, who develops into one of the most hated and unfortunate characters in recent fiction. The kid cannot catch a break. Jude beats Marek regularly and curses him with sadistic fervor, imagining at one point that he would “spit on [Marek’s] body as it swayed from the gallows, denounce him completely, disown him.” Marek’s mother, who tried to abort him and left him disfigured, is “unconcerned for Marek,” later shrugging when he threatens to kill himself. The only person to “give him a kind word every now and then” is Ina, who nursed him as a baby but now molests him in her hut in town. The closest thing Marek has to a friend is Jacob, and even Jacob throws rocks at Marek and calls him a nobody. Most remarkable, though, is that Marek’s ceaseless misfortunes lend him no readerly sympathy, since he reflects this same hatred and abuse back at everyone. He kills Jacob, throws a rock at his mother, hopes for his father’s death, and helps Villiam torment his servant. To read from his perspective is to encounter a locus of the book’s hatred.
Perhaps because of Marek’s odious qualities, the novel maintains its distance from him through a roving third-person narrator. This choice of narrative voice changes Lapvona quite a bit from other Moshfegh works. Whereas in McGlue or Eileen, the voice holds us close enough to soften readers to its characters’ horrors, the third-person voice never fully inhabits the characters but rather holds Lapvonians out at arms’ length for our scrutiny, giving us just enough distance to realize how wretched they are.
In much the same way, the voice of Lapvona creates distance from its setting. Here Moshfegh seems not to strive for world-building so much as for set design. That is to say, the setting of Lapvona is something like a painted backdrop, or perhaps a rear-projection of what readers might assume medieval times were like, a “fiefdom” here and a “pillory” there, routine degradation of the peasants and the ruler living up on a hill, all told in the language of jarring anachronisms. Characters say “Nah” and “Who cares?” and pigs “turn their asses toward the slop.” The spoiled young Prince Jacob reflects that his calm temperament is only “a privilege of his wealth and breeding.” Villiam seems less King Lear than he does a Disney villain, literally demanding that a red carpet be rolled out in front of him each morning. At one point, after a disastrous fire, the narrator mentions with a colossal wink, “Much of the stable burned, but none of the animals were hurt.”
Without a sturdy setting or a vocal protagonist, the shocks and sudden reversals are what connect the characters. Parents thought dead return hundreds of pages later, alive and seeking vengeance; those fearsome marauding bandits are in fact terrorists Villiam pays to keep the villagers in line; characters are secretly pregnant or are…not the father. One particularly campy and gruesome passage involves, in the space of twenty pages: Ina and Jude’s cannibalizing of a villager, Marek’s mother having escaped from the convent when she’d been thought dead, Jude raping Marek’s mother in what he thinks might be a dream but is actually reality (all the while regurgitating the cannibalized villager’s pinky toe), Marek dressing up illictly as a priest to surprise Jude, discovering what he believes is Jude’s headless body, and burying his own father at night in his mother’s grave—which he discovers has been empty this whole time.
As in the case of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the exquisite extremity of Lapvona is garnished with religious questing. Villagers in Lapvona practice a crooked form of Christianity dictated by the whims of Father Barnabas, who himself knows nothing about the Bible. “Jesus turned wine into roses, did he not?” he asks. This contrasts with the religion of the Northerners, a “single-minded and cold” and “physically superior” race living in proximity to the native Lapvonians whose beliefs line up more with paganism (“Didn’t they know that the land was God itself, the sun and moon and rain, that it was all God?”). When the Lapvonians later lose their religion and stop having to attend church, the village turns aimless: “Nobody prayed. Everyone just talked about themselves and each other.” When Marek goes to live in the palace, he notices that “he found himself praying to his own mind rather than to God.” The happier the Lapvonians’ circumstances make them, the less spiritually fulfilled they become.
But although Lapvona occasionally raises questions about God and beauty, the novel’s spirituality (and its concomitant aesthetic sense) is not that of Coleridge but rather of Matthew Lewis, not one of downers but uppers. It reaches its highs through undisguised artifice, and by stacking chewed-up corpses and bawdy punchlines. Even after that very scene where Marek notices the turn his prayers have taken, the novel immediately drags him back into an extended scene in which he makes his maidservant eat a grape he rubbed on his scrotum. The continual dirtiness is almost compulsive, something the voice reaches for to avoid feeling preachy. As stated in the epigraph from Demi Lovato (unfortunately no stranger to uppers), “I feel stupid when I pray.” Lapvona doesn’t awaken, as Coleridge would have it, the truths that “lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul.” The novel thrills and burns, hisses with camp, cannibalizes its characters for an adrenaline rush of pure, shocking story.
[Published by Penguin Press on June 21, 2022, 320 pages, $27.00 hardcover]