this is a nice book. wrote following to e.:
upon some more consideration the book is actually very good. there's this interesting thing that happens where there's clearly one plot--there's some like nonlinear stuff in terms of time, but there's one plot. however the way narration jumps between different topics of interest interestingly develops themes and symbols. and then the last chapter is a huge tying up of knots. very predictable tbh, but still a gorgeous ending. not sure how to explain. but i recommend reading. worth giving caveat: it's not anything special stylistically. and also it means a lot to me for irl life reasons. but still very good
i don’t know how to feel about the book. on some level i like what it says about consumerism in like a positive light
back cover review which i like:
Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree.
I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore.
She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?”
… stranded in the desert.”
Dr. Tuttle scribbled dutifully, then lifted her head, waiting for more.
“So I started eating sand to try to kill myself instead of dying of dehydration. It was awful.”
“Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?”
Everybody thinks their dreams are weird.
My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.
Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into.
Whenever I came to, I’d drink water, eat a slice of pizza, do some sit-ups and push-ups, some squats, some lunges, put the clothes I was wearing into the washer, transfer the washed set into the dryer, put on the clean set, then take another Infermiterol. In this way, I could stay in the black until my year of rest was up.
When the locksmith came, I told him to install the new lock on the outside of the door, so that anyone inside the apartment would need the key to get out. He didn’t ask why. Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.
I got in the habit of buying a box of Corn Flakes from the Egyptians each morning. I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park.
I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler.
ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.