In an interview with the Guardian last autumn, Ottessa Moshfegh explained that her Booker-shortlisted novel, Eileen, had been the product of a strategic decision to write commercially oriented fiction. Having slogged away thanklessly at writing critically worthy material, she had decided "to write a novel to start a career where I could live off publishing books. That was my prime motivation... I thought, fine: I'll play this game." Indeed Eileen was a work of genre fiction of relatively little serious literary merit; it did, however, touch superficially on moral and philosophical questions about personal improvement, authority and the formation of character, which gave it a crossover appeal sufficient to endear it to the Booker judges. Hot on the heels of that unexpected nomination, and in the time-honoured tradition of striking while the iron of publicity is hot, a volume of stories has appeared. These mainly pre-date the tactical sellout and ought, therefore, to represent the author in her natural element. What, then, have we been missing?
A cursory glance over the stories' titles – Bettering Myself'; The Weirdos, A Better Place, No Good People – suggests the thematic preoccupations are broadly similar to those of Eileen. In stark contrast to that novel's somewhat lopsided structure, which culminated in a rushed and unsatisfactory denouement, the pacing of these stories is languid and unhurried: this, clearly, is a writer much more at ease with having nowhere in particular to go. In this respect the form and the substance overlap, as the prevailing mood in most of these stories is one of weary, directionless torpor. Jaded couples abound, and Moshfegh does a reasonably entertaining line in sending up self-absorbed young men, invariably the boyfriends of her protagonists. The boyfriend in The Weirdos, an out of work actor, is obsessed with a crystal skull: he rubs it for luck and prays to it. Perhaps the finest piece of dialogue in the collection occurs when one such lad, having returned from a trip to the shops, reports to his girlfriend with droll inanity that "The line at the grocery store was average."
Lame boyfriends aside, the dominant motif in these pages is poverty and squalor, and a general sense of moral revulsion at how the American underclass live. Early on in the collection, a visit to a McDonalds introduces us to "whole families sitting down together, sipping on straws, sedate, mulling with their fries like broken horses at hay". The animal simile is inadvertently signal: there is something profoundly dehumanising about Moshfegh's portrayals of the rabble, whom she surveys like specimens in a zoo. It is at best ungenerous, at worst contemptuous. A girl in A Dark and Winding Road is said to look "like the kind of girl who works at a Store 24 or some pizza parlour or bowling alley"; a man called Paul in No Place for Good People has "fat, chapped lips. His hands always smelled of butane and the powdered cheese and spices that coated his favourite corn chips." At a family diner we encounter a "table of pug-nosed young women, bored and stirring their milkshakes with their straws, a half-eaten plate of fries split between them". In Slumming we are introduced to the residents of Alna, Maine: "You could tell just by looking – grape-soda stains on their kids' T-shirts, cheap dye jobs, bad teeth – the people of Alna were poor." The town contains "the fattest people on Earth . . . buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs, trailing huge carts full of hamburger meat and cake mix and jugs of vegetable oil."
And so on, and so on: Moshfegh's narrator-protagonists are interminably wallowing in disgust at greasy-fingered doughnut eaters, pregnant teenagers and excess BMI. JG Ballard once said that he wanted, in his fictions, "to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror". This is presumably the motivating impulse here, too. It is a worthy and commendable aim, no doubt, but it doesn't follow that any old leering misanthropy can be passed off as insight. Those of us who condemned Martin Amis as out-of-touch, complacent and downright boring when he published his "state of England" novel about a yobbish chav (2012's Lionel Asbo) would be hypocritical not to call out the same intellectual laziness in another author just because she isn't old, white and male. Amis, to his credit, can crack a joke; here, a few rare flickers of mirth aside, the smug superiority is served cold. Okay, the poor are revolting. If you say so. What of it?
Houman Barekat is co-editor (with Robert Barry and David Winters) of The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, which is forthcoming from O/R Books.
