Book Review #14: "Lapvona" by Ottessa Moshfegh

A modern novel about feudal times.

This review comes months after a promise I made to a friend to let her know if this story was too scary for her. This one’s for you <3.

My answer is that it’s complicated. I hesitate to classify Lapvona as a horror novel, although it does display a multitude of horrors. Lapvona’s strangeness and grotesqueness fit well into the Moshfegian oeuvre. As Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker, “Moshfegh’s characters tend to be amoral, frank, bleakly funny, very smart, and perverse in their motivations, in ways that destabilize the reader’s assumptions about what is ugly, what is desirable, what is permissible, and what is real.”

Lapvona focuses on Marek, a young peasant with an abusive father and an obsession with religion. He firmly believes that suffering and pain will lead him to heaven–where his dead mother awaits him. As a result, he accepts daily beatings and harsh physical labor with a sick sort of joy that thinly covers his resentment. As we learn about Marek’s plight on earth, we also discover the manor that shadows over Lapvona. It houses the lord and his family, who grow ever richer as the town suffers. It is through this dichotomy that Lapvona is at its strongest both narratively and thematically. 

The comparison between the lord’s castle and daily life in Lapvona emphasizes the ludicrous nature of extreme class division (obviously) but it also gives Moshfegh the opportunity to explore capitalistic corruption. Marek ends up in the castle after he murders the lord’s son, Jacob. Rather than killing Marek in retribution,  Lord Villiam decides to keep Marek for his own as a way to get back at his wife. The entire situation is utterly ridiculous–offering the grisly death a sort of whimsy. Villiam’s tendencies are particularly zany–he thinks everything is a game (including the death of his son) and forces his servants and advisors to constantly entertain him. He is nothing more than a petulant child. Unfortunately, though, his obnoxious tendencies are not borne of naivety. Whenever citizens act out of line, “punishment consist[s] of a little poison in the family’s well, just enough to make the wife and children sick for a week. The priest would say that God punished those who didn’t uphold their responsibilities as citizens. This was the way Villiam governed. Surreptitiously” (75). 

As part of the elite, Villiam’s amorality is inherent to his nature. Moshfegh is slightly more forgiving to the poorer characters, but only just. As Levy comments in her profile of the author, the morally righteous do not interest Moshfegh. This makes sense. The untouchable, pure child or virgin or hero are archaic archetypes that often date classic literature. Furthermore, Lapvona very much argues that people are the results of their circumstances. Why would a town of peasants who must result to cannibalism and mud to satiate themselves have a preoccupation with goodness? Moral corruption is not necessarily their fault, but the logical conclusion to a life of injustice. 

For example, Marek becomes brattier as he settles into the high life, but he is never good–in spite of the tropes the author borrows to create him. He is an abused 13 year old with a presumably dead mother who also suffers from a physical disability. He is sensitive to nature and quite curious. His only goal in life is to go to heaven. Moshfegh designs him to elicit pity and sympathy– a lot of which is warranted. However, he brutally murders someone before ever going to the castle. At the novel’s end, he kills his infant sibling out of jealousy. Then there’s Marek’s father, both a tender shepherd and violent monster who r*pes Marek’s mother. The townspeople on the whole suffer greatly as a result of Villiam, especially when he sends bandits to pillage their goods to pay off his debts. However, they also gleefully partake in public executions. It’s not about good and evil, but the mechanisms that drive people to behave in those ways.

The most fascinating character in this regard is Ina, the witch and wet nurse for the entire town. As you might have surmised from other pieces in this newsletter, I love witches. Even when they’re morally gray, they often function in a feminist capacity– holding a middle finger up to the patriarchal institutions that label them monsters. Ina doesn’t quite work that way, though. Or, maybe she does, but only by adhering to Moshfegh’s preferred character design. As with Marek, there are parts of Ina’s character that generate pity. Blinded by a plague that kills her family, teenage Ina lives in the woods as a social pariah for years. She learns to speak with the birds and, through them, discovers herbal remedies to various ailments. Miraculously, she develops breast milk, which helps sustain her and gives her a career in child rearing.

However, those years of social isolation, paired with Ina’s magical abilities, make her odd, cunning, and downright repulsive. Marek often goes to her for comfort, which she offers in exchange for chores. She allows the boy to nurse from her, despite her lack of milk and his age. Although we want to see this as maternal comfort, their relationship is also Marek’s first (and only) sexual experience. The book doesn’t make excuses for her, though. At one point, Ina herself even recognizes the predatory nature of their dynamic. During a drought that causes mass starvation, Ina convinces Marek’s father to cook a human corpse for them. And, when Villiam’s wife goes in search of her lover, it's made implicitly clear that Ina kills her and steals her horse’s eyes so she can see again. Ultimately, many of Ina’s actions make her a sort of corrupter (not that she’s alone in this characterization).

Worst of all, though, is what she does to Marek’s birth mother. Rather than dead, Agata escaped Marek’s father after her son was born and hid away in a convent. When the drought finally incites her to leave, Marek’s father assaults her again in the forest. She eventually ends up in the manor as an assumed virgin mother, becoming Villiam’s next bride. Ina volunteers to care for her, keeping Agata and the new baby completely out of the public eye. When Marek finally enters their room, he discovers that Agata’s face is “hollow and gray, her eyes black holes. A maggot crawled out of her bony nose” (298). Meanwhile, “Nobody had seen Ina in a long time. The old woman looked younger than she used to…from down the hall, Marek stared in awe at her changed appearance” (297). Of all the characters in Lapvona, Agata is the most sympathetic. She suffers from so much abuse that it’s hard to blame her for leaving Marek as a baby. Killing Agata for youthfulness–especially after her already extended life–makes Ina a truly wicked witch. But Ina’s intellect and ability to “beat the system” are also admirable.

You don’t win in Lapvona for being virtuous, you win by being strategic and cruel. Lapvona is bleakness in the extreme; a bleakness that tells us a lot about the nature of monstrosity. There are lessons to glean in vileness–lessons about cause and effect, desire, repulsion, and social systems. Lapvona is an allegory for our times, showing us how exploitation develops and stagnates across the centuries.