Does a Story Lose Its Power When It Loses Its Hope?

WHAT IS A devout village to believe in during a time of famine and plague? Ottessa Moshfegh presents a story devoid of hope and redemption in her latest novel Lapvona, proving that in dire times, believing is not a want but a need.

Moshfegh has a flare for brutality (Eileen and Death in Her Hands). With Lapvona, Moshfegh has crafted a medieval fantasy in the vein of Game of Thrones. It reads like a fairy-tale epic for adults, with its cast of fringe characters and fable-esque sequence of events. But this fantasy is far more depraved: As religious as the villagers are, there is no redemption to be found in this village.

The main characters’ lives are controlled by incredibly selfish people: a lord who hoards water while his realm thirsts and a witch who preys on desperate believers of her remedies. In a time of drought, famine, and plague, the environment is as harsh as the rulers. This is one way that Lapvona is a typical Moshfegh novel — life becomes increasingly awful with no end in sight. Nihilism seems like the only reasonable response to a world characterized by an extreme wealth gap, catastrophic weather, and casual cruelty.

In certain graphic scenes, Moshfegh overplays her hand: One character, for instance, replaces her eyes with a horse’s, then keeps her real eyes to rot in her house. The disgust, which is a signature of her writing, fails to add to the story because characters are already suffering so much. The gore and filth only bog the story down, begging the question: Does a story lose its power when it loses its hope?

The character of Marek is what kept me reading until the end. The shepherd’s son is simultaneously the most cursed and the most divine character in Lapvona. Marek is an outcast among outcasts. He is physically deformed with a “spine twisted in the middle so that the right side of his rib cage protruded from his torso.” Marek was abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father, who tends more to his lambs than to his only son. This suffering child gets no attention until he kills the son of the town’s lord. But instead of punishing Marek, the lord, Villiam, adopts Marek as a replacement son. Even while surrounded by farce, Marek remains sincere.

In a world so depraved and hopeless, is religion reduced to escapism? Marek, after surviving one year of natural and human-made disasters, concludes that death is nothing to mourn. The villagers believe that hunger, ailments, and abuse — the sum total of their suffering — qualify them for the afterlife. Marek’s servant Lispeth thinks that “perhaps God liked her best because she asked for so little.”

Ultimately, Lapvona presents a bleak picture of spiritual life: Religion is twisted theater at a time when people most need it to be meaningful. In the villagers’ defense, it wasn’t that they looked for hope in the wrong places; there simply wasn’t any hope to be found. Moshfegh’s latest novel leaves the reader craving affirmation that life has value and faith is not simply a tool.