There’s something encouraging, and perhaps telling, about Ottessa Moshfegh’s success. Her abject, pervy, excremental fictions carry a whiff of deviance and nihilism into a squeaky clean mainstream that comforts some while alienating others. Although it was set before the horrors of web 2.0, her hugely popular novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation seemed to reflect something of the medicated, desolate, anaesthetised now. While our era’s ruling cultural-literary tone decrees “It’s the end of the world – no laughing”, Moshfegh’s stuff is comically weird, amoral and antisocial.
Lapvona is not her first novel to eschew the contemporary world – her debut, McGlue, was set aboard a 19th-century pirate ship – yet its blurred medieval setting, like a recounted dream of a half-forgotten past, feels like a bold swerve. As I began reading I kept asking myself: “What’s she up to? What skin has she got in this game?” Three hundred pages later, I still didn’t fully have my answers, though by then I’d realised that the (pseudo) historical setting wrenches us out of history and into a timeless, interior landscape of drives, impulses and cravings. A crowd of first name-only characters trace the play of instinct and appetite amid a cheerfully undignified, infantile realm wherein morality either operates in some alien manner or isn’t there at all. Lapvona’s grotesque, shameless world shows us not how it used to be, but how it’s always been.
In the eastern European-seeming fiefdom of Lapvona, Marek is a masochistic and pious 13-year-old who abides in stable disgust for his father, Jude, looking down on his masturbation and excess pleasure in rites of self-mortification. Lapvona’s lord and governor is the man-baby Villiam, whose priority in life is to be entertained at all times. Dibra is Villiam’s wife, “a bore and a nuisance”, while Ina is a withered crone with magically bountiful breasts that Marek and others come to suck in her cabin at the edge of town. Marek’s mother, Agata, is believed dead but may be about to return.
These and sundry peripheral characters collide in ways that string the plot along, though it soon becomes clear that this plot, like the medieval setting, is secondary to the pulsing, quivering tissue of incident and carnality that it facilitates. As well as grown men breast-feeding from eldritch old women, we are presented with ejaculations, incest, botched abortions, arse-sniffing, rapes, pube-plucking, tongueless or eyeless women and a scene involving a servant girl and a grape that could have sprung from some dank 4chan cellar. Particularly in her morally neutral scenes of physical and sexual humiliation, Moshfegh seems to write from a shady confraternity that includes the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille and Angela Carter.
Among the novel’s scant real-world signifiers is the Christian religion, though here the faith is a codification of perversities, violence and morbid fleshly fascinations. Its morality is invoked only with reference to its punitive delights (“Chastise an evil-doer and God will know you’re good”) or its freaky sexiness (“Jesus, bloodied and dead, falls into the arms of Mary. Her nipples hardened thinking of that embrace, and her breasts ached”). The most elemental, charged, oneiric passages read like scenes from an art-porn film so avant garde it no longer aspires to arouse, but is bent instead on unveiling some transcendent reality of sex and the psyche. A description of Villiam’s bed doubles as a gloss on the novel’s varicoloured and crusty texture: “blood smeared, shit smeared, semen shot on the canopy”.
Aside from Marek, Villiam, Ina and one or two others, the characters hardly distinguish themselves except as embodiments of drive or attribute. There are too many names. We encounter Jenevere, Clod, Petra, Ivan, Jon, Lisbeth, Grigor, Vuna, Luka, Emil and others besides, but it’s a struggle to keep track of their incesty familial links or what dramatic role they are each meant to play. Father Barnabas stands out as an amusingly complacent priest, dimly aware of needing to do the absolute minimum to avoid letting the villagers realise he’s corrupt to the core. Jacob, a handsome rival to Marek, meets a bloody end early on. In its final act the novel – which is divided into seasons of the year – makes room for a dubious Second Coming, as eerie images well up from a subterranean fount of unconsciousness and myth: a woman with horses’ eyes; divine ejaculations; shit as satanic sacrament.
In the past, Moshfegh has trollishly floated the notion that she might be a bit of a hack (she revealed that her acclaimed novel Eileen issued from an awful-sounding “Write a novel in 90 days” programme), but Lapvona confirms that such ploys served the author’s deeper agenda of getting the weird shit in front of a mass audience. What impresses here is not so much Moshfegh’s abilities with character or narrative, or even her language (which excels more in her short stories), as the qualities Lapvona shares with a Francis Bacon painting: depicting in blood-red vitality, without morals or judgment, the human animal in its native chaos. “When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.”
• Rob Doyle’s most recent books are Autobibliography and Threshold
• Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh is published by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
