And this recurring note of fascinated distaste makes it hard to disentangle their misanthropy from their self-loathing. She revels in the grubbiness of the human body, splashes the ordure around like a preschooler in a muddy puddle. Her work has a corporeal, rebarbative, scatological quality. What makes Moshfegh an uncommon writer is that beneath the scorn and the dark humour there lurks an authentic Swiftian disgust. There is a special satisfaction in being invited to share the exquisite isolation and ennui that result when you are the only person smart enough to have realised that people are idiots and everything is a sham. Their caustic observations perform the same seductive trick: they draw you into an intimate alliance against the hypocrisy, absurdity and ugliness they see around them. The narrators of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation have a knowing air that is at times reminiscent of that archetypal world-weary adolescent Holden Caulfield, even though both of them are in their mid-twenties. Moshfegh is well aware that there is something a little jejune about this kind of sweeping contempt. It was the same thing I had about skinny people: I hated their guts.’ A fourth features a man who admits to having ‘a thing about fat people. A third story is narrated by someone who thinks the ‘entire world is stupid’. In another, a teacher complains that all she ever does is ‘contend with stupidity and ignorance’. ‘I hated almost everything,’ declares the narrator of Eileen ‘I was unhappy and angry all the time.’ Her dissatisfaction is shared by the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, who feels like ‘a baby being born - the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile … the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.’ In one of the fourteen short stories collected in Homesick for Another World, the central character observes that people are ‘so dishonest with their clothes and their personalities’. Ottessa Moshfegh’s protagonists are, as a rule, unimpressed - with society, with their families and acquaintances, with life in general.
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