![]() Lapvona is famous in the region for its reliable soil (the cunning, but lazy lord of the land even marries his wife so her father won’t “try to steal dirt”). Land is at the center of the coercion-extraction cycle. The peasants are materially impoverished and spiritually devout, and the nobility is Epicurean and spiritually impoverished. The novel divides its attention between two sides of life in the eponymous, reductive medieval fiefdom: joyless, laboring peasant life and pleasure-seeking noble life. And that would be fine - kind of - if she didn’t derive narrative structure from feudal class differences. It is a way to sell books about cynical apostates written for the simple pleasure of other cynical apostates. Any interest in general systems’ collapse is only ever nominal. In the process, it reveals the deliberate way in which Moshfegh absents herself from politics as a writer. “Lapvona” obsesses over this generalized depression without taking seriously its systemic causes. The internal logic connecting most of Moshfegh’s oeuvre argues that a different world is a fantasy. She is partial to the hypothesis that, free from a positive bias, depressed people have a clearer handle on reality than the non-depressed. Moshfegh’s narratives are each studiously individualistic - effective at goading you into a sort of depressive realism. The throughline is that when a character gains clarity about the rot of society, she effectively exits it. ![]() In “Lapvona,” the medieval Ina - the plot’s protagonist - separates herself from the action of the village, secluding herself to a hut in the woods. In “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the Y2K protagonist cloisters away in a Manhattan apartment and attempts to sleep for a year. Moshfegh likes characters who silo themselves away from society. The fiefdom setting halfheartedly gestures toward a semi-material critique that ultimately fails to cohere. The village of Lapvona isn’t quite a shtetl - it’s Christian - but it has an ambience given its insular, hyper-religious populace. It is set in a vaguely medieval era, in a vaguely Eastern European village, and espouses a completely vague apoliticism. Everything about Ottessa Moshfegh’s newest novel, “Lapvona,” is noncommittal.
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