Moshfegh’s considerable gifts as a stylist give these cartoonishly abhorrent scenes a deep-seated punch, but the farther the reader travels over the cart ruts of Lapvona, the more precarious the terrain becomes. The novel is medieval as one of those village-building computer games is medieval: no portrait of a particular time or place, a complex culture with a cosmology and a recognizable system of feudal obligations; but a fantasy genre setting in which medieval things can happen. The higher aesthetic cues are the plague-ridden carnival of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and the hunchbacked heretic in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” screaming as he is burned at the stake; but unlike Eco or Bergman, Moshfegh has little interest in religious belief, and generally presents it in cynical terms. ‘Lapvona’ also often brings to mind ‘grimdark’ fantasies such as ‘Game of Thrones’ and the slapstick comedy of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’. At times, in the brutality of its focus on violation, it seems to point to something harder and more programmatic, the philosophical horror of the Marquis de Sade, or of Georges Bataille.
Obviously, “Lapvona” is not intended to be a conventional “historical novel” full of authentic details and historical touches. But even seen as a postmodern exercise, building a world is perfunctory. Villiam lives on a hill in a mansion with a drawbridge. It’s far enough from the village to have a secret lake in which he collects water as drought ravages the land, yet close enough to walk from the church. Jude pays “monthly dues” to that church, though he never attends, and sounds to the whole world like a church member in today’s American suburbs, rather than a medieval serf. Villiam’s affairs with the northerners are futile, and his wanton destruction of his fief, believed to be the source of the surplus that sustains his regal lifestyle, is weightless and without consequence – while the hungry in the drought-ravaged valley feed on dead spiders, he feasts and swims.
The novel doesn’t seem entirely ironic, in the sense that it genuinely wants to shock, nor is it fully committed to the reality of his world, at least not in a way that would make his shocks circuit with something else. It’s hard to know what to do with scenes like Jude raping or imagining Agata raping, a woman he once loved as a child sex slave and is now a nun. “Jude clumsily poked the red foam on her pubic bone,” Moshfegh writes, “then thrust at her lips at her sheath, which was clenched tight like a fist.” Agata is also the mother of Marek, who thinks she died when he was a boy; and we are told that Judas “had last known that her scabbard had been tortured and bleeding, as she labored to give birth to a deformed skull.” This has all the profusion of a Jacobean revenge tragedy, spilling over into the conventional register of pornography as Jude thinks of his victim’s “tight hole”, his penis “hard and throbbing.” It’s too violent to be funny, and too silly to be meant to be anything else. “Lapvona” has the strange effect and episodic quality of 80s VHS slasher movies, made for an audience that wanted an endorphin rush of terror, shrouded in knowing genre tropes and gory slapstick. The most enduring creation of the novel, the one that remains in the mind, is the witch Ina, with her cunning wit and all-encompassing worldliness. Her refusal to conform connects her to other Moshfegh characters, in different settings. Surrounded by chaos and terror, she knows what kind of story she is in. “I bet you this gold ducat,” she tells an elderly visitor, “that I remember more terrible things than you.”
LAPVONA, by Ottessa Moshfegh | 304 pages | Penguin Press | $27