Vesta’s loyal dog Charlie plays the part of Reva, the fawning best friend from My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Both novels begin in medias res with their protagonists grieving the loss of family. She explains, “Most people were blue collar and dull.” The narrative takes place over a short period and the structure’s hyperfocus on Magda’s inner monologue in her house and her quick jaunts to other locales (the library, the food store) is reminiscent of Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In her new town, Levant, Vesta doesn’t spend time making friends with the locals, and this is where her haughtiness shows most. It’s not a surprise Vesta’s other reason for her new start is that she wanted “only to do exactly what I wanted.” This includes, possibly, creating a murder mystery. Like Hughes, Walter was tall, mercurial, and brilliant. It becomes clear that Walter is like a different sort of fading, twentieth-century man: Ted Hughes. Still haunted by their marriage, Vesta compares him to Harrison Ford, but the comparison is too flattering. Toward the beginning of the novel, Vesta explains her rationale for moving to an isolated cabin in the woods: “My mind needed a smaller world to roam.” Her late husband Walter had been a larger-than-life figure, and a man well respected in his scientific field. Escher, and Death in Her Hands is a literary double of his lithograph Drawing Hands: we experience Vesta creating Magda while Magda creates Vesta.

I left it there, of course.” Wheels start turning: is Magda implying that she left the note there for a moment or left it there for herself to find? Or is this Moshfegh showing her hand-Moshfegh did leave us this note, after all. In these first pages, Vesta claims, “No I didn’t see her body. Readers learn a girl named Magda has been killed. The note, like so much in this metafictional story, is spooky. Death in Her Hands, the third novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, begins when Vesta Gul, a seventy-two-year-old recent widow, moves to a rural town and finds a note during her usual walk in the woods.

Death in her hands by ottessa moshfegh