Ottessa Moshfegh

Source: Larry D. Moore

Levy quotes Moshfegh talking to her man friend, inducing a bum-clenching, toe-curling reaction: “What are you thinking?” “I am thinking what a genius you are, your writing is genius.” Here’s some of that genius, a long passage of Eileen’s greatest joy, described as a case of explosive diarrhea: “With the laxatives, my movements were torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out, a sludge that stank distinctly of chemicals and which, when it was all out, I half expected to breach the rim of the toilet bowl. In those cases I stood up to flush, dizzy and sweaty and cold, then lay down while the world seemed to revolve around me. Those were good times.”

One could also call it bowel porn. But don’t despair, dear readers—yes, we are falling back to barbarism, but Ariel Levy has an excuse: She’s a frustrated proctologist posing as a writer for The New Yorker while dreaming of nonstop colonoscopies. Ottessa Moshfegh has been described as “arguably the most rapidly expanding powerful voice in American letters and when she speaks of what she believes in, has spent her life working to perfect, a righteous transgressive sensitive force speaks through her which is divinity in rebellion.”

Ah yes, how wonderful our rebellion days were, when we recited Fitzgerald’s farewell sonnets to university life: “The last light fades and drifts across the land—the long, low land, the sunny land of spires….” I think back and can see Natasha and Prince Andrei waltzing in the winter palace, Brett and Jake downing whiskeys and listening to a paso doble in Pamplona, Tommy holding Nicole back while Dick blesses the beach at Antibes, never to return. And Ariel Levy inhaling deeply and watching Ottessa Moshfegh take a dump.

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