Alienation is as old as storytelling itself. In earlier days, we used to explore our feelings of isolation and disconnection through salivating monsters, because we used to think about the monster as a figure that hovered at the edges of human society, looking in. In Beowulf, Grendel hears the humans celebrate indoors while he mopes around the moors, alone. Frankenstein’s monster lurks outside a peasant family’s house, only to be driven away when they catch sight of him. In the stories we told ourselves, we were careful to keep our darkest fears on the periphery.

HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD: STORIES by Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Press., 304 pp., $26.00

But the monsters of today’s art are part of our world. They’re fathers or sisters or neighbors who got turned into zombies by an alien virus or a government experiment run amok. They’re normal teenagers who happen to be vampires or werewolves or mutants. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to our high school. These new monsters—the ones within us—represent a distinct departure from older genres of literature that were created to explore our existential terror. You couldn’t write Steppenwolf now—the word “wolf” in the title would make it seem more like a supernatural thriller than a book about loneliness.

In her new collection of short stories, Ottessa Moshfegh reverses our modern expectations of genre by connecting the estranged ethos of the existentialists with the horror of ordinary life in our time. Homesick for Another World is a compendium of 14 compulsive little tales, each powered by the sense of distance implied in the book’s title. Several of them have run already in The New Yorker, so the distinctive Moshfegh flavor—minimal, repulsive, fleshly—may already be known to you. That one about the creepy neighbor and the firm thighs through the chain-link fence—that was her. She’s also the author of Eileen, a fast-paced novel she wrote for a popular audience as a means of disseminating her special strain of dissatisfaction with the world as it is. If she made a name for herself and a little cash, she figured, people might pay attention when she published the kind of stories she cares about. “I looked at the dominating paradigm and I abused it,” she wrote last year in The Masters Review. The resulting potboiler about a miserable twentysomething caught up in a thrilling mystery with a tall redhead was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, so I suppose her scheme worked.



In Homesick, as with Eileen, Moshfegh has produced a book that abuses its paradigm. By this I mean that her stories exploit the fun, singsong qualities of storytelling while peddling a manic savagery that doesn’t fit the medium. Homesick is filled with spidery-faced women and deadly fruits, against the backdrop of games arcades and meals at Friendly’s. Like her peers—Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Alexandra Kleeman—Moshfegh writes characters who shrink big feelings into flat utterances, the kind of disaffected tone that feels born of the internet and its mechanisms for emotional distance. The overall effect is of an ancient fairytale performed by bad television actors, the kind who seem to be makeup all the way through.

Each story in Homesick features a clear protagonist, who may be young or old or male or female—the specifics don’t seem to matter. These heroes are never sympathetic, or really even close to humane. One character says nothing as a pregnant woman begins to bleed in front of her. Another forges her students’ standardized test results in between drinking sessions. But all these protagonists have desires: for sex, for an acting gig, for escape. The stories are all animated by a plot motion that muffles or perverts those desires, delivering a nice injection of twist. The protagonists may fuck or booze or laze their way through tightly choreographed plots, but they never quite dance into fulfillment.