It seems that this is Moshfegh’s central mission, too. From a distance I watched the way they congregated, then dispersed, heads hung at mid-level, neither noble nor disconsolate.” From her yard, she considers poverty in its 21st‑century pomp, and produces marvellous sentences about it: “Wild teens, limping men, young mothers, kids scattered on the hot concrete like the town’s lazy rats and pigeons. The protagonist of “Slumming” has given up even Miss Mooney’s residual moral considerations, and wants only to be alone with her $10 drugs and garage sale junk. I used their bathroom to puke in in the mornings.” Miss Mooney is alcoholic and way overfamiliar with her senior class, and spends the story considering whether or not to tell her headteacher she is forging the exam results and sleeping on her desk : she is a blackly comical, richly detailed, nihilistic creation.Ī similar, slightly older Eileenesque character appears a little later in the volume, hanging out for the summer in an unattractive holiday house in a depressed town in New England. L ike Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker prize-shortlisted novel, this collection of short stories opens with a self-loathing young woman who works in a nasty Catholic institution: “My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge.
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