W hat makes American life meaningful? Apple products?

Cat videos? Torrential pornography? The prospect of a lavish

retirement? The senior prom? Forestalling your plunge into poverty?
Prescription narcotics? Not so long ago the answers might have
included: God, manifest destiny, gentleman farming, transmuting
hardship into blues and jazz, abstract expressionism, white picket
fences, the great American novel, T. S. Eliot’s broken heart, being a
Communist, being an anarchist, not being Soviet, viable
entrepreneurialism, plausible feminism, NASA, loving nature,
transmuting privilege into psychedelic rock, recognizing ourselves in
those who are different from us, and, in general, striving together to
form a more perfect union.
The target has always been moving and manifold and
inextricable from bad shit. The ends change because the founders
designed a means, not an end. What can liberalism do but shrug off the
ultimate questions? We inherit rules and, at best, mores. But who, in
the meantime, doesn’t like ultimate answers? Since November 2016,
the United States has beheld a set of ultimate answers, told as just-so
stories, to make the blood run cold.
The new president, having long since skunked mores, delivers
bracing fables of doom. Trump’s storytelling appalls even some of us
white men from the rustbelt who are ostensibly served by it. Yet in a
certain sense he’s done nothing more than deliver what voters of every
stripe have come to expect. For all their differences, Obama and Trump
both rose to power as storytellers, broadcasting mythologies onto the
ephemeral wall of contemporary reality. Obama drew from Abraham
Lincoln and Reinhold Niebuhr to do it; Trump, from Nielsen, Breitbart,
and the kooky eddies of the internet. Obama gave us the arc of history
bending toward justice; Trump, a “nasty woman” and some “rusted-out
factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”
If it feels like a category error to compare oval-office storytelling
with literary storytelling, so much the worse for literary storytellers.
Writers, like presidents, expand their lungs to the fullest in the
atmosphere of ultimate questions. They owe us an account of the
foundations of conviction that underlie our choices. If anything heralds
transcendence any longer, writers should help say what. It falls to them
to elevate, nourish, make visible, caress, fortify, and render with love
what the White House would shoot, deport, mock, silence, or gleefully
immerse in the white noise of anti-factuality.
 Did Ottessa Moshfegh vote for Trump? If so, I’ll eat my hat. But,
like Trump’s oratory, her new story collection, Homesick for Another
World, aestheticizes abjection. The characters will shock you with their
cruelty, and that shock is proffered as a treat. Here’s a lonely Chinese
man, looking for love, anonymously texting the woman he thinks he
adores: “How does it feel to be a middle-aged divorcee living with your
retarded nephew and working in a computer café? Is it everything you
ever dreamed?” Not hard to imagine Trump asking this of a contestant
on The Apprentice.
In Moshfegh’s world, as in Trump’s, such seduction lines work.
People like to be abused. Moshfegh, of course, makes use of complete
sentences, fine words, and complex grammar, as the president never
will. She describes the proprietor of a yard sale as “a woman with a
hundred years of suffering behind her—no love, no transformations, no
joy, just junk food and bad television, ugly, mean-spirited men
creaking in and out of stuffy rooms to take advantage of her womb and
impassive heft.” A bleak perpetuity haunts the scene. “One of her obese
offspring would soon overtake her throne … and preside over the
family’s abject state of existence.” How can this be? “You’d think that,
sitting there, oozing slowly toward death with every breath, they’d all
go out of their minds. But no—they were too dumb for insanity.”

MOSHFEGH’S CHARACTERS WILL

SHOCK YOU WITH THEIR CRUELTY,
AND THAT SHOCK IS PROFFERED AS
A TREAT.

Through the eyes of tweaked narrators, Moshfegh conjures a

debased population and degraded landscape. Here there’s no “scenic
hike or museum to visit, no guided tour, no historic monument … no
gallery of naive art, no antique shop, no bookstore, no fancy bakery,”
only gas station coffee and two-dollar movies. “And sometimes I visited
the deluxe shopping center on Route 4, where the fattest people on
Earth could be found buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs, trailing
huge carts full of hamburger meat and cake mix and jugs of vegetable
oil and pillow-size bags of chips.” Those tombstone factories, though
unmentioned, loom just up the road.
Pimples abound. A Chinese prostitute has a “face covered in hard
little pimples.” A guy in Malibu comes clean: “It was true: I had
pimples.” A volunteer working with “retarded” people describes “the
runt of the litter—small shouldered, pale, with blackheads and pimples
around the corners of his mouth and nostrils.” A music student’s face
“was scabbed from tearing his pimples open and squeezing the pus out
with dirty chewed-up fingernails.” A narcissist describes his thuggish
brother’s “terrible cystic acne,” the “big red boils of pus that he
squished mindlessly in front of the television.” A sleazy director asks an
aspiring actor: “You always got zits up there between your eyebrows?”
Genitals also abound. You can make your own montage.
Disgust lives in moist proximity to titillation. It is this dimension
of modernism, the dimension that once upon a time reactionaries
savored a hatred for, that stands behind Moshfegh’s achievement.
Gustave Courbet painted The Origin of the World in 1866, and its wry
frankness, its outrageous comic ambiguity, its yawning bang, is
Moshfegh’s kind of thing. It is a modernist axiom—the art that feels
most alive is grounded in shock—that links Moshfegh to her
predecessors; it is also reflective, perhaps, of her training. Take James
Joyce. Ulysses teaches a reader a great deal about the sensory,
linguistic, and historical contours of Dublin in 1904 and virtually
nothing about how to act or be—unless, perhaps, how not to be
squeamish or prudish. Ulysses appeared in 1922, making it ancient
history to a literary scene, like ours, committed to tomorrow. Yet even
today Joyce casts determinative light across the galaxy of American
creative writing programs. From him to Hemingway, to the classrooms
of the 1950s that enshrined the latter, to the seminars that produced
the American minimalist fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, runs the
genealogy at the far end of which Moshfegh assumes her place.