There’s at least one genuinely nasty piece of work here, in the form of Mr Wu‘s eponymous character, with his deeply hypocritical stalk-reject-repeat philosophy. Then come brief interludes of speakers whose unpleasantness derives, conversely, from their overwhelming arrogance, for example in A Dark and Winding Road and Nothing Ever Happens Here. Firstly, there are those who feel oppressed by their own sense of worthlessness and degradation, like the narrators of The Weirdos and Slumming. The protagonists of Homesick for Another World can be broadly divided into a couple of categories.

Moshfegh’s ability and willingness to craft wholly unsympathetic and largely reprehensible people set her work apart from contemporary literary fiction there’s something Dickensian in the grotesque nature of some of her creations, and the likes of Daniel Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop would fit right in here. If any of this sounds like a criticism, it assuredly isn’t. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge.

Bettering Myself, the opening story, begins with the following juxtaposition of religion and regurgitation: the tone is set for the rest of the collection. This assessment of harshness and crudeness could easily be applied to any of the stories from Homesick for Another World, in which Moshfegh transfers the scummy inelegance of her Booker-nominated novel, Eileen, and somehow uses it to create even more unpleasant characters. In one story from Ottessa Moshfegh’s new short story collection, a character is described thus: “despite being pretty and soft as flesh, there was something harsh about her… Something crude” ( An Honest Woman).

Ottessa moshfegh short stories