Otessa Moshfegh's LAPVONA

There's a fad nowadays for de-romanticizing the Middle Ages in various ways. A lot of contemporary fantasy that takes its cues from history, for instance, takes the route of brutalizing women to be gritty and "realistic" (whatever that means in a made-up world in which magic, dragons, deities, etc. exist). I've read at least one history book this year that sought to "brighten" our perspective on the period. But I've not encountered many that take the route of Otessa Moshfegh's latest, Lapvona, toward a new version of the Age of Faith.

Set in an unspecified fictionalized region of Europe in an unspecified century (coded very strongly as pre-Enlightenment), Lapvona takes aim at that last characterization of the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance; there is considerable religious feeling among the residents of the village that gives the novel its name; most of these are vegetarians, or at least ovo-lacto vegetarians, out of a vague notion that eating meat is sinful, but they have no firm grasp on doctrine or theology. Villiam, the lord of the manor set above the absurdly fertile valley where the hovel-dwellers of the village and the odd semi-pastoral herder live and toil has no firmer grasp than his peasants, and even the priest who lives with Villiam, one Father Barnabas, doesn't seem overly familiar with the Bible or the liturgy, performing rituals so rarely that he would have to brush up on them if anybody even cared or would notice that he's about half making up his words and gestures as he fumbles through the odd wedding or funeral.

We are only peripherally concerned with Villiam or Barnabas, though, as the Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring of this novel unfold; our point of view character is a malformed, ugly and partially disabled boy named Marek, a child who only knows a few things about his absent mother, told to him by his bitter and hardbitten guardian, Jacob, who beats Marek at any provocation, works the boy half to death and has convinced the child that his suffering is a sign of his being specially chosen by God to Suffer the Most because suffering pleases God, to which end Jacob is also a flagellant who inflicts almost as much pain on himself as on his son, every night once their small herd of sheep (raised for wool and milk but never eaten by anyone in Lapvona, though bitter necessity forces Jacob to part with most of each year's crop of lands to be sold elsewhere for meat to pay the high taxes Villiam demands of all of his subject peasants) is settled in safely. Jacob and Marek have secrets, the revelations of which are the chief driver of the plot of Lapvona, as the villagers' dire straits are made even more dire by a drought that is more the fault of their foolish and greedy lord than of the angry God they seek to placate.

Which, trigger warning: in addition to domestic violence and rape and a Lysa Arryn-level of prolonged breast feeding/nursing behavior (as in the village wet nurse keeps on letting people suck on her into adulthood and even middle age) there is animal abuse and, yes, cannibalism and you are really going to need a strong stomach to get through it all. I've put books aside for much less, but I fought through to the end of Lapvona because the novel remained compelling throughout even though the only remotely sympathetic character is barely in it and everybody else is, I can't even say fun to hate, just horrible to watch, like a highlight reel from a CPAC convention except no mass media was necessary to send all of these people into derangement and reprehensible deeds.

Not since Robert Silverberg's Book of Skulls have I felt so punished by a book even as I admired its precision of message and its deft handling of details. We never get to the Grand Guignol level other reivews had led me to expect, but it was never beautiful either. Frankly, I'm stumped as to what it really is, but it's something.