Her students’ lives are a mess, but her own life is even more of a disaster, and together they share snarky dialogue and mirrored despair. The collection opens with “Bettering Myself,” a portrait of Miss Mooney, a 30-year-old divorced high school teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school in the East Village, as she passes the days with her students and her college-age boyfriend, who lingers outside the story most of the time as a symbol of pure millennial angst. If there’s a thematic thread weaving through this collection, it’s the complicated relationship between entrapment in the physical body - her characters are often probing, picking and searching with their fingertips, as if seeking beauty and potential grace - and entrapment in social landscapes.
In her excellent first collection, “Homesick for Another World,” Ottessa Moshfegh, the daughter of a Croatian mother and an Iranian father, moves from the West Coast to East Coast (with a brief stop in China) and homes in on characters in states of weirdly dynamic paralysis, trapped between the pains of the past - bad childhoods, bad relationships, bad marriages - and dreams of the future. The bigger the country, the more necessary the short story form. $26.Ī talented story writer can range an immense landscape - as Chekhov did in Russia - zeroing in on precise situations of intense isolation and, story by story, drawing what seems to be a map of national character. HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD By Ottessa Moshfegh 294 pp.
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