Youth is no protection: “I was always picking at my pimples,” the teenage hero of “Malibu” tells us, chummily. Most of all, Moshfegh is drawn to bodily rot: there is scarcely a character in the collection without a skin disease or disfigurement. “I liked how ugly it was, how trashy,” says the narrator of “The Weirdos” (Moshfegh’s titles are pleasingly direct). Decay, both moral and corporal, is Moshfegh’s favourite trope and favourite subject and she finds it in “the fake brass and cloudy windows and orange fake marble floors” of empty Malibu malls in the bottom of Hollywood pools, “full of rust stains and the carcasses of squirrels that had fallen in and starved to death” and in the new apartments rising from the “shadowy, crumbling collection of bungalows and auto-body shops” of seaside towns.

Her limpid, rhythmic prose, sumptuous with detail, isn’t exclusive to west coast towns: it can be aroused by all sorts of American landscapes provided they are past their best. 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.

Homesick for another planet