Once there were brook trout
Ottessa Moshfegh, Cormac McCarthy, and the literature of optimism
Hey, I’m back.
A few weeks ago I read Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth full-length novel and the first of hers I’ve finished.1 Let me get this out of the way up front: I liked it. I thought it was a good book, and I want to read Moshfegh’s other books now. It gave me the creeps and it bummed me out and I couldn’t put it down. The prose was blander than instant grits, though not nearly so mushy. It didn’t blow me away by any means; it was pretty good. I liked it.
I’m no stranger to books that bum me out but something about Lapvona took me to a genuinely dark place, one I don’t often visit. I don’t know if this is a good thing, though it’s certainly not a bad thing. My favorite writer of all time2 is Cormac McCarthy3, a man whose books are about as warm and fuzzy as a full nest of groundbees. And, though their prose has nothing in common, it was McCarthy’s work I kept coming back to as I tried to sort through my thoughts on Lapvona.
Here’s a superlative: Lapvona is the bleakest book I’ve ever read.
“Bleak” is a word that gets thrown around a lot talking about McCarthy’s work and, while I can’t say I entirely disagree, I think it can miss the mark somewhat. But when I hear the B-word invoked for The Road, the book that won him a Pulitzer and a mega-awkward Oprah interview… well, then I get heated. The Road is devastating, terrifying, post-apocalyptic bummer of a book. It’s also unbelievably beautiful and probably my favorite of McCarthy’s novels. But it is absolutely—categorically!—not “bleak.”
Here’s another (potentially more controversial) superlative: The Road is the most optimistic book I’ve ever read.
Hey, listen. Hey. Hear me out.
“Optimistic” is not an outlook en vogue in the 21st century, and not without reason. In this day and age, it’s often used synonymously with “delusional.” But I think there’s a place for optimism, albeit meaningful optimism, in the world today, and certainly in literature. I’d go so far as to say there’s a need.
What a lot of people write off as “optimism” is really just delusion: The assumption that things will “be fine,” even improve, without effort or suffering or discomfort. It’s a prioritizing comfort to the point of sheer apathy.
It also tends to foster a narrow and fragile image of what things “working out fine” actually looks like. When “things will be okay” becomes an eject button for engaging with anything scary or uncomfortable, the “optimist” usually winds up learning to conflate “okay” with their own personal comfort. “Okay” only seems to cover “roughly comparable to now” or better, and anything else, well… let’s not dwell on that.
This is where things really start to get iffy. See, when the range of experience one can fathom as meaningful or worthwhile gets reduced to their own individual comfort—especially when the “optimist” in question is, say, an American or a suburbanite or even both4—it’s pretty easy to lose touch with what 99% of the “human experience” has actually looked like. An empty optimism disturbed can only resolve in two ways: delusion or doomerism. Go ahead and pick your poison.
The state of modernity is itself a state of delusion. It is not natural that I can buy a cheap, disposable version of anything I could ever want within three clicks. It’s not natural that it will show up on my doorstep within 24 hours. And it’s certainly not natural that I can buy fresh fruit year-round in a fluorescent-lit building playing P!nk over the loudspeakers. These things only seem reasonable if you choose to ignore the human and ecological consequences they create, and that, friends, that is delusion, and it was never built to last.
A lot of people seem to accept the unprecedented level of material comfort our era offers as a sort of baseline. But SHEIN is not a human right, and “the world” cannot be saved if we can’t bring ourselves to look at what the world actually looks like.
Let me put it this way: A better world requires imagination. Therefore, a better world is impossible if we cannot find the will to live a life we now find unimaginable.
Real, meaningful optimism is an embrace of reality. Being human is hard, being alive is uncomfortable. That’s okay. I’ll gladly own less stuff if it means my grandkids have a habitable planet to live on. I’d gladly give up Amazon if it meant that millions of lives weren’t ruined for my Halloween costume to get here overnight. I’m not afraid of such a world, I’m desperate for it. And I have faith that there is meaning to my life, to living it, even if that life is much harder than mine is now.
A literature of optimism is one that confronts the world, confronts the experience of life, without shying away from the hard parts. A literature that deals unflinchingly with suffering, with hardship, with lives we might now find unthinkable, and a literature that shows us the endless meaning that exists in such lives. A literature to affirm that meaning exists at all.
The Road is a book that fundamentally wants to know why we fight so hard to stay alive when continuing to live means continuing to suffer. Within the novel itself, that suffering is blown out to the extreme. Almost to the absurd. Scarce food, constant fear, and potentially (probably?) being tortured and eaten by cannibal death cults. Beyond that, The Road asks, how do you stay “good” in such a world? How do you raise a child in it? Why even try to?
It’s a heavy read for sure. It’s a book about a beach trip but it is absolutely NOT a beach read.
McCarthy owes a great deal to the work of Flannery O’Connor, especially in the sort of worldview his fiction espouses. Forget about “Southern Gothic,” O’Connor was a downright misanthrope. Human nature, according to her fiction, is unrelentingly cruel, greedy, and at best self-serving.5 People are small-minded and lonely and violent and even the natural world offers little shelter from the human one.
The world of Flannery O’Connor is not a fun one, though it is an awfully funny one. The only thing saving humanity from total desolation, says O’Connor, is God. These are stories about finding your way through a fallen world and, ultimately, back to God. Ideally Catholicism. Certainly Christianity.
McCarthy, himself an Irish-Catholic apostate from Knoxville, seems to have inherited O’Connor’s opinions of humanity if not the durability of her faith. Cormac’s world is just as fallen as Flannery’s, but there’s no God to pull you out, or if there is he doesn’t seem much interested in doing so. Much of his work seems to take the world’s depravity as a given, and its concern is how to navigate such a place without a God—or at least a present God—to find our way back to.
By the time we reach The Road, God has never been more silent. Cormac’s earlier work, godless though it is, upholds a certain reverence for nature, a certain deference to fate. In The Road, nature itself has been eradicated. The world’s gone cold and gray and dead. And if there’s such a thing as fate then it’d better hurry up.
The world of the road has no government, no society, not even an ecosystem to be beholden to. It is a world void of community, natural or human or divine, and stripped back completely to the individual. Merely caring for your own child has become a radical act of altruism. Totally irrational. Most people are dead and those who aren’t have banded together by sheer necessity and will literally eat each other at their first opportunity. The only “good guys” left, it seems, are the father/son protagonists, the man and the boy.
The man, sick and facing his own mortality from within as well as without, deals every day with the fear that, by keeping the boy alive, he’s probably subjecting him to a great deal more suffering than if he’d simply killed them both a long time ago. He’s still not sure he shouldn’t just kill them both. And yet something won’t let him.
Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that—while it pulls no punches and it will absolutely make you cry—the ultimate conclusion The Road comes to is one that affirms the value of goodness.
He went over his life story again and again, but he reached no enlightening conclusion about its moral. First his mother rose from the dead, but not for his sake, apparently.
Ottessa Moshfegh is not a southern writer, and I’m not sure if she’s ever alluded to any influence from O’Connor, but Lapvona sort of makes me wonder. The world of Lapvona is every bit as bleak as Flannery O’Connor’s, but like McCarthy’s, there’s no God to bail you out. Instead of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you find yourself in a fictional medieval fiefdom locked in a feudal system that feels strikingly on-the-nose in 2025.
The class element of book’s thematic content is hard to miss, yes, but it’s the way Lapvona handles faith and morality that I find most interesting. The book is an exploration of scapegoats, and on what happens when a culture venerates suffering without a savior to reward them for it. It’s an incredibly dark book, at times gross and at others extremely violent. It’s unrelenting.
By the time I finished it, I found myself almost impressed that Moshfegh could write a book where not even the smallest glint of light could sneak it. Characters that seem good prove easily corruptible, characters that seem corrupted receive no come-uppance or conversion, and the value of living, of staying alive, is slapped down like a dog-gnawed nerf football. Even the slightest hint of tenderness or love is immediately undercut, and the most noble-seeming scene in the book ends up being an act of (implied) infanticide.
In Lapvona there are no “good guys,” but there are no “bad guys” either. There are just guys6, and there is simply no reason to be good.
On a cosmic scale, both The Road and Lapvona have reached the same conclusion: This place sucks and God isn’t gonna help us. This is also where they start to diverge.
Lapvona opts to wallow in its meaninglessness. To revel in it, even. At times it feels like Moshfegh is having a blast trying to make you, the reader, feel as bad as possible. And she’s good at it, too. “Everything seems reasonable in hindsight,” says the narrator. “Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by.”
The Road, meanwhile, imagines the most violent, depraved, terrifying future imaginable. But even in that world, there’s a meaning inalienable in the choice to stay good and a value in the decision to stay alive. Goodness is a fire not inextinguishable, but still worth sacrificing everything to keep alight. And there’s no such thing as an empty sacrifice.
He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was alright. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
When I think about the literature we need right now, certainly the sort I want to write, it’s one of optimism. Of real, terrifying, even stomach-turning optimism. Fatalism requires nothing from you. Delusion makes no demands. But nothing is scarier than believing this all means something.
I’ve never read a book that captures all this quite like The Road does. You want to know how bad life can get? it asks. Really, really, REALLY bad! But as long as there is one person left alive, then there’s a chance to be good and a value in doing so. Ultimately, what’s more optimistic than that?
I spent like three weeks tinkering with this, by far the longest I’ve ever worked on a Substack post. At a certain point I just had to hit ‘send.’ I hope it resembles some sort of coherence.
If you read the whole thing, I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed it, maybe send it to somebody you like (or somebody you hate, that’s cool too).
Hopefully more coming soon. Regardless, happy Labor Day. Go sit in the sun and read a book this weekend.
I have DNFed the “McGlue” audiobook twice now, though I have a feeling I’ll have less trouble finishing it if I actually read it
Writer, not author, if you’ll allow me such an obnoxious distinction
But in, like, a chill way, I swear
(many such cases)
“‘She would've been a good woman,’ said The Misfit, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’”
Here I invoke the gender-neutral “guys”