I might write a longer review of this at a different time, but I'm coming to this story rather late, and there's not much more to critique that hasn't been written already. Briefly, this was mediocre and with a heavy-handed obviousness. "What a sick, cynical young woman with a prophetic bent towards 9/11 America. Her WASP parents fucked her up pretty badly, huh? She's immature but so so observant." Cool.
The protagonist isn't unworthy of character study [I can be a pretty solipsistic reader; I like stories about young fail-daughters], but I think the value of a novel like that/this is not, primarily, its subject matter but its voice. Moshfegh is not deft enough a writer to eclipse spectacle, nor avoid those trite, thoughts-racing-in-metaphors-as-a-feverish-burst-of-emotion-takes-hold passages that cheapen the whole thing.
Plus: this is a breezy, entertaining read for when you have downtime somewhere, like a car dealership.
