Note: not 100% sober. Spoilers and such.

Finished this yesterday, so I'm still thinking it over. It seems to be the most frequently disliked of Moshfegh's work, and that has thus far been my experience as well, though I suspect given time, it will elevate itself into one of the best, at least for me.

Reading it is undeniably a bit tedious. I'm unclear on how much of the story takes place inside the protagonist's mind, but it's possibly all of it. She finds a note during a morning walk and extrapolates an entire murder narrative based upon a few sentences, complete with a cast of suspects. She begins meeting fellow townspeople who she either overtly gives the names of characters from her invented narrative, or who just happen to have those names (she presumably has given these people those names as well, the writing is just more coy about it).

The invented murder mystery struck me as primarily a commentary on two different things. First of all is the writing process as Vesta's spiraling narrative is a mirror to what writers must do on a day to day basis: invent stories out of virtually nothing. In one of the book's funniest sequences, Vesta uses a library computer to "ask Jeeves" about solving a murder, and gets mystery writing tips as a result, which she follows.

More poignantly, the entire book struck me as a meditation on grief. Vesta has lost her philandering, condescending husband and has replaced his companionship with a dog, and while her feelings about her deceased husband oscillate wildly from heartbreak to resentment, she's clearly in pain from the loneliness of it all and the invented murder mystery is a distraction.