‘Crooked Seeds’ is hard to read and impossible to look away from

.” The narrator, Nora, is that most alarming and repellent character: a bitter woman. Single, childless and middle-aged, she won’t smile to look pretty. She won’t effuse to make us feel better. Her fury is boundless. When she says, “I’ll set the world on fire,” she doesn’t mean with a song in her heart.

With withering, Nora-like irritation, Messud shot back: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in ‘The Corrections’? Any of the characters in ‘Infinite Jest’? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If...

But the moral rot overpowers every hygienic offense. Fifty-three-year-old Deidre is putrefying in self-pity. Limping out onto the street, she immediately starts begging for cigarettes and cuts to the front of the water line. Marked by her amputated leg, she’s clearly a well-known figure in this poor section of town. Having exhausted her disability allowance on alcohol, she begs for credit that everyone knows she’ll never pay back.

Deidre may not be responsible for these atrocities — whatever they might be and mean — but with no one else left to take responsibility, on whom should the burden fall? As in some Greek tragedy, the investigation proceeds offstage, with shards of news arriving periodically to screw Deidre’s agitation ever tighter. Her dread is reflected in the wider world that’s drying out and going up in flames.

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