To write a book about God, Ottessa Moshfegh created a world: Lapvona. The story charts a year in a medieval fiefdom where citizens are in thrall to a muddled Christian religion. The piety of the lamb shepherd, Jude, manifests as rape and beatings. His son, Marek, appears meek as a lamb but his murderous jealousy propels the story. The godless Lord Villiam and his crony, Father Barnabas, proclaim that Villiam’s new wife has miraculously conceived; the second coming is upon Lapvona. The men’s subsequent deaths (poisoned wine, self-hanging) have a brief preface that might frame the entire novel: “Perhaps it is most miraculous when God exacts justice even when no human lifts a finger ... Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by. So find some reason here.”

The novel’s aortic question is who or what is this God exacting justice? Upwards of a dozen Lapvonians suggest possible answers. God is “the land” or a maker of wombs into which men “unload”, or “a synonym for [Villiam’s] own good fortune”. Clod, Villiam’s portraitist, provides the artist’s perspective: “Flesh was mortal. God was not. God was not alive. God was life itself. And life was invisible. This was why Clod felt he had to make art, to give proof of life.” A good candidate for a god if not the God is the character Ina, the immortal village wet nurse. Ina is described as both “witch” and “the sacred thing”. Her love story with Grigor, a rare religious sceptic, suggests God is love in its simplest, ineffable form. And yet the birds have told Ina: “Love was a distinctly human defect that God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.”

All Moshfegh’s previous books have alienated, first-person narrators. Lapvona has an ensemble cast of Christians and a bounteous landscape subjected to drought and flood. It has left the cosmos of the deep interior to try and capture universal chaos and synchronicity. But Lapvona’s themes and tricks — vanity, depravity, bleak humour — are distinctly Moshfeghian. The novel is a composition of one writer’s gnostic musings. While Lapvona doesn’t strictly moralise, it champions spirituality and disparages religion.

The subject, God, is the story, and so the novel’s end can’t offer a conclusion. Clod told us, much earlier: “Nobody knows the truth.”