My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
A Novel
Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Publication Year: 2018
ISBN: 9780525524311
Rating: 3.75 stars
I’m going to start this review off with a disclaimer: I really don’t know how I feel about this book. I thought I maybe didn’t fully understand it (I went into it thinking it was a memoir and not a novel, so that is still possibly true), but I read some more about it after finishing it just to see what others had to say, and it seems like maybe I’m not alone in not knowing what to think about it.
This book is about an unnamed but very beautiful protagonist living in New York City in 2000. She is an orphan, a recent graduate of Columbia, an heiress, and just a very angry, misanthropic person. Because I went into this book thinking it was a memoir, I spent an embarrassing amount of time wondering why Moshfegh would ever admit to thinking and feeling the things the narrator was thinking and feeling—turns out she wasn’t. Disenchanted with her life, fired from her job, and on the outs with her longtime on-again-off-again boyfriend, the narrator decides that she’d like to sleep for an entire year to truly get rested and relaxed.
In order to do that, she finds a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, who she is able to trick into believing she is an insomniac. For the next several months, gets Dr. Tuttle to prescribe her more and more heavy duty drugs and uses cocktails of prescription drugs to lull herself into as much sleep as possible. The only interruptions are occasional visits from Reva, the narrator’s best friend, who the narrator doesn’t really like, and the narrator’s own trips she makes while blacked out. Reva is struggling from watching her mother as she dies, her illicit relationship with her boss, a married man, and her own eating disorder and exercise addiction. The narrator repeatedly vows to herself to break up with Reva after she is done sleeping.
Finally, the narrator is able to find Infermiterol, a drug that allows her to lose consciousness for three days at a time. The drug cocktails needed to match the impact of Infermiterol are getting more and more elaborate and Dr. Tuttle is less willing to keep prescribing. The trips out of the apartment and promises the narrator makes in her drug-induced blackouts become more frustrating to her and make her feel like she isn’t getting the rest she needs. Finally, she concocts a plan to get rid of most of her stuff, have an artist work as her caretaker, and have her apartment locked from the outside. Over the next four months, she uses up the last of her Infermiterol to have subsequent three day blackouts with all of her outside needs brought in by the artist.
She emerges from her sleep for good on June 1st, 2001. She spends most of the summer acclimating to life outside of her slumber, slowly replacing her expensive belongings with thrift store finds. She does actually try to revive her relationship with Reva, but Reva brushes her off and then dies in her job in the Twin Towers on September 11th. The narrator’s beloved VCR had died before her last four months of rest, so on September 11th, she buys a replacement to film the news coverage of the terrorist attacks. She is drawn to a particular clip of a woman jumping from the towers because the woman makes her think of Reva even though she doesn’t think it’s her.
So in terms of my reaction to this book, I’m not sure where I stand. I didn’t like any of the characters at all and I was disturbed by the way substance abuse and eating disorders were depicted in the story. However, I’m not sure that matters. This is the only piece of Moshfegh’s work that I’ve read, but she’s well known for writing unlikable characters. They don’t like themselves and I don’t think the reader is supposed to like them either. In terms of the substance abuse and eating disorders, they appear as so much larger than life and so textbook that I don’t think the reader is meant to take them seriously—they are more like outward metaphors for the issues on the character’s insides. In general, I do care about how mental health and substance abuse issues are depicted, but in this book it kind of felt like those issues were incidental even though they were central to the story. I’m not sure that will make sense if you haven’t read it.
I can’t really say that I liked the book, but at the same time, I also can’t say that I disliked it. There wasn’t a point at which I thought about giving it up or wished that it was over, but I also can’t say that I wished there was more of it. I don’t think I will forget about this book anytime soon, but I also can’t name a theme or message that I took from it. Yet, I don’t mean that as a criticism of Moshfegh or the book. I think that is intentional. Sometimes real life doesn’t lend itself to neat themes or lessons, so why shouldn’t books be the same?
In terms of others’ reactions to the book, they seem mostly positive. No one really seems to be able to come up with a theme, but some see Moshfegh’s ongoing use of unhygienic and misanthropic characters as feminist (women don’t have to be perfect and pleasant to be worthy of existing), some see this book as a strike against capitalism (but the narrator has an inherited fortune that allows her to spend a year on this pursuit—that sounds kind of capitalist to me), and some see it as a strike against a self-care industry that pushes people to spend more money on “self-care” instead of challenging the capitalist and societal norms that make true care of the self impossible (I could maybe get on board with this one). Almost every single review calls it some form of darkly funny. I like dark humor, but I really didn’t find much of it here. I have noticed that a lot of critics and people in general just call something darkly funny when they don’t know what else to call it. Normally, I think it’s a cop out, but I struggle to make this book fit into any category, so I certainly can’t blame others in the same boat.
In terms of Moshfegh herself, in a 2016 interview with Fanzine, she said, “I’ve dedicated my life to being a writer and I haven’t done it selfishly. I’m writing for all you fucking assholes, and I need to figure out a way to do that…I needed a way into the mainstream, because, you know what? How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos. I’m fucking brilliant! I don’t know what people expect me to do.” Maybe I’m just not brilliant enough to soak it all in.
So I leave you at the end of this review deeply unsure about this book. I can definitely relate to wanting to sleep for an entire year, and yet trying to fit this book into a nice little box has been keeping me up at night. And yeah, that probably is a mark of authorial brilliance.
Read this book and tell me what you think.