Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation tries its best to make itself unlikable, which is a clever if cynical way to make it even more likable. The main character is a privileged, entitled, disloyal, WASPy, Ivy League graduate who doesn't have to do anything and doesn't. She's alienated, misanthropic, angry, feeling connected to the world only by her building's trash chute. Moshfegh at length but offhandedly establishes her trauma, subtly detailing the scars of her upbringing and the recent deaths of those responsible. "We got along best when we were asleep." Her inability to grieve has become a wall between her and everything else. She doesn't have anything to grieve for, so she grieves by not grieving. The narrator doesn't like herself much and doesn't expect to be liked. Despite having pretty much everything we're supposed to want in life (looks, money, cool job), all is insufficient and superficial. Emblematic of that lifestyle is her best and only friend Reva, who self-conscious and self-hating engages in a constant battle of self-improvement. She lives a life of quiet desperation, but like so many stubbornly rides daily into the valley of death. Reva's concern is about what we're told life should be, what we should want, one of those people who have careers instead of jobs. This is everything our narrator doesn't want to be. She doesn't want to be one of the people in a country somnambulating through life, chasing meaningless goals. Consequently, she treats Reva horribly ("'You'll be fine,' I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. 'Don't be a spaz,' I said when her mother's cancer spread to her brain."), which is how her tool of a so-called boyfriend treats her. Self-hating people find a way to accept such treatment. Unhappy with everything, she wants to live in a world of "fluff," where it all can be ignored. "I needed a way out of this -- the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life." So our narrator enters My Year of Rest and Relaxation. She evolves a plan to eradicate her current life in "American" sleep. She wants to hibernate in a chemical cocktail. To undergo a drug-fueled metamorphosis in which she'll be reborn as someone who doesn't hate everyone and everything. "I knew in my heart ... that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person ... . My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets." The vehicle for this rebirth and the novel's comic relief is provided by the hilarious and incredible psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, gleefully providing a level of medication that would hospitalize a racehorse and injecting fresh air and fairy dust on every page in which she appears. After our narrator's dark night of the soul, we and she come out the other side. The ending seems rushed, but her plan works. She has a newly born heart (and Moshfegh reveals her own). She's woken up, just as America awoke to what looked like a much different world after 9/11. Our narrator is now willing to connect to humanity (with charity shop Goodwill as her first step). In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh is willing to use any trick in her bag, including Pynchonesque bad jokes, saying the unsayable, and mining dark humor and disgust for all they're worth. She goes to implausible and awkward lengths to deny the narrator a name, but I'm unsure why. She writes amazingly well, (somehow she reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis -- that's a compliment, btw), but I'm not sure that even this amazing book matches her talent. At this point we can only read Ottessa Moshfegh and marvel; someday we'll look back and be able to see how it all worked and where it all fit. [4½★]
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