Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Rating: 3 Stars
I find Ottessa Moshfegh’s work to be fascinating. I’ve previously read her novel Eileen and her short story collection Homesick for Another World.
All of her characters seem to come from some bizarre island of misfit personalities. They are usually some combination of unattractive, addicted, depressed, or sociopathic. She seems incapable of writing about any character exhibiting anything approaching a normative personality. The challenge that she seems to give herself is to create an as unsympathetic protagonist as possible and to see if she can entice the reader into caring and/or rooting for her.
So it is here. The narrator, unnamed, is quite a piece of work. She is young (around 25) and is thin and beautiful. Recently having quit / been fired from an art gallery job, she seems to have resolved to spend a year sleeping as much as possible. She manages to find Dr Tuttle, a psychiatrist, who willingly and cheerfully prescribes all of the drugs that our narrator could ever hope for. She mixes and matches various combinations, along with cough syrup, alcohol, and everything else to find the best mixture of drugs that will allow herself to sleep uninterrupted.
The narrator’s best (and apparently only) friend is Reva. Although Reva acclaims her love for the narrator and expresses concern with her drug use and lack of initiative, it’s clear that she is jealous, envious, and resentful of the narrator’s looks and access to money. The narrator, on the other hand, although acknowledging that Reva is her best friend, can barely stand her and is openly contemptuous of her.
There’s a couple of more characters, but most of the action revolves around these three.
As the narrator continues to try to find the perfect mix of drugs that will finally give her blissful sleep, Dr Tuttle gives her an experimental drug.
After taking it, the narrator has a three day blackout during which she was apparently out and about in the world but now has no memory of it. Worse, after having taken it, she finds it impossible to get back to sleep, regardless of any combination of pills.
Given that she now can no longer sleep, how will she achieve the peace that she thinks that only extended rest can grant her?
So goes another character in the Moshfegh universe. The narrator is deliberately unlikable. As a reader, it’s as if you’re reading the diary of someone bent upon self destruction.
As the story unfolds, Moshfegh does start to open a window into how the narrator got to this point. You hear about her parents and their deaths. You hear about her childhood home that now needs to be sold but that is still a potent source of memories for her. She is stuck and is just grasping for something that might free her.
If I’m a fan of Moshfegh, why the 3 stars?
At least for me, Moshfegh’s characters are best read in short stories. I enjoyed nearly every story in Homesick for Another World. In a short story, the anti-hero can be drawn and can arrive at their conflict / resolution quickly. As a reader, if you’ve reached your fill of Moshfegh’s pitch black humor, you can complete a story and wait a bit before starting the next.
In her novels, you have to marinate in the protagonist. I had a similar issue when I read Eileen. Although I enjoyed it, there were times when I was like, I get it, she’s a horrible person, I don’t need to be buried in all of the various parts of her horribleness.
I think that Moshfegh’s art is this pushing of the envelope. How far can she actually take the protagonist before she loses the reader? How many times do I have to read about her taking some random cocktail of pills and then passing out for sixteen hours for me to understand that she’s reckless and lost? How many times does Dr Tuttle have to ask the narrator how her mother died for me to understand that she’s a really bad psychiatrist? How many times does Reva have to ogle the narrator’s shoes for me to understand that she’s a shallow, envious, consumerist barely interested in the narrator’s actual health?
For me, from a thematic point of view, it all got a bit repetitive. I feel that the same story could have been expressed better in novella form.
dorkenstein 