Fifty Books Project 2023

My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh

The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion - I began to do things while I was unconscious.  I'd fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor.   Furniture got rearranged.  I started to misplace things.  I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks.

This is a most unusual, entertaining and ultimately beautiful book.  While it not without precedent – there are echoes of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, it is ultimately unlike anything I have read – totally lucid while still being largely hallucinogenic, solidly character driven while still feeling experimental.  Wallowing in despair while still being laugh out loud funny and, somehow, getting beyond despair.

Moshfegh gives us an unnamed character who, at the start of the novel has already given up on life. She is young, financially independent (Moshfegh goes to great lengths to make her sure her finances never get in the way) and beautiful, but has decided life has nothing to offer her and plans to handle her ennui by sleeping for a solid year.  While she visits a wonderfully comic psychiatrist who doles out psychotropic drugs and new-age advice with equal hysteria, her narrative moves back periodically to fill us in on the death of her parents, her soul-crushing work in a downtown art gallery and the vapid, useless support she gets from her one friend, Reva. 

Much of the novel is taken up with lists of pills she is taking – some familiar, commercially available meds like Ambien and Nembutal, others apparently created by Moshfegh to underline her point (Infirmiterol).  There are also long lists of the late 20^thcentury movies the narrator watches on her old VCR while drifting in and out of sleep – Working Girl, Tootsie, Air Force Onethat convince you that it is not just the drugs that are putting her to sleep.   There are also vivid descriptions of sleep, of dreams she has and dreams she makes up to feed her psychiatrist in order to secure more prescriptions.  

The only real relationship is with her friend Reva.  Reva is, in fact, the only other real character in the book.  There are bodega owners and gallery owners and a hot downtown artist and two truly hideous boyfriends, but these characters are largely cartoons that flit in and out of the narrative as comic relief.   The narrator’s relationship with Reva is marked by both concrete love – Reva continues to visit and cajole the narrator towards life despite dozens of rejections – and shallow competition over looks and weight.  

Because Reva is a self-pitying alcoholic who quotes self-help books, I recognized her as vapid. Because she is almost endlessly loyal to the narrator I rooted for her.  I was rooting for the narrator as well, though I often wondered whether that meant hoping she would take more sleep medication or less.   She is whiny and endlessly self-involved, but totally honest about both those traits.

While the relationship with Reva gives the novel some substance, its plot is generally shapeless. Instead, it gets its shape from its setting.  The novel opens in the fall of 2000 when the narrator hatches her plan to reboot her life by spending a year in drug-induced sleep.  Which makes this a portrait of self-centered and self-destructive New York seemingly sliding towards despair while it is actually sliding towards 9-11. Of course no one knows that but the reader, and I was constantly reading Reva’s devotion to Oprah and the narrator’s hysterical drug use in the context of the oncoming planes.  There is no discussion of politics whatsoever, but we do get a glimpse of some things the narrator encounters on television, like the Bush inauguration.  Tiny details like that set up a rather surprising ending and turn the novel into one more full of heart and soul than any of its characters.

If I have a complaint it is that Reva disappears – the loyalty and care she showed the narrator, even if it was largely self-serving, deserved more closure than she got.  But note I am reacting to her as if she were real, as if the relationship was real.  That is something.