My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted.

Reviews of Moshfegh’s work tend to repeat the same notes. Her protagonists are gross, scatological, inside and outside. All the characters, especially the POV ones, are unlikable, borderline sociopaths. She has nothing to say, relying on shock value and bodily functions to mask a fundamental lack of content. And finally that she’s nihilistic, nasty, destructive, a Brett Easton Ellis for Millennials.

I’ve read three of Moshfegh’s books now--this one, McGlue, and Death in Her Hands. The first criticism is largely correct, if a bit flat: the widow of Death in Her Hands isn’t gross, even though the book itself sometimes is, but in McGlue and Year, the protagonists deal with (and deal out) plenty of real and metaphorical shit. And it’s true that from a certain angle, none of these people are especially likable. They range from annoyingly obtuse, like the widow, to cold and cruel, like the unnamed narrator of Year. But Moshfegh isn’t empty, and she’s the furthest thing from nihilistic--in their ways, I think all her books are about transcendence and the difficulty, maybe the impossibility, of finding it in this world that’s full of piss, shit, and people.

The unnamed author of Year spends most of her time in a drug induced haze, when she isn’t in a drug induced sleep. Entire paragraphs enumerate the drugs she’s on, acquired mostly from her quackish psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle, and their effects. She spends most of her waking hours in the first half watching VHS tapes of movies starring Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford, drowsy marathons often interrupted by Reva, her overly-sincere best/only friend, who she often seems to hate. She’s well-off, thanks to the inheritance she received after both her parents died in close succession, lives in a nice apartment on the East Side, and pines, occasionally, for her only serious boyfriend, a jackass named Trevor that’s easily the slimiest character in this grimy book. Oh, and she looks like a supermodel--everyone wants her, praises her, tries to get into her good graces, but she studiously pushes them away, all but Reva who, through sheer force of neediness, sticks around even as her mother slowly dies of cancer. Oh, and this is all very funny most of the time.

Yes, there’s gross stuff in this book. Plenty of bodily fluids, anatomical anomalies, dead animals and people, weird sex. And I understand why people don’t like the narrator: she’s painfully self-absorbed and cruel, very cruel, to Reva, though as the story progresses we see that she’s perpetuating patterns begun by her parents and Trevor, a walking reddit age gap horror show. To say this is a trauma book is reductive, but certainly generational pain and severe depression are major themes, and they form the primary obstacles in a story that, in the end, is structured something like a Goethian or Hesse-ian bildungsroman. In the third act, the narrator’s defenses are slowly stripped away--Trevor, the drugs, her VCR, and finally, even Reva--and she emerges, like Siddhartha, as an enlightened being, or as enlightened as a 90s trust fund baby can be.

The final page of this book, which I knew nothing about going in, subtly reframes the book, as 9/11 occurs and the narrator has her final epiphany. What it means, exactly, is up to the reader--is it the moment she finally sluffs off the cloud of wilful unknown, or is it the most egregious example of making herself into the only person whose pain matters? Moshfegh doesn’t tell us, here or elsewhere, and it’s this ambiguity about whether the transcendence that all her novels seek actually exists that gives them their power and elevates them above their far more nihilistic forerunners.