My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa 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. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I'd go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I'd acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I'd been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted?

Why do you think this book is so famous? I don't know how many copies it sold or whatever, but it seems undeniable to me that Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a book that, at one point in the not-distant past, everyone was talking about. It wasn't her first book, but it definitely elevated her into another layer of the authorial stratosphere, and cemented a reputation as a sort of sleazy it-girl novelist, or novelist for people who want to be sleazy it-girls. I think the protagonist captures something of the way we think about ourselves, or want to be, or afraid of being: disaffected and alienated from her bullshit artworld job, cast aside by her dickish lover Trevor, she decides to spend a year doing as little as possible. She finds a quack psychiatrist who will prescribe her a smorgasbord of pills, and she does her best to stay catatonic. When this doesn't work--she's pulled back into the "real world" by her needy friend Reva, whose mother has just died--she plans a serious sleep, a strict regimen of the most serious pills that will keep her asleep for three out of every four days. When she awakes in months, she hopes she'll be reset, a new person.

A lot about this book doesn't work, in my opinion. The satire of the art world--she's assisted in her serious sleep by a Chinese experimental artist who has permission to use her sleeping form in any artistic way he wishes--is shallow and unfunny. The middle act at Reva's mother's funeral interrupts the novel's entire reason for being in exchange for very little that's interesting. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel, the revelation that the narrator is sleepwalking while under the influence of the most powerful drug she's been described, is mostly wasted. (I really like the irony inherent in the fact that, in her sleep, she is living and enjoying the full life she is trying to escape, but all this amounts to, in the end, is a couple of Polaroid photographs of her enjoying herself at a club.) The novel's endnote (spoiler alert), in which Reva is killed in the World Trade Center, is telegraphed so baldly, it reads like Moshfegh is prophylactically defending herself against charges that it doesn't fit. The only part of the book I would say I liked without reservation is Dr. Tuttle, the insane and insanely unethical therapist that prescribes drugs with loopy abandon.

That said, it's hard to deny the appeal of Moshfegh when she really digs into the literature of sleaze and squalor. It works better in Eileen, I think. But it's Rest and Relaxation that caught everybody's attention, and I think that has something to do with the way that the novel embodies a language about depression and isolation that has become familiar to us, even as we remain uncomfortable with it. In a way, it's a satire on our easy ideas of self-care, that we can fulfill our responsibilities to other people by pleasing ourselves first, and indulging our powerful urge toward inertia, toward kicking back and letting go. Interestingly, it works: the narrator comes out of her stupid feeling rejuvenated, and ready to return at last to the world. But Reva, her only friend, will not be there--our narrator awakes in August 2001--and perhaps that's the point of that silly, stupid ending; that while you're practicing self-care, the world keeps turning, and it won't wait for you forever.