Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

In idle moments I return to an internal conversation in which I consider the impact of September 11 on American cinema. Those before, particularly those immediately before, rest on the assumption that the only problems left were in our own head. Movies like Momento, Being John Malkovich and the Matrix mark a time where the most fallible structure was not the deep state, rising dictatorships or global terrorism but our own psyche. It seems quaint now to look back on this cultural moment of post-modern malaise, a time when history had ended before being jump-started again the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

In her novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation author Ottessa Moshfegh locates this epoch and conjures it up in a masterful satire embedded deep within that flawed, naive and pathologically self-obsessed world. We follow her unnamed protagonist privileged in every respect - Columbia educated, white, beautiful with enough money to never have to work - through a year that she attempts to sleep through with the aid of an arsenal of tranquillisers that could fell a pack of megafauna stone dead.

And like other now-extinct creatures, the protagonist’s pursuit of sublime oblivion is thwarted not by obligations or guilt but by other equally privileged characters that elbow their way into her semi-conscious state. There is her nominal friend Reva, obsessed with her weight, self-help and celebrity gossip, Trevor, the protagonists on-again-off-again sexual partner, a man incapable of love, her doctor Doctor Tuttle a half-crazed quack that practices a blancmange of new age natural medicine, retained because she has easiest got prescriptions in lower Manhattan. These characters arrive as real people, trapped within their self-absorption and performative neurosis. Their species are extinct today because they live in a self-contained world without fear, awareness of their privilege or invasion by horrific world catastrophes. The only reference frame their lives have is popular culture. Of all of them her friend Reva comes closest to expressing something like real emotion but she does so in the language of day-time-movie melodrama.

In the beginning I found them all so utterly out of step with our current moment as to be repulsive, until I finally realised that was the point. All orbit our protagonist utterly untethered to reality, allowed, through virtue of their privilege, to halfheartedly pursue their flawed drives in an atmosphere free of consequence and self-awareness. It’s vacuous and outrageous but it’s also charming - the way of that friend who cannot decrypt a train timetable, who is always late and forgets birthdays but sill manages to exist is.

This could be an eye-rollingly passé experience except the writing is acerbic and bone-dry hilarious. Take Moshfegh’s version of the 90s art-world. The protagonist “works” in a gallery - kept there by her own admissions as a pretty piece of furniture. When she is not napping in a janitor’s closet, she interacts with the shameless social climbers and artists that have clearly exhausted themselves beyond describing a human experience not worth describing. Everyone involved speaks a parody of art’s pompous vernacular driven not to express themselves but to make money or utilise it as a status symbol. The only art available that can break through the collective shell of ennui is shock but even here it only evokes a dull flutter. The side character Ping Xi is an artist whose art involves freezing dogs and painting with his own ejaculate is a brilliant take on the self-indulgence of this artistic period. Wanking off is the art. Within such a context, the protagonists’ desperate grab for tranquilliser induced oblivion appears almost noble. She can stomach heroic amounts of sedatives because she cannot stomach the art.

But as the book progresses a reader will be amazed at how Moshfegh has made something out of nothing. She employs the tone of Bret Easton Ellis, the ironic celebration of Tom Wolfe with satirical heft of Martin Amis but the touch is lighter than all these men. It enables Reva and the protagonist to both deal with the loss of their parents and an emotionally abusive upbringing they struggle to contextualise real pain in a universe in which genuine emotion is impossible and nihilism is the dominant response.

The protagonist’s choice of sleep is suicide lite and while she never bothers to explain herself to other characters, many readers today will sympathise with her urge to shut out a world, as today our world seems to stop at nothing to infiltrate our increasingly porous private sphere to instil disaster, outrage and guilt without any hint of a panacea. Within such a context sleep may be the only escape, the last place that is truly our own.