My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

I am working through a list of recent novels about young people wandering around. These novels are mildly comic—sometimes cynical, mainly weird, and much more to my liking than most other kinds of books, so even when I don’t think they are that great, I enjoy them well enough. The best one on the list so far I had already read, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, an extremely literary and extremely uncynical version of these tales. Also wildly funny and VERY like my own youth. Then there was Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, which is more cynical, more obscured by drug use (I do find it hard to read a novel where every character is chemically altered the entire time—what is real??), and much less like young RR. I still liked it very much, mainly because of the obsessive attention to language and the act of communication. The book after this, when I get around to it, will be You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman , which I want to read mainly because someone on Goodreads said it was like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh but more genuine and less annoying. So I’ll probably like it.

Especially since I didn’t mind Rest and Relaxation. I was interested in the events and to a certain extent the characters, and found the writing elegant and funny. The story in a nutshell: a wealthy, beautiful, depressed young woman, having always been mistreated by her fairly dysfunctional parents, goes to university in New York City and partway through her father dies of cancer, and shortly after her mother dies by suicide. She returns to school where she has no almost friends because everyone is intimidated by her beauty and dates a much older guy who treats her terribly, eventually graduates and gets a glamourous but underpaid and not fun job at a gallery. She is on-and-off with the mean boyfriend, and in occasional contact with one frenemy from university and otherwise completely alone, sinking deeper and deeper into depression until she is fired from the job and becomes completely adrift.

It’s funnier than it sounds.

She decides, given that she has seemingly infinite money inherited from the dead parents, to take a year of Rest and Relaxation. By which she means she will con a low-rent psychiatrist into giving her enough pills to disable a water buffalo (John Mulaney has a comic routine about doing this too, but I believe Moshfegh did it first), and spend the year mainly asleep. She wants to be cured of sadness, of apathy, and especially of “hating everyone” and believes enough time spent asleep will do this.

In between the attempts to sleep, we get visits with the hilarious and terrible psychiatrist, Dr Tuttle, and her many cats; visits with her best friend Reva, one of the many people the protagonist hates but the only one she tolerates; visits to bodega down the street, and flashbacks to the entire rest of her life—which is how we learn all the above stuff about the family, bad boyfriend, “too beautiful” for friends, etc. The actual “now” of the novel is all in the R&R year, but the flashbacks take up a lot of page space. They are also how we learn that she struggles against hating everyone and might, in fact, be an unreliable narrator, though an intense, articulate, adamant one.

I never fully decided how unreliable the narrator actually is—whether it was her story-telling ability or Moshfegh’s that prevented the narrative from ever fully making sense. For whatever reason, lots of it didn’t really add up. Her childhood sounds like an unproduced Tennessee Williams play—not impossible but unlikely, dramatic and easier to summarize than picture. The protagonist’s insistence on her own beauty—that it prevented from having friends, dating anyone appropriate, or indeed doing much of anything—but was also of no consequence to her personally, although she checks on her prettiness like an ill pet throughout the novel. It read like a book by a certain type of straight male author—women do not typically glory in our own physical attributes in this way. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it didn’t read quite true.

This is complex of analysis of what might turn out to be flaws in the book—or wrinkles in the narration meant to be read as clues to a deeper truth???—and yet, I did like it. The best parts to me were the relationship of the protagonist with her despised best and only friend, Reva. Reva seemed to me from the start set up to be a doppleganger—another young woman struggling with a relationship with cruel older man, a dying parent, and trying to find a career in a world and an economic system that both fetishizes and ignore young women. Only, the protagonist reacts by hating everyone else; Reva reacts by hating herself. A bulimic alcoholic who forgives the narrator (the protagonist is never named, which is why I’m stuck with this terminology, sorry) every cruel comment and sticks determinedly with the friendship because why not—she doesn’t feel she deserve any better. The narrator despises her and hopes for her to go away but not actually too much—Reva is the only person in her world she doesn’t pay to be there, and truly her mirror image. There’s a poignant scene where the narrator has taken a wild amount of drugs and, when Reva comes to the door, she answers it on her hands and knees. Reva matter-of-factly helps her up, and gets on with what she came for. Both are locked in their self-conscious misery but, in little ways, they are kind, and neither is ever willing to fully sever the link. Very little about the rest of the novel seemed remotely plausible to me, but all the Reva scenes rang of truth. I was surprised that most of the reviews I read took the narrator at her word that Reva is silly and dumb, when the narrator says OF HERSELF that she needs to be cured of hating everyone. Her hate is a symptom of her illness, not Reva’s.

I started thinking that the narrator had invented Reva—or as Reva was the more realistic character, Reva had invented the narrator and was somehow narrating herself. One of them must surely be imaginary, since they were only ever two together—like in that other weird funny book about very young women (Is it not a spoiler if I don’t tell you what book I mean??) Anyway, I was wrong about that, or at least it’s never said explicitly—the actual ending of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is foreshadowed fairly early and I didn’t like it one bit, not only because it undermined my Reva theory but because it seemed like an easy escape valve.

Anyway, my final analysis is that this book didn’t quite work but it was very ambitious, very weird, and made me think about it a lot, so that’s not bad. I’ve cycled back around to romance novels in my reading and the best that could be said about my current is that everyone is very nice. They do a lot of gazing and peering instead of boring old looking. Makes me long for the drugged-up fury of Moshfegh.