After bad breakups (something I had many of in my 20s), the typical advice is usually to just give it time. It might hurt now, but one day, you’ll be better. I did not always take these words of wisdom well, though, just as often snapping back that that’s fine for one day, whenever it might be, but what am I supposed to do with my feelings right now? They were right, of course. Time really is the only balm for some wounds. But I often longed for a fast-forward button to get to that later point.
What if there was a way to get from the “now” when you’re having a hard time to the mythical “then” when it’ll be better? The lovely, WASPy, and never-named heroine of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation thinks she might have found a way: sleeping. Not just sleeping a lot in any ordinary sense of the word, but taking so many sedatives that she could more or less sleep for an entire year. She’s lost and lonely in New York City at the turn of the century…her parents have both recently died in quick succession, leaving her assets substantial enough that she doesn’t need to work, her sort-of boyfriend Trevor treats her like a sex object, she doesn’t even really like her loud, needy best friend Reva, and she’s filled with despair at the thought of continuing to live. So she finds the least competent, most unethical therapist New York can offer, Dr. Tuttle, and spins a tale of profound insomnia to get her hands on the downers she needs.
At first, it doesn’t work quite as well as she might have hoped. She takes the drugs, but she sleepwalks, suddenly coming to herself in strange places with no memory of how she got there or what she’s been doing. She checks in with Dr. Tuttle, telling her ever-more ludicrous and complicated stories to wheedle increasingly powerful drugs out of her, combining them to try to achieve the full blackout state she craves. Reva continues to come around, half concerned, half jealous at how how her friend remains beautiful despite treating her body like an ambulatory biopharmaceutical test lab. Eventually, she decides to really buckle down and hires someone to ensure she stays locked in to her apartment and it’s stocked with the necessities so she can remain tranquilized for days at a time without interruption.
And then, at the end, a…certain incident that took place shortly after the year 2000 in New York City happens. The time and place setting of the book, though, and the occasional paths that the characters cross with buildings at the center of that event, makes it all-but-certain that the tragedy will impact the narrative in some way. Though it takes place at the conclusion of the novel, over only a few pages, it feels symbolically heavy. Is it meant to tilt the novel’s interpretation into allegory? Is it meant to be a reflection of a personal loss of innocence, or a collective one? Or is it just there to serve as a punctuation mark on the end of this particular story that Moshfegh sought to tell?
This is a strange book. It reminded me in some ways of The Bell Jar: both center on young women who would seem to have good lives suffering from profound depression, struggling to find an answer to how to deal with it (albeit in very different ways). But Plath’s book feels much more traditional in its structure and is more sophisticated, while Moshfegh’s somehow manages to be compelling despite a near-total lack of narrative tension. The characters in this book are uniformly unsympathetic, and not even particularly well-developed apart from the narrator. Very little actually happens. But I still found myself interested in what was going to become of her, which is a testament to the quality of Moshfegh’s writing. At the same time, I can’t imagine re-reading it, which tends to be a barometer for me of how much I actually liked a book. I would hesitate to recommend this book to anyone, it’s very odd and while some people would appreciate it, I’m sure plenty of others would hate it. Worth a try if you’re down with unlikable characters and unconventional plotting, otherwise fine to skip.
Leave a Reply