She's drawn to the transgressive and the disgusting, finding plenty of both in the offensive art at a downtown gallery where her narrator briefly works.
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Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness, but her dark humor and ghoulish sensibility are not for everyone.
Yet they aren't entirely without hope or heart - and most decidedly not without interest. Like the eponymous narrator of her Booker prize-nominated, noir first novel, Eileen, R&R's characters aren't particularly sympathetic or likeable.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is, among other things, about the narrator's guilt about being such a bad friend to Reva, the rare optimist among Moshfegh's characters (whose hopefulness is portrayed as misguided to the point of inanity). She's also beyond caring what others think about her - though she does tell us repeatedly what a knockout she is, effortlessly slim and blond and looking "like an off-duty model" even on her worst days. She's unable to move beyond a degrading on-and-off relationship with a total creep, whom she keeps calling and texting pathetically. That's part of her problem: She's a lifelong outsider, and her parents' deaths left her well off financially, but emotionally strapped. The only one checking in on her is Reva, the bulimic best friend from college whom she finds more annoying than likeable. When not sleeping, she watches movies and eats animal crackers and Thai food between slipper-clad excursions to the corner bodega for bad coffee and RiteAid for prescription refills. Like the soused, wildly inappropriate 30-year-old math teacher in "Bettering Myself," the leadoff story in Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World, the narrator of R&R describes her daily routine in loving detail. And she's made a deal with herself: "If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn't worth the trouble, I would end it," she states unequivocally. But Moshfegh's narrator isn't lazy like Oblomov - in fact, she's single-mindedly goal-directed: She wants to sleep and sleep and sleep. In both cases, their disillusioned response to the hustle and bustle of daily life says something about their effete culture. Both lack worldly ambition and would gladly stay in bed round-the-clock. Like Oblomov, she's privileged with an excellent education, ample inherited wealth, and people to manage her estate. Moshfegh's self-proclaimed somniac and somnophile evokes Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov's classic 19th century Russian novel about profound lassitude and ennui - but only to a point, and in a twisted sort of way. This miserable young woman hopes she can hibernate for a year and literally lose herself - her haunting memories, obsessive thoughts, and acidic negativity - and emerge from her sleep-cure as "a whole new person." My Year of Rest and Relaxation is her hyper-articulate account of this disturbing, ultimately moving "self-preservational" project. How about going even further and taking a yearlong break from yourself and the world, courtesy of an extended nap? That's the desperate plan of the unnamed 24-year-old narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's bizarrely fascinating second novel. Imagine taking a sabbatical, not just from your job, but from your life. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title My Year of Rest and Relaxation Author Ottessa Moshfegh Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance.
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