My review:
If you, like me, subscribe to the “unhinged woman” genre of literature, then you should put My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh on your to-read list. This one had been on my tbr for quite some time until my friend Alanna and I decided to buddy read it together when I visited her in Austin, TX this May. Alanna’s review will be included in this post as well!
I love an unreliable narrator, and our unnamed protagonist was just that. She is a young woman in her twenties who graduated from Columbia, lost both of her parents, and now just… exists. She lives in New York City, if you can call it living. Her goal at the moment is to be awake as little as possible. Instead of dealing with grief and other underlying traumas in a healthy manner, our narrator’s “therapist” (in an extremely questionable sense) piles on the prescriptions to help her sleep. The narrator fuels this process by feeding her therapist woes and tales of insomnia to keep the pills coming. The result? Days and days of existence clouded by drugs and dazed memories of leaving the house. She even experiences days at a time that she doesn’t remember at all, but will awake to her nails painted or a new outfit on.
The narrator in this story was pitiful, of course, but she was also more than that. So much of her inner monologue showcased her dry, twisted humor. I couldn’t help but laugh more than once throughout the book, and points she brought up made me think in a way I hadn’t before. Though sometimes uncomfortable, her commentary in particular when describing her “best friend” and ex-boyfriend’s copious flaws (in her eyes) made me stop and reflect every so often.
The small cast of characters in our protagonist’s life include her therapist Dr. Tuttle, her best friend Reva, and her ex-boyfriend Trevor. Dr. Tuttle doesn’t seem to phase her, despite the approximate two hundred red flags she bares to any onlooker. However, a large portion of her mental energy is spent absolutely ripping apart Reva in any way possible. If Reva has a “shallow” problem, ranging from wanting her makeup to look nice or developing an eating disorder, this is just another thing our narrator cannot stand about her friend. Part of me felt so deeply for Reva, she was just a normal twenty-something woman having normal twenty-something problems, and her supposed best friend could not give a crap about her. Not even when she got dumped. Not even when she checked in on our narrator in her lowest moments. Not even at her mother’s funeral. This made me so aggravated with the narrator in some ways, but feel that level of annoyance right along with her in other ways.
Her musings on her ex-boyfriend, Trevor made this cognitive dissonance even more severe for me. This woman is clearly so hurt by whatever Trevor did to her (unclear) and that he has a new girlfriend now. At the same time, though, she’s a hot MESS. We can’t really blame Trevor, can we? Nonetheless, you can’t help but pity her.
Though I never felt the urge to give up on this book, it was definitely slow going in the beginning. The plot finally came to a head when the narrator was approached by an artist (Ping-Xi) who was willing to document her “year of rest and relaxation”, aka forty weeks of drugging herself into oblivion and sleeping it off. After the pills ran out, she planned to be “healed” and continue life as it was. Foolproof, right?
I finished book thinking that maybe I was supposed to feel more strongly about the characters. Was I supposed to hate the narrator? Love her? I felt so neutral about it, like any feeling I had toward her eventually got canceled out by another. I think I was probably supposed to had Reva too, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Reva existed as a punching bag to show us the narrator’s true feelings/inner monologue, and in reality I just pitied her. Overall, My Year of Rest and Relaxation was amusing to me in an “if I ever act like that, just kill me” way.
Alanna’s review!!!
As My Year of Rest and Relaxation begins, we get breadcrumbs about the narrator as a character. We can hear her inner thoughts, which are whiny and pathetic, but if we ever learn her name, I can’t remember it. We know she went to Columbia, studied Art History, comes from money, and believes herself to supermodel-effortless-pretty with a classy wardrobe to match. If I had to guess, her name is Claire. The narrator, who sets off to drug herself into the oblivion so she can sleep for a year, is on a journey of self-healing. This, of course, is charming and somewhat relatable. But for me, any charisma that this Claire character could have is obscured by her constant ranting and complaining about her “best friend,” Reva, who she hates and loves. Reva is very obviously a foil for Otessa Moshfegh to check in on the status of Claire’s slumber, drug abuse, and process of healing from personal trauma.
Reva and Claire are both insufferable and completely unlikeable, which as readers we begin to trust is Moshfegh’s objective. Somewhere in the middle of the book, when Claire tries a new drug that makes her do unknowable things while unconscious—think sleep walking, but change out sleep for almost-overdose and walking for behaving like a feral-NYC-pretentious-villain—she acquires a white fur coat, which becomes an important touchstone and source of humor throughout the remainder of the story. This is when the book gets good. If you can push past Moshfegh’s development of her objectively annoying and hyperbolic characters Reva and Claire, you’ll rejoice when a seemingly-random character from the first chapter reappears: Ping Xi. We do not know much about Ping Xi other than that he is an eccentric modern artist interested in shocking audiences and (but mostly) making money. As it turns out, Ping Xi’s superficial motivations offer the final support for Claire’s transformation.
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