My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a novel released in 2018 by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. This is Moshfegh’s second novel, following the release of her award-winning book Eileen. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is set in early 2000’s New York City and follows an unnamed main character who attempts to sleep for an entire year by increasing her prescription medication use.
Characters
Originally written to focus on the terrorist attacks of 9/11, My Year of Rest and Relaxation became a story about an angry woman and the few people she allows in her life. Our cast of characters includes:
Reva: our main character’s closest friend and ex-college roommate towards whom she feels no genuine affliction (Moron with an eating disorder who’s having an affair with her boss)
Dr. Tuttle: a doctor who is not very good at watching her patients and the provider of our narrator’s prescription drugs (Wack-job doctor who’s too busy being a fake hippie to notice blatant substance abuse)
Trevor: our narrator’s older on-and-off boyfriend occasionally comes by whenever women his own age dump him or when our narrator pleads with him (Finance bro rapist who can’t keep a girlfriend)
Pang Xi: an artist represented by the gallery our narrator was fired from who assists with her year of rest in exchange for the ability to use her as an art contract (“modern artist” he kills dogs for fun)
Narrator’s parents: two people who selfishly raised our narrator into the depressive mess that she is (absent and always on something)
This is a physiological fiction novel in which Moshfegh does everything to convince you to hate all the characters in this book and somehow you find yourself picking sides in every petty argument. Take our bitter narrator and Reva for example, through her eyes every character in this book is easily detestable including herself. Yes, the narrator is an ******* to her supposed best friend Reva after her mother died, but our narrator’s mother died too and Reva was insufferable with her pity towards the author so isn’t this just payback?
Our semi-misanthropic narrator is possibly one of the least interesting characters I’ve read about. Witnessing her life through the perspective of this book just makes everything she thinks of laughable. For the majority of this novel, she is hateful or bored and the only time we see another emotion is on her father’s deathbed. Even when the only other emotion we see is sadness it’s hilarious how she is so torn over the death of the father she barely knew.
Some praises I have are that the book is easy to read and take breaks from because of the diary-style writing. This book is also genuinely funny, though it may not be for everyone. I found the narrator’s cold humor very enjoyable and her drugged escapades around NYC make for fun guesses about what happened during the last blackout.
I do have a few criticisms of the novel. Some may say that this novel is just one of a woman living in high privilege complaining just to complain. This makes for a good story for anyone who enjoys reading about depressed haters and I am one of those people. However, I do wish Moshfegh had gone a bit deeper into our narrator’s backstory with Trevor, her parents, and college some more so we could see the recent happenings that led to the narrator working at, and getting fired from, the art museum and the beginning of her year of rest.
If you enjoy books such as Frankenstein, Go Ask Alice, or anything by Salley Roony you’ll love this story. From me, it’s an easy 8.9/10.
