Book Review: Otessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Flowers of evil

Hi! Here’s another review from the period last year when I tried to be a more regular book reviewer-I don’t really have the discipline or consistent enough insights for that, but nonetheless I do also like this one, so here it goes again!

I’ve never completely known how to feel about Otessa Moshfegh. I’ve regarded her for as long as I’ve known her work with a kind of bone-deep ambivalence, partly to the flat, affected register of most of it and partly to her persona itself, which I can never entirely decide if I find delicious or deeply irritating.¹ Nonetheless a confluence of factors (not to mention recommendation/endorsement by several people whose opinions I respect) drove me to read her consensus masterpiece thus far, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I found it a pleasant, short read, often very funny and in the end rewarding. The book covers about a year in the life of an unnamed, affluent-but-failed semi-single young woman living in NYC who decides in June of 2000 to spend a year asleep, medicating herself with a vast assortment of pills provided by her quack psychiatrist. In the shadow of this premise Moshfegh explores the relationships between our protagonist, her now deceased parents, her closest friend Reva, and an on-again-off-again older lover as she sedates herself with a truly comedic mass of pharmaceuticals.

I’ll get the obvious off my chest now: this reminded me a lot of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.² I mean a lot, both thematically and in terms of performance. Both books are flat, snarky examinations of the ennui of bourgeois neurotics haunted or obsessed by death, and they arrive at largely the same conclusion: transcendence through a sudden, violent disruption which allows the now-actualized protagonist to return revitalized to the quotidian. In fact I had almost exactly the same initial response to both books: general amusement at the deadpan snark coupled with a gentle skepticism at the assertion made by those who recommended the book to me that this was one of the Great Novels Of Our Time. Like White Noise however, MYORAR grew on me enormously and by the end I was mostly convinced of its greatness.

A lot of what I’ve read of Moshfegh’s other work scans as either too flat or too choked by its own spite for my taste, and there’s a delicate and largely successful performance happening here between those two affects. The unnamed protagonist of My Year’s narration and observation feels like every bad thought you’ve ever had, every venomous perception of ugliness or bad taste personified as a personality without redeeming or softening characteristics. She doesn’t do anything, but she comes off as a magnificently bad person, almost pure id. The book is very cruel, especially early on, and despite her epiphanies, despite the assertion that

My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things.

Moshfegh’s protagonist never really seems to become any less lacerating or acidic, just less depressed and better adjusted, free from the baggage of her former life. I think this goes a ways toward explaining the success of the book, and maybe Moshfegh as a whole. An enormous amount of ambient cruelty was either forced underground or mandatorily sublimated into ostensible political righteousness by the developments of the last decade, and so blasts of sustained, nonpartisan unpleasantness are able to seem vital and new once again in a way that they absolutely didn’t as recently as 2012.³ Rest Girl speaks on some higher frequency I suspect for a mass of people who spent the late 2010s yearning to call people various rude words I shan’t repeat and suchlike, but felt stifled by the public demand for empathy, for kindness to those-not-yet-enemies.

While I was reading the book I found myself expressing to a friend some surprise that this was as well-received as it was in 2018. Sure it makes sense that everybody was reading this in quarantine-the protagonist clearly points forward to the whole reactionary NYC counterculture that sprang up in the space where burnout about Bernie 2020 met anger at lockdowns- but in 2018? at the height of the great awokening? I think I get it now, although the book still scans as very redpilled.⁴ The narrator has to shed the vestiges of her origins, her unloving parents and her yuppie sometimes-boyfriend, has to violently lose Reva, the personification of social-climbing, self-help-consuming shallowness and liberal mediocrity in order to become a zero and be reborn through performance art as someone who knows that:

there was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. things were just things.

I’m reminded a bit (maybe because I just finished reading it) of the ending of Barth’s Floating Opera, which is a similarly rapturous shrug, nihilism as transcendence. What’s interesting in My Year of Rest & Relaxation is that the resolution of the novel then undercuts this message: the narrator tapes a woman she thinks is Reva jumping out of the world trade center on 9/11 and watches it compulsively, almost as an inspirational work of art:

I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Contra her revelation in the gallery and her general skepticism of the art world she formerly inhabited, in the end for Moshfegh’s protagonist the aesthetic-even an aesthetic of absolute horror- transcends the nihilism of the quotidian world.

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I’ve finished the review really, but a few thoughts remain. I’m not the person to extrapolate on this theme (far too Anglo) but a fascinating angle of divergence between White Noise and MYORAR would be the novel’s relationship to Jewishness. The Italian-American DeLillo’s Jewish professor Murray Siskind is his novel’s oracle, a voice from urban authenticity speaking wisdom to Jack Gadney’s implied-WASP postmodern enervation, while the half-Jewish Moshfegh gives Reva, her novel’s avatar of modern shallowness, self-absorption and mediocrity an identity as a bulimic Jewish woman who celebrates every Christian holiday, while her protagonist

was tall and thin and blonde and pretty and young. Even at my worst I knew I still looked good.

As I said, I’m probably not the person to make that examination, and so I’ll stop there, but it seemed striking to me, and as this is a slightly more off the cuff, scrapbook style review I’ll leave you with the thought. Honestly I’m sure some survivor in the blasted wastes of literary academia has gotten some mileage out of the racial politics of the book, whether the Egyptian bodega workers or the way the protagonist describes the animal-killing Chinese modern artist Ping Xi as

a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them.

But I’ve bored you enough with this.

All in all I was impressed by My Year, and further intrigued by a coworker’s assertion that Eileen was her true masterpiece. I’ll have to report back to you on that point. A part of me wants to agree with a maybe-bete noir that Moshfegh isn’t a great American writer yet-if this is White Noise, I’m waiting on Libra and Underworld!-but she achieves something that (at least in my view) only a few writers can, which is making something as consistently unpleasant as this book often is a funny, enjoyable read.

Rating: 7.5/10

1. That whole art-worship thing for one, and the declaration that one communes with the spirits and must separate the good shit from the mediocrity, must acknowledge a genius such as hers and put down the rest, as one selected from on High. I mean I get where she’s coming from, I really do! There’s just something a bit tasteless about being so loud about it.

2. For what it’s worth it also reminded me of a less-hysterical David Foster Wallace, especially the DFW of Broom of the System. I’ve relegated this observation to a footnote both because DFW himself wrote very much in DeLillo’s shadow and the sort of transcendentally amoral nihilism Rest eventually resolves into has nothing to do with him, but the note of sustained depression struck in so much of the book was especially reminiscent of his work.

3. Someday I’ll write about this at greater length, but it seems remarkable to me how carnivalesque and casually vicious so much of the culture of the aughts and early tens seems in hindsight, and how swiftly this was all put on ice and replace by a sentimental moralism that was often as cloying as what it replaced was abhorrent. I know it’s fashionable now to wax nostalgic about those good old days of the millennium, but that stuff was bad too!

4. Moshfegh’s protagonist winds up able to be read as kind of enlightened almost-girlboss figure in the end, free of all responsibility or connection in the metropole with an inheritance and an actualized self, beautiful, young and mean. I suspect this is a bad enlightenment, what I will perhaps presumptuously and without acknowledging who I stole this from a qlippothic enlightenment. Of course, it’s possible I am simply possessed by ressentiment, being much less skinny and hot and evil than Rest girl!