My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

On a train back to New York Manhattan and then on a plane away from New York Manhattan—contained within these moments of interstitial transit I finally experienced My Year of Rest a Relaxation. It is a book I’ve wanted to read for years, a book that my wife has consistently called, “One of the worst books I’ve ever read.” I did not hate it. I was even surprised by sort of liking it. I think I respect that the book knows what it is doing, is exactly what it wants to be.

It often employs a trope I find unenjoyable in media—using actual tedium to convey the tedious nature of something—so you’d be forgiven for thinking it would land awkwardly with me. I don’t find it clever to waste my time, but Rest employs a host of other literary devices to imply a crushing tedium without making me read, say, yet another list of prescription barbiturates. The brief moments of intentional, structural repetition feel more like liminal contrasts than contrived performances:

“…We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit about who we really are. These paintings are deliberately boring.” Did he think that was an original idea? I would never remember posing for the paintings, but I knew that if I was high on Infermiterol, I must have just been feigning sleep.

So while I didn’t love the, “This is boring because the. world is boring” simulacra, Rest manages to ensconce the trope fully in ennui–the tedium is the book, but not in a way that makes the book tedious. Lists of drugs serve as white noise–the drone of cicadas representing a halcyon summer, the recitation of a prayer to begin a meal–and while they are tedious: “I pulled a vial of Ativan out from between the sofa cushions…”; “‘I’m tired, Reva,’ I said, peeling a wrapper off the cap of a bottle of NyQuil.”; they know that they are “deliberately boring” and so toe the exact line between insufferably arduous and repetitively habitualized

Because Rest isn’t about anything, it feels like it is “about” things: how we create functional daily routines; the nonlinear structure of the passage of time in novels; the limits of omnipotence in narrative voice. Structurally, it forces you to eat a year in someone else’s life. It continuously estranges each individual moment, uncouples it from all its connections, and then mashes moments into a gloopy, indistinguishable paste that forms a human life. Whether time is accelerated for the narrator through drugs or for the reader through montage or time skips, the length each narrative point of consciousness is completely liquid–what the narrator does rarely matters for her “year” and that, I think, is the point.

In regards to our nameless narrator, she is so unlikable that at first I believed the book was going to be a coda on the prevalence, or perhaps inevitability, of choosing to excuse, overlook, or even come to appreciate the POV perspective of a story no matter how awful the thoughts or actions of the protagonist turn out to be. But no, the book is an internal journey through grief, not a media reflection on empathy; it encompasses how we spend time, surely, but moreso that the “how” matters less than acknowledging that each moment is unique, worthy of said acknowledgment. The clear message is to keep our eyes open to appreciate the beauty of this impossibly short life. The other option–to shut off, close off, try to turn each day spent into something it isn’t–simply will not work.

I decided I would test myself to see what was left of my emotions, what kind of shape I was in after so much sleep. My hope was that I’d healed enough over half a year’s hibernation, I’d become immune to painful memories.

Rest is odd in that it isn’t really about the narrator in the way that All Things Are Too Small mocks the “nameless alienated female protagonist” genre as self-indulgent and solipsistic. In both form and function, the narrator serves mostly to personify grief and hyperbolize emotional shutdown. She’s not really real, and all of her actions are large-scale representations of possible ways to handle sadness: her VHS obsession is a collapse into nostalgia and withdrawal into media; her American Psycho sex-friend is toxic relationships writ large; trips to the bodega for coffee etc is rote, poisonous convenience. She’s an idea, truly, holding on to an idealized past that never really existed.

The swirl of fictionalized pre-interregnum idealism and attempts to incorporate painful memories into one’s sense of personhood without them overwhelming your identity collide in the American national memory of September 11th. A book set in 2000/2001 New York City will inevitably brush up against 9/11—was it foundational to the work? It is impossible not to feel 9/11 looming throughout the book: references to the handful of named characters transferring into WTC offices, calendar dates mentioned and re-emphasized. Was the image of the person free-falling from the towers—the book closes: “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”—the embedded splinter around which the surrounding novel healed? That you could choose to appreciate the beauty of the fall rather than close your eyes in fear of an impact that has yet to happen is the revelation that heralds our narrator’s awakening. That minute of freefall can be transposed across each individual human lifetime: we all end the same way, so might as well try to enjoy the sights on the way down.

Contrast that with how the narrator views life shortly before:

Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t…If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.

Two hundred and seventy pages to remind me that life, even near the end, even in crisis, is worth seeing? The things that Rest does kind of suck, but the way Rest does them is kind of brilliant: 

“Some rats,” she said after a while, “probably deserve to be demonized. Certain individual rats.” She picked her pen back up with a flourish of the purple feather. “The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern. I hope you follow me. Rats are very loyal to the planet.”

I would not go as far as saying our narrator is a stand-in for some pre-and post Sept 11 America: that’s simply too hokey, even for a novel as blunt as this one. But it’s interesting how easy it is to empathize with someone–even someone whose actions are terrible and existence is wafer-thin–when they’re the one telling you a story. And the worst of it all is that, casually wretched as she was, I did eventually find myself empathizing with the narrator, her pain and loss, her childhood of distance and lack of love, her lack of self in her only-existing exploitative romantic relationship. It’s a cruel combination of all modern alienating trends coupled with a leisure-class wealth that was a staple, if not a requisite, of previous-century novels–you can’t write books if you’re scrubbing pots eighteen hours a day.

Perhaps she is a grand metaphor for America after all. But not one of trauma. Simply one about the power of narrating our own mythos.