Review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)

Quitting: An admission of personal failure, anathema to the quintessentially American spirit of optimism and self-improvement. Fighting for the wrong side is held more admirable than running from the field of battle. Even anti-heroes are heroic to the extent that they strive in their opposition. A life without purpose is not worth living. Quitting is somehow a betrayal of our humanity.

The narrator, a privileged, Art History graduate of Columbia University, is fired from her going-nowhere-fast job at an art gallery and she decides to quit—to spend an entire year holed up in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zonked on anti-anxiety and sleeping medications, funded by the inheritance left her by her parents (both of whom died during her senior year in college). Between trips to the local bodega for coffee and ice cream and watching the same movies over and over, she sleeps a dreamless sleep.

But her quitting is imperfect, messy. During the first nine months, threads of her old life leak in. Her superficial, annoying friend Reva visits to fret about her sick mother and her affair with a married man. She thinks of her well-intentioned father, gone from cancer, and her distant, self-centered alcoholic mother (who she realizes she emulates) gone from suicide with drugs and alcohol. She tries to rekindle her demeaning relationship with her older Wall Street banker boyfriend. She subjects herself to dangerous combinations of drugs and has blackouts when taking a particularly heinous psychotropic drug and afterwards sees evidence of raucous partying in the apartment, hinting at her former life.

This description of the basics of the plot doesn’t do justice to the black humor threaded through My Year. The woman sees her psychiatrist, Reva, her boyfriend Trevor, the guys running the bodega, the overbearing relatives at Reva’s mothers funeral as little more than impediments to her longing to escape from all vestiges of human involvement, describes them as well as herself with caustic detachment. Moshfegh’s narrative is bland, coldly observational, told in the first person without flinching nor apology, suitable for the tale of an antihero that walks through a hell of nothingness to find something of value on the other side. Her quitting is a dive into the strange, an exploration of inner demons that aren’t easily silenced. The novel ends with the 9/11 attack on Manhattan, and her own awakening to human feeling.