Review: "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" by Ottessa Moshfegh

It was easy to tell from her first novel, the chilling Eileen, that author Ottessa Moshfegh was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with. She further proved that with her short story collection, Homesick for Another World (her debut book, the novella McGlue, is creepy but flawed) and proves it once again with her second full-length novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Much like her first novel, it plumbs the depths of the female psyche in ways you have not seen before, harkening back to writers like Flannery O’ Conner and Shirley Jackson, other authors with a keen eye for the macabre and the beauty in grotesque and aberrant behavior as well as a sympathetic ear for these people, caught between feelings they know to be destructive and societies that will never, ever understand them. Reading this, and seeing it done, right made me think of other book with similar stories with women on the verge of collapse and what they got wrong. I couldn’t help but think about books like Liska Jacobs Catalina and Jade Sharma’s Problems, books that presented a woman’s downfall in stylized, almost pretty ways, where whether by their environment or the other people around them, we feel pressured to admire them. That isn’t the case here, with an unnamed narrator, whose visage and breakdown are equally ugly. Told from her perspective, it showcases a year in her life in New York City where she figuratively and literally tunes out the world. Financially stable after her parent’s deaths, she spends most of her days in her apartment, watching VHS tape after VHS tape (this is the early2000’s, years before Netflix), swallowing all different kinds of pills and sleeping for long, stretched out periods of time. Others pass through her life, whether in real time or flashback, like her friend Reva, a holdover from college who clings to the narrator out of a sickly desperation and need to coddle someone and her on again off again cold boyfriend, Trevor, who the narrator is obsessed with to disturbing degrees. It creates kind of a blur, like a ore personal version of Bret Easton Ellis’s early work, where we don’t know what is real, what is perceived correctly or incorrectly and what is a total fabrication, with long sections where the narrator describes, in great detail, something she is imagining. Moshfegh has a real talent for the morbid of the Lynchian variety, with scenes involving what she does when she is fired from the art gallery she worked at and the one where her most important appliance breaks are tense, brutally rendered and creepy as hell (as is her idolization of Whoopi Goldberg). It is a disquieting book, but one filled with an odd sense of hope in individual freedom, the perverse, sometimes good side effects of cutting yourself off from the world and how important it is to survive and value life, evidenced by its ending, which is easy to predict given its time period and location, but is no less perfect. This is a wild ride through the mind of someone hell-bent on destroying themselves, and thankfully it comes from a talent as rigorous and ingenious as Moshfegh. 

Rating: 5/5