My year of rest and relaxation

1) "I had started 'hibernating' as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.

I didn't do much in my waking hours besides watch movies. I couldn't stand to watch regular television. Especially at the beginning, TV aroused too much in me, and I'd get compulsive about the remote, clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn't handle it. The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega. I'd quickly glance at them as I paid for my coffees. Bush versus Gore for president. Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City–they always are–but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep–reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn't concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn't matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn't have worried."

2) "'You really shouldn't mix alcohol with all your medications,' she said, finishing the wine. I let Reva have all the wine. In college, she'd called hitting the bars 'going to therapy.' She could suck a whiskey sour down in one sip. She popped Advil between drinks. She said it kept her tolerance up. She would probably qualify as an alcoholic. But she was right about me. I was 'on drugs.' I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan. 'I'm not a junkie or something,' I said defensively. 'I'm taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.'"

3) "At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. 'Napping' is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy."

4) "'Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,' my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me.

“Orgasm,' my mother whispered.

'Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,' my father said.

'That warm fuzzy feeling.'

'It's what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It's good to be aware of that.'

'For when you're thrown out with yesterday's trash,' my mother said. 'Men are dogs. Even professors, so don't be fooled.'

'Men don't attach as easily. They're more rational,' my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, 'We just want you to be careful.'

'He means use a rubber.'

'And take these.'

My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills.

'Gross,' was all I could say.

'And your father has cancer,' my mother said.

I said nothing.

'Prostate isn't like breast,' my father said, turning away. 'They do surgery, and you move on.'

'The man always dies first,' my mother whispered.

My dad's chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table."

5) "It had been months since I'd even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I'd tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I'd met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual–a value impossible to measure, anyway–but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would 'elevate' their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind."

6) "I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them. Did they wonder about things like that? Maybe they couldn't sleep at night. Were they plagued by nightmares? Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another. Maybe they lived as real artists knowing all along that there were no pearly gates. Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven. Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lifes without having to swat away any more flies."

"I spent a lot of time staring at [Whoopi Goldberg] on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta."

I don't know why but that line doubled me over. It's the sort of humor I've always been drawn to. Enough tension between earnestness and irony that it is neither one nor the other; it is both. That is the sense I had overall when reading Moshfegh's novel. I've read comparison's to the old HBO show Girls and I think that's apt, though for whatever reason I appreciated this novel a lot more than I ever appreciated Girls, which I found lacking in enough substance to justify it's privileged and vacant characters.

There are themes in this novel that are peculiar and I haven't thought enough about them to decide whether they are illusory or profound, but I did appreciate the lack of tidy epiphanies and Moshfegh's instinct to counter reader expectations just enough to keep things interesting.

I recommend this as a solid summer read. Easy to digest, entertaining in more than a few parts, and written by an author intellectual enough to make interesting provocations.

4.5 stars

There is a weirdness, a paranoia, that I particularly like in Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories. They operate in extreme conditions, somewhere between disgust and immense sadness. Her stories are strange and devastating, beautifully devastating. In a certain sense, throughout her books, the present is a place that the narrators tend not to want to be, they rather be in another place, in another timeline.

The narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a blonde, thin, pretty and financially independent young woman. She lives in Yorkville, Upper East Side NY and she is trapped in bleak, punishing circumstances. She has lost both her parents in a short space of time and she is trapped in a manipulating, ferocious and punishing relationship with an older man.

The book is painful, you can sense the depth of her grief and suffering, but more of that of being someone who does not know how to exist in that space and time, who wants out of her sadness and depression. The young woman seems vulnerable but her vulnerability is also her power and sleep, enforced and distressed as it is, is her way out. Sleep becomes a cathartic experience, when she finally awakes she has escaped not only death but also her past, she is a new person living in another time and place.

I am very excited by the work of Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s weird, almost surreal. Reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, especially at the end, I couldn't move, I was completely absorbed. You know that in the few pages something awful is going to happen but you can’t stop reading. It is a powerful experience.

Read the whole review at Maquina Lectora

 I heard and read great things about this novel and the word that got me most was that it was "profound." I bought it, started reading it, and waited for the profundity. And waited. And waited. I never found it. Instead I found it to be workmanlike writing that any decent writer willing to put in the work could have written. I didn't come across a single new idea or observation in this book. I found it humorless and unconvincing—it's in the first person and the author describes herself as physically beautiful but not in a way that someone like that would ever do. At times, Moshfegh chokes her prose with lists of physical items to portray a subject's character. Good writers don't resort to this or let their narrators do so. They get tedious after awhile.
 If you read it, you'll find that it goes quickly. That's more because of the book's generous leading than due to writing style.
 You know what helps a writer get published? Having an exotic name. I wonder if this book would have been published and as widely reviewed if the author's name was something like Janet Miller.